Anglo- French race to space?

I'm starting to enjoy this Summer even more by the day, and the Ashes are just starting, which means guerillacricket replaces Radio Caroline on my portable bluetooth powered speaker. And now, harking back to the years of ironclads and Gloire, we have the prospect of an Anglo-French race to the stars.

One of the major announcements lost in the noise of Boris' spectacular Commons debut yesterday was the indication that we, the UK, will be launching our own GPS Sat system* - no doubt a cogent move against being locked out of the currently broken down and Chinese-infiltrated Galileo system. It's not yet complete, and their actual satellites are built here. The EU doesn't have the know-how. So I suspect an export ban on satellites if the EU continues to be obdurate, plus the launch of contracts for our own £10bn programme (a much better use of the money than HS2) will soon change things around. Yes, I know everyone thinks it's for road pricing but I don't care.

One of Penny Mordaunt's last acts before her defenestration as defence secretary was to green-light developments in the UK's Space Force. As the paper reports -

An RAF spokesman said: "The UK is already is a world-leader in small satellite technology and we’re excited to be partnering with Virgin Orbit, one of the industry’s leading figures, to boost our space ambitions even further." Ms Mordaunt also said the UK is joining Operation Olympic Defender, a US-led international unit aimed at strengthening deterrence against hostile actors in space and at stopping the spread of debris in orbit. Joint Forces Command, which co-ordinates activity across the armed forces, will also be renamed Strategic Command, the Defence Secretary announced.

Speaking at the Air and Space Power Conference in London, Ms Mordaunt said: "Science fiction is becoming science fact. One day I want to see RAF pilots earning their space wings and flying beyond the stratosphere".

I wonder whether British spacecraft will be equipped with a feature unique to British tanks, an inbuilt tea-making facility? One hopes so. But our ambitions are not unique - M. Macron across the channel has similar hopes for France, which he hopes to achieve with German money.  As Politico EU reports-

The French government will develop laser weapons to fend off attacks in orbit and deploy mini-surveillance satellites by 2023 to protect space-based infrastructure, Defense Minister Florence Parly said today. "Today, our allies and adversaries are militarizing space," Parly said in a speech that confirmed France will set up a space command in Toulouse from September 1. "As time to build resilience gets shorter and shorter, we must act." As Paris moves to counter threats from China, Russia and India, Parly said new legislation would be prepared to consolidate control of France’s space activities directly under the defense ministry.

Ah, it's all becoming so ...... 1859. You will recall French hubris was shattered just a year after they built the first ironclad, when we rendered it utterly redundant with HMS Warrior.

* "We will have .... satellite and earth observation systems that are the envy of the world. We will be the seedbed for the most exciting and dynamic business investments on the planet."

Wow. I don't think anyone was expecting that.

A taste of the way things were going yesterday came early, with news that Dominic Cummings was in the Number Ten team. Then we knew Boris was serious, and would be a PM of very different stamp to the dilettante David Cameron or the dismally incapable May. Every new announcement of a new member of the Dream Team brought rapture to Leavers on social media and meltdown to remainers.

Boris has three jobs. First, to get the UK out of the EU by 31st October. Second, to consolidate a party whose congruence has been dented by EUphile rebels. Finally, to trounce Corbyn and win an autumn general election. The team he has put together has been designed precisely to deliver those three outcomes - and so far all the square pegs have gone into the square holes.

There were a number of media columns yesterday suggesting that Boris should trigger an immediate election. Risible nonsense. It is time for the Treasury to release its grip a little so that measures to sweeten the changes of the coming months can be appreciated by the electorate before they go to the polls; the public would also not forgive an election until Boris is forced into one by a petulant and obstructive parliament. Those forcing an election will be compromising our ability to put all our efforts into an October Brexit, and thus will be acting against the interests of the British people.

As for Brexit, his message is clear. We are planning for a clean Brexit, but are asking Brussels to accept a cut-and-paste deal taking all the best bits from May's mess; citizens' rights, travel, pets, financial passporting and those sorts of things. If the inflexible bigots and zealots won't budge then so be it; a clean Brexit. Any fall out will be the EU's fault - we tried. And we keep our £39bn.

Cleverly as Party chair is a good move. He's a plodder, not a cerebral. House trained and socially skilled, he can schmooze with the best of them and is utterly loyal to whomever is in power. With the lesser posts filled overnight, this morning we have a cabinet of 30 with 14 leavers and 16 who voted remain in the referendum - though who now are fully committed to Boris and to a clean Brexit.

