From the Desk of Mr Barrister Tony Blair

As with Nigerian 419 scammers, Mr Barrister Tony Blair doesn't himself address anyone. Such people imagine that heading a polite written request for £5,000 or an excuse for killing 100,000 people with the words 'From the desk of ...' or 'From the office of ...' adds gravitas to their own actual insignificance. Guys, it really doesn't. 

So we have Chilcot clarifying that the truth for Mr Barrister Tony Blair is what he believes it to be, and that he approached War in the same way an advocate defending a man charged with waving his todger about on the Central Line. For Mr Barrister Tony Blair, an emotional and persuasive appeal always trumps stuff like actual facts, real intelligence and credible evidence. And that probably goes for his Desk, his Office and any other objects that speak for him. 

But just as learned counsel don't actually deceive the court when they aver that their client claims he was just shaking raindrops from a newly purchased Bratwurst in that tube carriage, and that this could indeed have been the case, that there exists a reasonable doubt, so Mr Barrister Tony Blair wasn't actually deceiving us when he claimed with all his emotional wringing that Iraq might represent a threat. 

The difference is more than a £500 fine. Iraq is a nation drenched in innocent blood and spattered with detonated body parts, home to pain, suffering, desperation and despair, the source of Islamist hatred, and a graveyard for an entire generation. And for that we must thank the Desk of Mr Barrister Tony Blair, 419 scammer and blagger extraordinaire, a man who avoids jail as an eel eludes the hand. 

Coffee needed. I've got a vomity taste in my throat.

Summer migrant surge exposes multiple EU failures

Well, you've read about it here many times. The many millions of young, male, African economic migrants moving North to make the move into Europe, driven by low child mortality rates achieved 15- 20 years ago that have caused a massive population bulge of young men for whom failing, despotic and corrupt African economies can provide no work. Global 3G phones and cheap Chinese crocs and clothing have convinced these poor sods that, from their 8th century barrios, without work, educational or social skills, they can fit right into a 21st century Europe. Even the UN, an organisation now dedicated to the destruction of the old-world nations, admits they're just economic migrants.

So far this year 84,000 have reached Italy and Europe's southern sphincter is tightening. Austria is upping its Brenner Pass border control, France continues a state of emergency and the Visegrad nations continue to flip a middle finger to Brussels. It's five years too late, but just about everyone now realises just how badly the EU has failed in controlling migration. Everyone except the deluded morons in the Berlaymont, of course, who even now see nothing wrong. Any fix at source - in Libya - is also now likely to be achieved by an informal group of European nations as the EU continues to be paralysed by hubris, failure and delusion.

Michael Gove generally visits the prestigious Mayr clinic on Lake Wörthersee each year to have his colon flushed out and to eat weed soup, and I'm sure Sarah Vine appreciates the work he puts in to keep his bowel in good condition - she writes in the Mail that she fears 'dark forces' rising in Italy over migration that may imperil the annual Gove arse-hosing. God save us.

Car lease bubble to burst?

It's the same all over Europe. No-one buys a car for cash any more. The roads are full of cars under five years old most of which seem to have been bought on retail leases, those three or five year deals with low or no deposit, low monthly lease cost but with punitive damage and mileage conditions and a vastly inflated bubble payment at the end of the term should drivers perversely want to buy their cars rather than take out a new lease. 

Here they all go for those vast-tyred monsters that come as close to looking like like a Humvee as road-legal cars can get. With thick chrome roll bars and Bengal plate slab decks. And they pretend they own them. 

What I can't understand is what the car makers' leasing companies, who presumably own all the three year old returned cars, actually do with them. If they released them all on the market then second hand prices would plummet with a tsunami of perfect condition pre-owned cars and fewer people would take the new lease options - so where are they? Shipped overseas? In some vast desert store like the entire 1970s USAF fleet of aircraft? I think we should be told.

For scale, the driver is standing under the front spoiler. Essential for the Munich school run.

That dodgy 'secret' K&C cabinet meeting

In my view the High Court was quite correct to forbid Kensington and Chelsea Council from holding a formal cabinet meeting from which press and public were to be excluded. The Guardian brought the case. 