So many good appointments. And so many strengths - a cabinet that can both manage leaving the EU and plan an election win, that can win loyalty from both the parliamentary party and the Conservative Associations. I'd almost forgotten what a capable PM looked like. DUDE.

Now to bring the party funders back and fill the war chest. James, go!    

Just enjoy their discomfort

Columns will be filled for many months with Boris and Brexit, and we have a way to go and a likely general election to face, but just for today, for one day whilst Boris moves in, let's give ourselves a break.

For three years we've had a remainer government that didn't want to deliver Brexit working hand in glove with a remainer parliament that doesn't want to deliver Brexit. Now, for the first time since 23rd June 2016, we will have a Cabinet and key mandarins and sherpas committed to leaving. This has of course triggered all the fifth-column remainers - and their petulant, juvenile tantrums are a joy to behold.

Florence of Belgravia has flounced out and will continue to be a prat from the back benches. #RoryWanksOn. Hammond, Gaulk and other nobodies have gone before they're sacked. Boulton is so puce with anger I thought his head would explode, the Guardian is in meltdown, social media is as stunned as it was three years ago and despite their #NotMyPM tags they will find that in fact he is. So for a day, chill, laugh and enjoy their discomfort.

'Noncefinder-General' Tom Watson under fire for credulity

Watson has long been a conspiracy theorist. After the Savile failure, he made the cardinal error of telling fellow MPs that he believed in a kiddy fiddler network amongst the political establishment. It was the sort of weak-minded credulity equivalent to announcing in the chamber that the da Vinci Code was a factual book, or that Prince Philip had killed Diana. The sexual fantasist 'Nick', who has subsequently been convicted, was then easily able to identify Watson as a suitable patsy to whom to spew his sick imaginings - and Watson was crass, credulous and gullible enough to lap it up.

Now MPs, even very stupid ones, have a certain status, and when Watson started repeating 'Nick's' sick fantasies the police could no longer ignore them, and weak, back-covering colleagues in the house such as the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, were also compelled to act. As the Telegraph has it

... the police who were, by now, committed to believing any sex abuse complaint, however outlandish. Basic checks that would have disproved Beech’s lurid claims were not carried out. A homicide inquiry was set up solely on the basis of his unsubstantiated allegations and, against this backdrop, Theresa May as home secretary instigated a public inquiry into historic sex abuse. One senior police officer even called this farrago of obviously fanciful tales “credible and true”. They were neither.

Watson's involvement was pivotal in the unjustifiable persecution of many wholly innocent public figures, their reputations, established over a lifetime of service, traduced. This fat credulous, cretinous owl, now nicknamed 'the Noncefinder-General' after the 17th century woman-hater Matthew Hopkins, made an utter arse of himself.

Watson is so far refusing to apologise for his substantial role in this nonsense, and for the utter waste of public resources. However, Labour members - and potential Labour voters - must now be asking whether Watson, himself now a proven fool, a believer in absurd conspiracy theories, a weak gossip and repeater of tittle-tattle, a credulous dullard, is a suitable person to lead the Party,

Steve Bell satirises Watson's 'Noncefinder General' tag

Boris is right - the dreary pessimists must pack their bags

I think today will be the last Monday - at least for some time - that Boris Johnson's column appears in the Telegraph. His final appeal is for an end to the gloomy prognostications of failure, the hangdog jowls, the droopy bitter eyes, the negative vibes. When he moves into Number Ten, we can be sure at least he will not be dragged down by a depressive, negative neighbour - Hammond has already been pictured packing, and will be gone before Boris arrives. His main point is that fifty year ago we put a man on the moon. Solving an issue of a customs border in Ireland is piffle. 

I've lost count of the times on construction schemes when I've been told it can't be done, it's impossible, the cost will be prohibitive. The reason I was picked to deliver so many 'difficult' schemes (and they are still trying to get me to do so - despite my strict instructions to my agent as to my very picky criteria for new work) I believe is that I had a reputation for being 'agile' at a time when the term wasn't even in the vocabulary of the management consultants. Usually all it took was a quiet and sympathetic chat with the boss of the engineering / design consultancy, telling them I understood if the task was too great for them, if they couldn't cope. There was no shame in it. We would arrange their quiet replacement by another practice. Fee-earning firms don't expect to be sacked - they expect their word to be gospel on the feasibility or not of some scheme aspect. Nine times out of ten it did the trick. You see, the task was very rarely impossible - more often the key consultants just didn't want to do it my way.