Firstly, the cabinet has plenty of opportunities to have private meetings - under the name of majority group, leader's meeting, or even outside the Council as a Party event. There is only one reason for meeting formally as a Council cabinet - and that's to take decisions. Now there are circumstances, defined by Schedule 12A of the 1972 Local Government Act, under which cabinet agenda reports can be classed as 'Exempt' and press and public can be excluded from meetings. The reasons are pretty tight. K&C didn't even attempt to use these grounds, for there was no written report to consider. Instead they sought to use a part of the Council's standing orders that covered preventing public disorder. 

So with no report tabled - open or exempt - why the need for a formal cabinet meeting? I suspect that they were intending to take a decision, that a report had been written, and that cabinet could agree to take it without prior publication to all councillors on grounds of 'overwhelming urgency'. If they just wanted a private discussion, why a formal cabinet meeting?

There is something very dodgy about the behaviour of K&C cabinet members here. Sadiq Khan, though, is just making silly little boy's political capital with his request to Mrs May to put the Council under special measures - he knows full well this is reserved for cases of egregious corruption such as the Muslim mafia takeover of Tower Hamlets. London's mayor has just proven himself to be a junior league failure, not fit to play with the big boys. He will be a one-term wonder. 

However, the council's new Tory cabinet needs to up its game to prove it can do the job. 

Khan - a failing one-term wonder

EU is failing again in the Western Balkans

If I could draw a cartoon it would be the statelets of the western Balkans fighting in a furious 2020 dustball of fists and boots whilst an EU President as shamefaced as a labrador who has copiously fouled the bedroom rug looks on, with the caption "You had one job ..."

The EU's foreign policy is a litany of failure, yet these hubristic Federasts want their own army to reinforce that failure; whilst they poke Putin in Ukraine, the Western Balkans are being lost to Russian expansion and Salafist pollution, corrupted through Turkish influence with Saudi money into a hotbed of radical Islamism. Reports in both the Republican American Interest and the Lefty Der Spiegel  catalogue the loss of interest by the EU in further Balkans accessions and the loss of interest by the Balks (if they can be so termed) in the EU; latest polls indicate that just 18% of Serbians really want to join the Federation. As Russia protects Christian orthodox nations, newly groomed Islamist statelets throw up new Saudi-funded mosques staffed by Saudi-supplied imams, to radicalise a new generation of Islamist terrorists. 

The Washington Post thinks it is a failure of democracy, that Balkans statelets are 'halfway democracies' and offers reasons for this. The paper misses the biggest reason of all. That the EU has the role of democracy mentor and monitor, and that the EU is in itself the most profoundly anti-democratic of regimes. It's like giving the job of Civics teacher to Pol Pot. What sort of lesson do the Balkans get from a corrupt Brussels EU regime that believes that the secret ballot and universal suffrage are obstacles to be over-ridden, that plebiscites can be repudiated and overturned, that solemn treaties can be broken for political ends and that threats, bullying and hubristic posturing are equated with statesmanship?

We should not forget that the Balkans are exporting their violent men who return even more skilled in crime and violence; Islamists fight for ISIS and pass back and forwards through a complicit Turkey, Albanian cocaine gangs dominate Europe, Serb people traffickers cross Europe in trucks filled with Afghan migrants. The reason why Austria can't put cigarette prices up to over €4,50 a pack is the ease with which white brands are smuggled from Balkans factories. Now that Croatia is part of the EU, there are a quarter million more Croatian passport holders than there are Croatians; well, who speaks enough Serbo-Croat to know? 

I have little doubt that the western Balkans will blow up again, and the dirty EU labrador whose fault it will be will wring its paws and ask for British peacekeepers and US ground attack aircraft to clear their shit up.

The one key factor in EU migration

You will all be used by now to everything from constipation to Summer lightning being blamed on Brexit; the remoaners know no limits in seeking to establish Brexit as the cause of every ill. Cow dries up? Crop fails? Late hail? Ewe aborts? Brexit. A few hundred years ago the same people blamed witches for everything that went wrong with their lives. Today they blame Brexit. 

EU staff are fleeing the NHS in terror, apparently. If you read the Guardian, you'll get a picture of the UK as a fearful panic nation in which stoic Hungarian nose-surgeons brave being spat at on the bus for talking funny. It's utter rubbish of course; the Guardian is an open sewer and its content just as palatable. Now the Indescribablyboring runs its own 'Brexit panic fear brain-drain exodus'  made-up news story. Sigh.