So I am with Boris on this. I've had a working lifetime of dreary dullards predicting failure and a lifetime's experience of proving them wrong. Boris writes

And I am afraid that there are technological pessimists – some of them apparently in London – who seem genuinely to think that such technical solutions are impossible, that they are a kind of logical contradiction, a mythological species that we will never see in this universe. Are they right? Of course not. There is abundant scope to find the solutions necessary – and they can and will be found, in the context of the Free Trade Agreement that we will negotiate with the EU (and this is common to both candidates in the current leadership contest) after we have left on October 31.

It is absurd that we have even allowed ourselves to be momentarily delayed by these technical issues. If they could use hand-knitted computer code to make a frictionless re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere in 1969, we can solve the problem of frictionless trade at the Northern Irish border. There is no task so simple that government cannot overcomplicate if it doesn’t want to do it. And there are few tasks so complex that humanity cannot solve if we have a real sense of mission to pull them off.

For a final column, that's not bad. 

Lawfare - The tide turns

This year's Reith Lectures by Lord Sumption really were extraordinarily prescient. Go on, listen to them if you haven't already - after all, you paid for them. Just like you've paid already for all the classic TV that the BBC will now charge you £70 a year to watch. Back to Sumption. He decried the intrusion of legal processes into matters that ought to be democratically decided - into political matters. Increasingly, those unhappy with the decision by the British electorate to Leave the EU have used the courts and legal processes to seek to frustrate or sabotage our exit. From Gina Miller to the biased Common Purpose shills at the Electoral Commission who have misconducted themselves in the exercise of their authority, Remain has taken up Lawfare in preference to democracy.

But now it seems the tide is turning. The biased and crooked Electoral Commission have now been slapped down three times by the courts - surely enough to provoke the mass cull of both Commissioners and the top two tiers of management - the latest over their unlawful persecution of young Darren Grimes. Arron Banks, fed up with the lies, barbs and insults of Remain campaigners posing as journalists, is taking Carole Cadwalladr to court to make an example of her.

Boris is also expected to push a robust and committed Attorney General into vigorous legal opposition to attempts to challenge the government in the courts - to maintain, as Lord Sumption has cogently explained, the proper separation of legal from political matters.

In the words of Corporal Jones, they don't like it up 'em.

Now that Leave have started playing the Lawfare game, and winning, the Remain side want to pull stumps -

... press freedom campaigners and charity groups warn the government in an open letter that UK courts are being used to “intimidate and silence” journalists working in the public interest. In a joint letter to key cabinet members, they call for new legislation to stop “vexatious lawsuits”, highlighting one filed last week by Banks against campaigning journalist Carole Cadwalladr.

reports the Guardian.

You couldn't make it up.

Poor Doors

Well, what did they think would happen when the planning system forced folk who can afford to buy an £800k apartment and folk who can only pay low rents to a Housing Association into the same block?

The owners are buying lifestyle. They want a 24/7 concierge service to take in mail and parcels and keep out crack dealers from the lobby. They want a clean, well maintained, regularly checked play area for their protected children free from dog turds, needles and spray tags. For this they are willing to pay an eye-watering service charge.

What of the social tenants in the same block? The service charge will be equal to the entire disposable income of many. Should they get these things for 'free' (not free of course - the owner occupiers will have to pay)? Should owning an apartment in a shared block, unlike a flat in a conversion or an Edwardian maisonette or a place in a mansion block, come with a legal obligation to pay directly for social tenants?

Developers have come up with 'poor doors' - separate entrances for the social tenants that do not enjoy the 24/7 concierge service or the standards of cleaning, decor and maintenance in the common parts. Play areas are segregated. Unaffordable service charges are thus avoided. Of course the distinction is humiliating and divisive and undesirable - so much so that councils are now motivated to act to end the practice.

But how? Fairly? Practically? Genuine ask.

BBC TV Tax thugs will kill the old

I must admit that when resident in the UK I always paid the TV Tax. To save my buyer from harassment and intimidation from the TV Tax Stasi, I wrote them a letter telling them I had moved and giving them my new address. Outside the UK.

Letters are still powerful - you, the writer, are in control of the process. 'They' want to force you to use their channels - an impenetrable web form, an eternity on a 'helpline', but you subvert the whole process with a letter to the company secretary at the registered head office. Thus have I always terminated phone, utility, broadband and other contracts with wolves and didacts. And civil law is behind you - our pre-EU law has survived intact, making any contract term requiring you to use the firm's contact channels unenforceable. Your letter - with no return channel volunteered except your address, requiring them to write back - can always quite legally give the required notice and request a final account. They hate it.