There's really only one factor that determines more than any other the level and pressure of inward EU migration to the UK; the £ - € exchange rate. When it stood at €1.35 - €1.43 to the £, every raspberry was picked, every ward swabbed and every bathroom tiled. Now it's €1.13 and housing costs in London and the South East are through the roof, EU workers are asking 'what's the point?'

If politicians had known they could reduce EU migration so effectively by weakening the pound, they would have done it before.  If the Peso hit $0.50 rather than $0.05 then Mr Trump would not have to build a wall. People simply don't uproot and migrate unless it's worth it. Until Greece defaults, the entire Italian banking system folds, Deutsche Bank drops or Spain goes bust, and so long as the pound is weak, our EU gastarbeiter will drift home.

Labour Party tower block 'murderers' condemned

Well, the government haven't politicised the faulty tower blocks, but Communist squib John McDonnell has done so - saying victims of the Grenfell fire were murdered by political decisions. Before he condemns so widely he might like to look at the political control of the councils which have covered their tower blocks with lethal materials;

Portsmouth	Conservative
Brent	Labour
Camden	Labour
Manchester	Labour
Plymouth	NOC
Hounslow	Labour
Doncaster	Labour
Norwich	Labour
Stockton on Tees	NOC
Sunderland	Labour
Islington	Labour
Lambeth	Labour
Wandsworth	Conservative
Barnet	Conservative

 Who are the potential killers now, John? And I'll bet when the DCLG release even more names that Labour councils predominate.

Also, can anyone explain why the government should face a £600m bill for correcting this danger? Why should not these councils dip into their own very substantial (£19bn from CIPFA) reserves to pay for it? Is this not exactly what council reserves are for?

Freedom Day

A year ago as the dawn Sun peeped over a valley rich with the Summer scent of new-cut hay I tuned into the Referendum results and got the shock of my life. No less stunned were the gloomy, funereal faces of the newscasters admitting the result. 

Since then much has happened. We have seen-off court cases, a hostile house of Lords, internal sabotage and a constant pissy whine from the old political establishment. Much remains to be done. We pray the resolve of our nation's leaders does not falter, that the sniping, bullying and undermining of the EU is overcome.

Yet I take comfort from the election, in which 86% of voters cast votes for Brexit parties, and from a recent You Gov poll that puts Leavers at 78% in total against 22% die-hard remainers. And every spiteful, bullying put-down from the hubristic EU Federast capos actually gains more and more of us to the Leave cause. 

The real Freedom Day will come in 2019 when we are free of the shackles of this despotic little Federation. But for now, this is a good anniversary to remember. 

Kensington duffer sacked

The forced resignation of Kensington and Chelsea Chief Executive Nicholas Holgate was on the grounds of the Council's appalling response to the aftermath of the Grenfell fire. More on this shortly. The yappy dags of the mainstream media though can't resist adding their own made-up reasons; "and for ignoring the repeated warnings of the fire risk" snaps the Mail, "and for neglect of the poor and of social housing" whines the Guardian. 

Across the country things are structured for the blue-light services to form the 'hard' response to civil emergency but for local authorities to co-ordinate the 'soft' side; power, water, sewerage, food, housing, transport, clothing, bedding, pets, banks, schools. Each council is given a substantial annual grant to maintain an Emergency Planning function including regular training; 'gold' 'silver' and 'bronze' commands in association with neighbouring councils are put in place. So when something like Grenfell happens, the machine swings smoothly into place. 

Except of course it didn't. K&C's response was non-existent. Holgate was an utter failure, a decorative popinjay, who left it up to churches, mosques and sharp-elbowed residents to organise food and clothing banks, blankets and so on. And despite K&C being replete with flats, Holgate's morons were sending DPs to council housing hundreds of miles away. In the event a group of six neighbouring councils had to step in to do what K&C was not - in the process excluding Holgate from the management of a crisis in his own borough. Even the departments of State each set up a stand on the estate and dispatched staff to serve the DPs - but not K&C council. 

It was quite right that this duffer was booted out. It also reminded me of the incompetence of the mayor of New Orleans in the days following the disastrous floods there. Such people must go. They earn their inflated salaries on the basis of a modicum of competence. When found wanting, they must be cast into the darkness.  