My letter to the TV Tax Stasi neatly avoided all the bullying of their chosen channels, all their weaselling for information for which they have no right to ask. I had completely forgotten that I paid annually by direct debit, and laughed when I got their airmailed letter telling me that they had refunded my account for several months. That must have hurt.

Twitter is exposing the repugnant methods the BBC Stasi are using to collect their tax - threats, lies. fake stamps, letters made to look like bailiffs' demands or even post office red 'not delivered' cards. And yesterday they confirmed that their thugs would be calling on the over 75s to remind them that they must scrape together the cash for the BBC's TV Tax or be criminally prosecuted. It's the sort of loutish bullying that Ann Robinson or Esther Rantzen used to expose on, erm, the BBC. And it won't take long for the first frail oldie to die of shock and fright.

So I can only recommend that those approaching the age of 75 - say all of you over 40 - write to the BBC (recorded delivery is good) querying the new arrangements and asking for more information. Don't bother with a phone number or email address. And remind them that you can't receive casual callers.

Oh. And you can't visit the BBC TV Tax office at Darlington DL98 1TL - it doesn't exist. Try it on google maps. I presume the post office intercept the mail and redirect it to the real, secret, address. The only thing of interest is a small probably 18th century building with oriel windows next to the Kebab and Grill. If there are any very wealthy BBC haters reading, I would love to restore this gorgeous little building and install a 'BBC TV Tax Advice Centre' on the ground floor staffed by local volunteers. Over 75 preferred.

 Update
======
The real home of the BBC TV Tax? - Crapita, India Mill, Darwen

Capita, Darwen - the origin of the BBC TV Tax thugmail

Con Coughlin lunches with the right MoD briefer this time

Back in 2015 this blog was something of a lone voice in advocating kicking Turkey out of NATO for its support for ISIS and Sunni terrorism in return for stolen Iraqi oil - oil that made Erdogan's son very rich indeed. It was also a time at which Turkey had practically isolated herself - I wrote

Erdogan is now skating on very thin ice; the EU is reeling from his policy of actively pushing migrants into Greece, with Turkey's old ally France in particular grief at this betrayal, he's lost Russia's support and now the US has turned against him. The generals must surely now be taking quiet soundings from these international players as to the likelihood of sanctions and international opprobrium if they act to remove Erdogan. If they get an answer that a coup will mean a deal of disapproving noise but nothing concrete followed by a swift move to co-operation if Turkey both halts the migrant flow, takes the pressure from the Kurds and closes the border to ISIS then Erdogan's days are numbered.

Well, the coup was tried - and failed. Tens of thousands of civil servants have been dismissed, hundreds of the most senior military officers imprisoned, and at least a score of them judicially murdered in custody ('fell out of a window' 'had a heart attack' etc). Erdogan appreciated his isolation and moved to make an ally of Russia, with $20bn of arms purchases. It is pertinent that at least some of that money comes from the EU, the billion-Euro bribes for not sending migrants across the Greek border. Again, I wrote back in 2015

Make no mistake; Turkey and the KSA are our real enemies, and the real threats to peace. We need to pour money and troops into Greece to secure Europe's Eastern flank against Turkey, and give full support to Russia, Syria and the Kurds in blocking Turkey from the South. Only then will peace start to return to Iraq and Syria, and the tsunami of migrants into Europe actively facilitated by Turkey start to stem. Oh yes. We need to kick Turkey out of NATO.

Maybe we should have kicked Turkey out of NATO in 2015 - but the US then needed Incirlik for its anti-ISIS operations. Well, now Erdogan has forced the move again; his purchase of Russia's S400 system has forced the US to exclude him from the F35 programme. And our old friend Con Coughlin has, for once, been lunched at the expense of the right MoD briefer; he writes in the Telegraph

When Turkey joined Nato back in 1952, the idea was that it would help to protect Nato’s eastern flank from Moscow’s aggression. Now that is clearly no longer the case, and European leaders should join their American counterparts in facing up to the fact that Turkey under Mr Erdogan is a lost cause. The days when Turkey had a genuine interest in cementing its ties with the West by joining the European Union are long gone. Instead, we have a country that openly associates with those who wish to do us harm.

Consequently, now that Mr Erdogan has demonstrated that he feels more at home in Moscow than he does in Brussels, we should acknowledge where Turkey’s true interests lie, and terminate its Nato membership.