Update
=======
I've just found Simon Jenkins in the ES whose own piece mirrors my view:-

It was total humiliation. Yesterday, as the dust began to settle around the Grenfell Tower site, six London borough bosses met to co-ordinate rescue efforts and struggle to repair the reputation of local government. They did not include the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, on whose patch the tragedy occurred. In the chair was the chief executive of the City Corporation, John Barradell, with “leadership roles” for Westminster, Southwark, Ealing, Hounslow, Bromley and Harrow. I am told they did not even meet in the royal borough.

So, it's to be 'hard' Brexit then.

Confirmation from the Federast Empire that Brexit means exit from the customs union and single market will have disappointed a number of 'soft' Brexiteers. The statement came yesterday at the start of Brexit talks between the Kingdom and the Empire. And I use those terms with reason.

Imagine, some time after 1870, if the kingdom of Bavaria told the king of Prussia and Emperor of Germany that they wanted to leave the German federation, please, and go back to building castles and selling cuckoo clocks and lager. Prussia's anger would not only make it certain that Bavaria was excluded from the Zollverein but would take the hit on increased clock and lager costs, on principle.

But doesn't this just make our team's job easier? If this means any grant of UK aid to the Federation - though not the absurd €100bn of aid the EU are asking for - must be linked to a trade deal that replaces some of the elements of the foregone customs union and single market? That any agreed UK aid to the EU is conditional?

And surely, if yesterday's pronouncement from Barnier means we're already on WTO terms by default, we've got nothing to lose by walking away without agreeing a grant of aid to the 27?

Can anyone explain?

Grenfell Tower

Around 6am, 5am UK time, last Wednesday morning I started watching Grenfell Tower burning. It was clear from the footage that the fire progressed on the outside of the building. "Cladding" I said to my plumber. A bit of digging about found the portfolio pics on the website of Studio E architects, of Tooley Street; they confirmed that an aluminium sandwich panel was specified. The architects have since taken down their website and are keeping a very low profile. Their residential portfolio has also disappeared from their RIBA page. 

It's all about energy efficiency. This was a concrete tower block with inadequate insulation and single glazed steel or aluminium windows. To slash heat loss, new external wall insulation and double glazed windows have been a standard solution since the start of the century, and to that extent no problem. EWI on low rise and domestic buildings usually means dark grey PE or Polyethylene foam in blocks up to 150mm thick stuck and screwed onto the existing facade. On low rise this is then usually rendered to give a 15mm thick crust that stops people poking holes in the foam with their fingers (but useless against woodpeckers, who now prefer making nests in EWI than in trees). 

We've all known for years that PE foam was a fire risk, and it's always therefore been replaced by 120mm - 200mm of mineral wool for higher buildings. However, repeated wet work - layers of render coats - at heights is costly and problematic, with the risk of injury if the adhesive bond between render and rockwool fails and chunks fall off. In place of render on highrise buildings the industry instead uses rainscreen cladding, designed to be fairly but not absolutely waterproof. So a void is left between the cladding and the rockwool to allow some rainwater to drip down and be drained without soaking the EWI. Again, not a problem if the rainscreen cladding is not inflammable and if fire-stopping and drainage at each storey is incorporated. 

What we know from the photographs and news reports is that rockwool was used - correctly - for the insulation but so it seems was the inflammable PE foam - if only in a 5mm thick layer in the middle of an aluminium sandwich for the rainscreen cladding. Suspicions that fire-stopping was left out - which would make drainage behind the facade much cheaper and easier - would explain a chimney effect for the fire spread. 

Now, none of this is specialist construction design and engineering. Just about everyone in construction knows the problems with PE foam - and personally I won't even use it for low rise not just because it burns so easily but because it's completely vapour impermeable and stops buildings from breathing - and just about everyone knows the importance of fire stopping between dwellings. 

When those responsible for the design and execution of these works face the consequences of their errors it will not be enough to claim that since the government hadn't banned one material or another they are in the clear. All of us in positions of responsibility in construction have an absolute duty of care and design teams - CDM, designer, engineer, supervisor, PM, QS - are constituted in such a way as to provide post-hoc evidence of exactly how such decisions were made. You can be sure that since last Wednesday each one of them will have printed out and assembled every email from this job, every periodic report, every meeting, every bit of written evidence and will now each be constructing a narrative that minimises their own culpability. Lawyers will have been briefed. We must now all wait and allow the enquiry to do what it must. 