There is one matter that Con has missed - perhaps his briefer avoided it. It's the US loan of B61 nukes to both the EU and Turkey - in 2017 I wrote 

As I've posted below, I think the timing is important. EU free-riders will not now increase their NATO spending by a cent. The EU is calculating what's needed to make a Common EU army and national expenditure will be so directed; the spending may be badged as 'NATO' in the short term, but this will be mendacious. They've almost certainly also got an outline idea of how to fudge the divorce.

Which brings me to an interesting footnote - shared Nukes. The US, to help little countries without the bomb to feel included, has distributed 180 B61 air-launched nukes to Turkey, Germany (?), Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. These 'dial-a-yield' devices can be set on loading to yield from 0.3 to 170 kilotons (Hiroshima was 15) and they can be launched from a variety of national NATO aircraft - but need US consent to 'unlock' them. Will Mr Trump now ask for them back?

Well, I ask the question again - with vdL now in post with an almost fanatical commitment to German EU militarism, and Erdogan off the NATO chums list, will Trump now arrange to have the US's 180 B61s shipped back home? They are dangerous toys to leave in the hands of not-really-allies.

Selmayr OUT - VdL squeaks in by 9 votes

Rejoice - Selmayr is OUT. The Telegraph, having the wool pulled over its eyes, reports 

Martin Selmayr, the German controversial secretary general of the commission, announced he would resign in accordance with Brussels tradition that dictates no two people of the same nationality can hold the EU’s executive’s most powerful posts.

It's rubbish of course. No such restriction applies to the head of the EU's 30,000 strong civil service - a permanent job normally awarded through competition - rather than the undemocratic political appointments of the five Presidents, fourteen Vice-Presidents and scores of Commissioners and their assistants.  The truth is that Selmayr's corrupt appointment by Juncker stuck in the craw of even the EU, so mired itself in corruption that such things normally go almost unnoticed. Politico EU has the true story

The procedure by which Selmayr and his boss, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, engineered his transfer from chief of Juncker’s cabinet to head of the entire Commission secretariat was an act of such chicanery and skulduggery that it stains the record of the entire Commission.

That Selmayr is, like von der Leyen, a German Christian Democrat, made the prospect of his continuing in office a provocation to those of other parties whose support she sought. But it was the nature of his ascent and his argument that the post is a political one that made his departure inevitable.

VdL herself was humiliated by the European Parliament, barely scraping in with just a 9 vote majority. Her 383 fell far short of the minimum of 400 that demonstrates the EP's confidence in the senior unelected functionary. Since she scored only 51% of the vote, we should expect the Remain lobby to call for a second vote - but of course this hypocrisy applies only to the Referendum result.

So the EU have lost a ruthless Machiavelli and gained a semi-competent duffer stained with a record of failure and corruption. Can't be bad.

More Corruption

Zero Hedge reports, in relation to the circumstances that have led to the relentless climb of gold (my emphasis)

Ultimately you are witnessing a massive expropriation of wealth from the middle classes to the wealthiest - 40% of the bank of England's money printing programme benefited the top 5%. These flows obfuscate the real demand and supply dynamics of the market - central banks are the baddest of bad actors. Using printed money to bid up the assets of the rich in order to manage outcomes is an utter perversion of capitalism. It blinds us to the opportunity cost of economic participation - real cost of borrowing, real expected returns. Worse still is that the money they use is created by devaluing taxpayers after tax savings - is effectively like a second tax. What happens when the market starts to fall, will these feckless un-elected central bankers be buying falling stocks? How will taxpayers react to their money being printed to buy assets that are falling? How would taxpayers like if they received a statement indicating how much money has been printed and the amount they have personally provided. This is not a victim-less crime.

There you have it. Not only are most of us victims of Globalism that has left median incomes in the UK still worth less than in 2008, a Globalism that benefits only the 1%, but the whole of QE, carried out in our name and at our cost, has acted mainly to the benefit of that same 1% by inflating asset values. A reckoning will come - and they have been the authors of their own destruction.

Will Labour ditch Magic Grandad before the General Election?

As far as Brexit goes, Labour's Magic Grandad is one of the party's few MPs actually standing for both working-class principles and the Party's 2017 manifesto. His commitment to leaving the EU echoes the real (though often misdirected) passion for democracy expressed by the late Tony Benn. As MEPs vote today on Von Der Layen's appointment some fools will call the process democratic. In the video below Benn makes the point that MEPs are not elected in the UK - parties are. Voters have no say on the members returned to Brussels by the parties, and can't vote to get rid of individual MEPs.



Benn's and Magic Grandad's views on the EU - that is it wholly detrimental to the interests of the working class in Britain - are not shared by the new breed of establishment 'progressives' who have adopted the Labour Party for convenience. For most of them it could have been the LibDems or parts of the Conservative Party - the present Parliamentary parties are currently largely homogeneous, Blairite and managerialist in character, opposed to Brexit and determined to frustrate the nation's democratic instruction.

However, these Blairite managerialists are determined to take over the Labour Party, defenestrate Magic Grandad and campaign wholeheartedly on a 'Remain' ticket in the forthcoming General Election. Lady Nugee, with all the bearing and presence of a large garden party marquee (200 seated or 400 standing) said so.

Short of Labour splitting into two parties - a northern, industrial Free Labour Party supporting Brexit and a southern metropolitan Labour House (members only) supporting remain - the managerialists will have to ditch Magic Grandad. And that may prove extraordinarily difficult in the time available. So I guess what we'll end up with is an official Labour front bench that is both on the record as Leave and Remain, depending who is being interviewed. Confused voters will simply desert Labour.

That of course is exacly in favour of the true heirs to Benn's Euroscepticism - The Brexit Party.

Will Farage cook Von der Leyen's goose?

It will not be a good week for the German lady who wants a Euro army, and who has warned the UK that she is just as much of a bully as the rest of them. She's mired already in allegations of corruption and incompetence in Germany; so useless do some folk regard her that they are saying that her departing Merkel's government for the European Commission will mean a marginal improvement in the performance of both. However, her corrupt appointment, alien to all principles of democracy, in which the people of Europe had no say, is subject to the European Parliament.

As Politico EU reports, she needs 374 MEP's votes, a bare majority, to scrape through, but anything less than 400 will look like failure. Juncker the Druncker had 422 with 250 against. So far she has just 286 that she can count on.

And Nigel of course will vote against her. As the Express has it

Writing for Express.co.uk on Sunday, Brexit Party MEP Matthew Patten warned of upset as the European Parliament approves or reject Jean-Claude Juncker’s chosen successor as European Commission President – German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen.

He wrote: "MEPs across Europe feel betrayed that the candidate was just dumped on them.

"Suddenly parliamentary bars are buzzing with talk about what can be done to get some democracy into the place. What would happen if parliament rejected the new president? Would its largest political party, the Brexit Party, help?"

Will the Brexit Party help? I expect so, Matthew, I expect so.

Von der Layen's Bundeswehr has many helicopters. None of them work.

Update - E-scooters
==============
You may recall I wrote about this new phenomenon back in May. Now the MSM are catching up, after a high-profile fatality. And, as predicted, the reaction of Authority is to move police from murder, gang violence, serious crime and the knife plague to pester Hipsters on electric scooters instead. You couldn't make it up.

Leaked Diptels - leaker must be jailed

Diptels are official secrets for a good reason. They allow our ambassadors to write freely, openly and without constraint to our government, informing our complex web of foreign policy and furthering the interests of the United Kingdom. Ambassadors are not hauled before select committees to justify their views, or subjected to deep personal scrutiny by the mainstream media. In return they keep a low profile, don't Tweet, don't snort lines of marching powder at nightclubs and generally act .. diplomatically.

Leaking Diptels is neither in the interests of the nation or even of Brexit. Once you start to make exceptions based on the degree of commitment of a leaker to their cause you open a Pandora's box. A Polaris submariner who opposes nuclear weapons? An SIS field operative who abjures subterfuge? A Home Office staffer who disagrees with telephone taps on Islamists? Exposing illegal State activity is one thing - but leaking perfectly proper, legitimate, lawful Diptels is not whistle blowing. It is a breach both of trust and of the criminal law.

Warning newspapers in advance, as the Met have done, that if they publish more stolen Diptels that they will be guilty of criminal complicity is also right. The MoS is not publishing these from the good of its heart but because it increases sales and profits for its owners. The Mail was quick enough to drop Brexit like a hot coal when their global corporate advertisers put the squeeze on - they are hardly motivated by virtue or altruism.

Freedom of expression and freedom of the press is not the issue here. The system that helps preserve our national security is.

Hormuz security - three suggestions

Here are three suggestions for keeping our tankers safe from Iranian aggression when passing through the Strait of Hormuz;

1. Convoys
Assemble tankers in convoys with RN warship escorts - timing dependent on tides, numbers. Extendable to include other threatened nations who can contribute warships.