Grenfell Tower cladding drawing from Studio E architects

   

German Nordstream II investors running scared

The unexpected inclusion of sanctions measures against Euro firms assisting Russian energy exports in a Bill supposed to penalise Iran in the US has caused panic amongst the Euro corporates. The Local reports that Merkel's spokesman said that she 

'shared the concerns raised by Germany's Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel and Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern who charged in a joint statement on Thursday that the measure brings a "completely new and entirely negative quality to European-US relations". In a hard-hitting statement, the German and Austrian said they "cannot accept the threat of extra-territorial sanctions against European companies that participate in the expansion of European energy supplies" adding that this would "violate international law". They accused Washington of using the sanctions to squeeze Russian gas supplies out of Europe in favour of US energy exports. "The aim is to secure jobs in gas and oil industries in the US," said Gabriel and Kern.'

The major panic seems to be with the Nordstream II  scheme - owned by Russia's Gazprom but with substantial investments from Uniper, OMV, Royal Dutch Shell, BASF's Wintershall and Engie. All now face penalties wherever Trump's administration can reach them. 

Nothing to do of course with the EU's signalled intention to fine Google €1bn this year, of course, and if US penalties equal this figure it will be purely coincidental.

Watch out BMW and Audi ...

BREXIT IS DEAD - Der Spiegel

Der Spiegel seems pretty certain - the Germans have won, with the help of global corporatism and the Tory Party, and Brexit is dead.

We''ll come crawling back in a few years begging to be let back in, they say. And they warn that re-admission will mean Britain's utter humiliation - they want to grind our face in the dirt under the heel of the jackboot. We cocky Brits will learn who is boss.

Hey ho. 

Austria bans Burqa, Niqab in fight against Islamism

Austria's fight against Islamism continues with the passage of new laws that make it illegal to wear a Burqa or Niqab in public from 1st October. These garments are not part of core Muslim faith but rather a hostile declaration of Islamism and non-integration - both unacceptable here. The same law makes mandatory attendance for both migrant men and women at Austrian culture and language courses. 

The Libertarian part of me abhors any control over what people can wear - I'll defend to the death a young punk's right to express through bin liners, safety pins and a pink mohican his contempt for a corrupt world. And any man's right to wear ladies' vestments in public. That sort of thing. But these bloody black ghost garments are something different; anarchy in dress actually expresses uniformity of values, those values being freedom, liberty, liberalism, but the uniformity of Islamist costume expresses the opposite, expresses a destructive apartheid that we simply cannot tolerate. 

Christian nuns have long known that covering the hair and neck is a gesture of modesty; indeed, in my childhood all Catholic women were obliged to cover their hair in church with a headscarf. However, nuns have also long known that leaving the face and the eyes free was essential in order to communicate honesty and sincerity. 

As for my personal crusade with silly men who try to talk to me whilst they're wearing mirror sunglasses I simply keep repeating "Ich kann dich nicht hören" until either they give up or take them off, at which point my hearing is miraculously restored.

Ruth, not Boris

A rapid post. It was the yoof wot done it for Corbyn. The Sun and the Mail no longer determine elections, social media does. Corbyn offered free stuff to a generation that's poorer, and has to work harder and longer for less, than their parents. The Conservatives need to capture a share of the youth vote. Boris is seen as an old establishment mugwump, not popular. He won't win.

Try Ruth Davidson. How is she rated amongst 18 - 34 voters? Find her a seat in the next ten weeks. Put her up against Corbyn.

The EU army and borrowed Nukes

Lost in the election noise last week was the EU defence 'Reflection Paper'. I'd like to say it's worth reading but in fact only the assumptions and ambitions are noteworthy amongst the Federast waffle. The EU's ambitions are clear; three options are presented from 'Co-operation' to 'Shared' to 'Common'. Co-operation is the do-nothing option and is dismissed. 'Shared' means armed forces that remain under national control but integrate - a sort of EU NATO - and the Commission's favourite, 'Common', which means a single Euro defence force controlled by Brussels and merely funded by member states.  Believe me, the EU really does want its own army, navy and air force all badged with that vile twinkly yellow noose.