2. Marines
Helo on a squad of Royal Marines with .50cal rail-mounted weapons, shoulder-launched missiles etc to each tanker making passage through danger zone, transfer them to tanker moving in opposite direction for the return leg

3. Jeremy Corbyn
Elect Corbyn as PM so he can ask his Hamas and Revolutionary Guard chums to lay-off UK tankers in return for UK breaking sanctions against Iran

Labour's shocking Jew-hatred

Last night's shocking Panorama exposed the depth of anti-semitism in the Labour party, a disease that goes to the very top. A shameful litany of crude Nazi tropes, ugly agitprop and a thuggish bullying of Jewish Labour members that would have made an SA man proud. That such evil exists still, when the last few precious holocaust survivors, our living link with that dark chapter in mankind's history, are also leaving us is both harrowing and shameful.

It is not, however, new.

Before WWII the Labour party was enamoured of eugenics and the politics of racial hygiene in much the same way as the Nazi party. I wrote about it in 2012, referencing a Guardian piece by Jonathan Freedland entitled 'Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left's closet' that warned presciently that unless Labour faced its fascist roots, it would not escape the consequences. Today, unusually, I will quote that seven-year old post whole.

18th February 2012
When I have previously catalogued on here the shared ideology between the British left and the Nazi party, an ideology based on racial purity, Eugenics, State control over breeding and marriage and the horror of 'involuntary euthanasia', or State murder, an ideology that persisted in Polly Toynbee's beloved left wing Scandinavian countries into the 1970s with compulsory sterilisation, I'm sure some readers have thought the parallels a little forced. Bernard Shaw wanted to kill the poor with a 'humane lethal gas'; more tellingly he also wanted to rid Britain of Jews, writing to Beatrice Webb he wrote

We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable, but insisting they do it as humanely as they can afford to

No doubt also subjecting them to a 'humane lethal gas'. Along with Shaw, the Webbs and HG Wells, even Virginia Woolf was a supporter of State murder; after passing a line of the profoundly mentally ill, she wrote "Imbeciles - every one of them a miserable, ineffective, shuffling, idiotic creature. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

After 1945 and the horror of the extermination camps, the Labour Party quickly performed one of those acts of collective amnesia and wiped all memory of their own National Socialist agenda from the record. Just as that loathsome gulag-apologist Nye Bevan has been resurrected as some sort of saint. But no longer am I alone in daring to say these things, it seems.

Jonathan Freedland writes today in the Guardian that it's time the Labour Party and the British left faced up to their poisonous ideological legacy. Until they do, he implies, the worth of each individual human soul will still be subjugated to a left ideology of collective good;

Progressives face a particular challenge, to cast off a mentality that can too easily regard people as means rather than ends. For in this respect a movement is just like a person: it never entirely escapes its roots.

Breaking: Autumn election dates

House of Commons library have just issued guidance on possible general election dates BEFORE Brexit day -

Thursday 19th September or
Thursday 26th September

with a no confidence motion passed before the Summer recess

Thursday 24th October

only possible pre-Brexit date if no confidence motion passed after Summer recess

More tomorrow.

All HERE

In praise of cities

I've long described myself in political shorthand as 'democrat and localist'. With Brexit for the past three years, I haven't found much of a chance to pursue the second of those core values - almost every day having been a battle to preserve the first. However, a serendipitous find in the Evening Standard has prompted this post. Under Osborne the paper has become a sort of lifestyle free adsheet with little bits of news squeezed in between the ads. Its editorials were given over to George's vindictive spleen against May for sacking him, but now she's gone (almost) our man with the look of a furtive Onanist is letting normal content slip past him. Such is a piece by Ben Rogers in the comment section - the first ES piece I think I've linked to since Osborne took over.

Rogers, head of a pro-London think tank, is pursuing an agenda for cities to gain greater local control. It is an area in which the RSA has long advocated multiple initiatives to take advantage of the strengths of cities. It is based on changes that in the developed world can be positive - the growth of world cities, city nation-states. London's population dwarfs that of Ireland, and is equal to the populations of Scotland and Wales combined. European cities, unlike the smog-laden sprawl of US cities, are compact and environmentally sustainable. For thirty years living in Zone 2 I never once owned a car - and consequently was able to spend much of those thirty years with a comfortable level of alcohol coursing through my veins. We build densely, and upwards; we have superlative public transport systems, we have 24/7 economies. For economic growth and vitality, for learning and development, for culture, for innovation, for leisure and pleasure, cities are ace.

I can almost hear your hackles erecting, readers, as you mentally enumerate the downsides of cities - that they avoid being part of our congruent national identity, that they display crime, extremes of wealth and poverty, poor environmental quality, are hotbeds of moral relativism, competing with the national culture and of course are breeding grounds for globalists and remainers. Yes, all these things are true. Yet cities are the engine of development, the powerhouses of renewal.

Boris showed how an effective Mayor could allow London to see its potential. Andy Burnham is no less committed to the North. Both were shackled by a constipated Treasury and power-hungry Whitehall; tax must be devolved as well as spend, city-specific laws and bye-laws should replace the centralisation and State power over law and public order, planning, health, transport, education and economic development - these should all be torn from Whitehall's grasp in an explosion of Localism.

Problems will tend to correct themselves. Cities attract militant and proud sexual deviants in hordes; they will overcome cabals of mediaeval bigots whose instinct is to persecute them. It's already happening. And without the veto of Whitehall, the instincts of city-dwellers of all races and classes is for a firm and determined approach to law enforcement; there are no greater fans of police and prisons than those at greatest risk of being burgled, robbed, stabbed or shot. The Lord Longfords of our age don't live in Peckham or Walthamstowe, and their ultra-liberal pleadings from their Cotswold vicarages can be drowned out.

We will leave the EU. This is the great gift - possibly the last great gift - that we can give our cities. Outside of the EU they will quickly learn to thrive and prosper, driving national growth and international trade and development. Powerful British city-states will dominate a sclerotic Eurozone on the verge of collapse, our buccaneer cities will be Drake to the clumsy Spaniards, Raleigh to the encumbered globalists, heavy and low in the water and ripe for the taking.

So let's hear it for cities, and for Localism!

A national Memorial for Eco heroes?

I may write to Saint Greta this morning, suggesting a new national memorial to all those who fall in the cause of the planet. Those killed by wind turbine blades or toppling towers, blinded by solar panels, those who succumb to a surfeit of quinoa and those such as the late Mrs Struthers-Gardner killed by metal drinking straws.

Hipsters and Eco warriors risk their lives saving the planet from plastic drinking straws

May they rest in peace. Preferably in hand-woven wicker coffins buried in the woods with a sapling planted over them.

Darroch again ...

There's an intelligent post by Paul Goodman on Conservative Home. I concur wholly that Darroch has done nothing wrong, and that he was just doing what we pay him to do. I would also remind everyone that UK ambassadors to Washington are there to represent British interests, not to promote any one American politician. Such tasks fall to our political Head of Government, who may be more or less successful in cultivating the relationship. That between Thatcher and Reagan was superlative, between Blair and Bush cringemaking and between Cameron and Obama outright hostile. Goodman concludes

Which returns us to Darroch. There is a suspicion that Sedwill, and not Darroch himself, was the real target of the leak. The former is reportedly interested in the Washington post. A new Prime Minister will be in place by the end of the month. Changes at the top of the civil service are expected. The leak looks designed to prepare the way for a replacement for Darroch who is more Trump-friendly than Sedwill. But the disposition of Darroch’s replacement to the President is not the exam question, or shouldn’t be.

There is a precedent for sending a non-civil servant to Washington as ambassador: Peter Jay, Jim Callaghan’s son-in-law, was sent to Washington when the latter was Prime Minister. However, the example is not encouraging. Perhaps Prime Minister Johnson should scour the more junior civil service ranks, and send for one of those who, pro-Brexit Ministers tell us, have put in exemplary work preparing for No Deal if necessary, regardless of their own views.

Jay was undeserved nepotism. He was a dreadful ambassador. The point is right - don't reinforce failure. We need an ambassador in Washington independent enough to be free to be critical of US policy where this is against the UK's interests, and with enough delegated authority to now take forward the robust and pragmatic discussions we now need to have with the USA.

How very convenient

Everyone agrees. When May goes, arch-Remainer Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill cannot stay at Number Ten. Suggestions for his future include separating the three roles he holds - Cabinet Secretary, National Security Adviser and Head of the Civil Service, leaving him with just one, probably civil service boss, and finding him a new office away from Whitehall.

Sedwill himself is said to want the UK Ambassadorship to Washington - a strange option, given that all his previous efforts have been to align the UK with the EU rather than the USA. Perhaps it is just an extension of a blocking role. The problem is, the popular and capable current Ambassador, Kim Darroch, is in no hurry to go. He is well liked over the pond and held in high regard, and importantly is not said to be one of the Remain fifth-column inside the senior ranks of the civil service.

So how convenient - and I suggest no more than that - that carefully selected secret cables from Sir Kim to Number Ten, which certainly passed across Sedwill's desk, should now appear in the Daily Mail, to Darroch's great embarrassment.

There needs to be a leak enquiry, of course, but I'd suggest that Sedwill is not the man to conduct it.