The assumption made is that the EU's multiplicity of kit - many types of main battle tank and so on - is uneconomic and rationalising ('consolidated procurement') could save €25bn to €100bn annually. It's bollocks of course. 'We have 17 types of combat tanks; the Americans have one' says Juncker in an interview with Der Spiegel  and the paper expands on this. The truth, though, is that this is driven by Euro defence firms greedy with hunger for taxes; US procurement and R&D is €108k per soldier compared to the EU's €28k, we're told. The bloody Germans want some of that, as do the French. And they'll have to give the Italians room at the trough, too. If you thought US defence cost overruns and defence corruption, fraud and mis-accounting were bad you've seen nothing - just wait until those Euro firms start in earnest. 

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?

Cheer up! It could have been worse

Amidst the glum faces and recriminations this morning there are some silver linings. For a start, the ScotNats have been cut off at the knee - Ruth Davidson must surely now be in the running to replace Mrs May - and the Union is that little bit safer. Likewise with the leverage the DUP will now wield to ensure our border with Eire remains as it is now. Peace in Ulster is too important.

As for Brexit, well, it looks as if it will be a lot softer than it was last week. Mrs May will be forced to find consensus. In doing so the 48%, who have with some justification felt totally left out of their own governance, will now feel a tad less aggrieved. However, the power of the 22 Committee and the hard Euroskeptics will pushback strongly. Overall, I'm not devastated by any of this. Slowly Slowly. Our national congruence is just a tad healthier than it was yesterday, and that's important.

We Brits don't like snap elections intended to make PMs more powerful. When Heath asked "Who runs Britain?" in 1974 we answered "Not you, chum".  Mrs May has had a lesson in the dangers of hubris and must now expand her old discredited Home Office circle of advisors. 

On the upside the PLP will remain in chaos and Yvette Balls can now put away her leadership ambitions for another year and keep trying to live down her house-a-migrant promises. Fat Boy Watson will stay off our screens and we can watch Chuka Ummummma wriggle and squirm in newly discovered Corbynism. Hey ho.

Universities must banish Islamism

The government, through HFE funding, can force an immediate change for all new undergraduates wishing to attend UK universities that will significantly curb Islamism and make Islamist speech and action as unacceptable as racism or sexism. Simply, all new students must sign a declaration abrogating the seven key indicators of Islamism, and agreeing that should they be caught expressing or arguing such views it will be grounds for immediate expulsion. 

Islamism is not a matter for freedom of thought. Islamism is not a human right. Islamism is a perverse and inhuman death-cult that has no place whatsoever in a western democracy. It must be stamped out from every aspect of public life.  

Islamist failure in places one loves

Everything worthwhile on the slaughter by the Islamist animals in London over the weekend has already been said. We now wait action by whomever wins the election on Thursday. And yes, I voted more than a week ago for an MP for my inner London Constituency just ten minutes by train from London Bridge station. That's the point. The scene of this latest atrocity is as familiar to me as any place can be. Oh, it's happened before of course; I used to walk past tiny little St Etheldreda's each day - a simple medieval gem that had survived both the fire of London and the Blitz only to fall to the Provisional IRA. And the Baltic Exchange. And even to the bomb left on Platform 4 at London Bridge station that fortunately detonated twenty minutes before I was due to stand waiting for my train. 

The thing about this part of Southwark is that it's only partly gentrified and still scruffy with a bit of an edge. That's the joy. The National Trust's 'George' and the Market Porter may be a tad upscale but the Globe used to be (until its refit) a comfortable shithole with a front door to the street and a useful back door onto the cheese stalls. The Old Kings Head over the road is also truly trad with a hipster-repellant Sky Sports big screen. And alongside the costas and starbucks are places such as Cafe Rossi - Full English with two rounds and a mug of tea for a fiver. Fried chicken and betting shops share street frontages with hipster bespoke cheese emporia and bakers making sourdough with vaginal yeast. This is where I bought my weekly pound of real dry bacon and indulged in half a dozen freshly shucked Mersea Island natives standing at a formica counter. Here was where we met after work to tie-on a session - with a short intoxicated stumble to the station to get home. 

Nah those sodding little Islamist buggers can't ruin it. Only the hipsters, the city wealthy and the dreary sterile gentrifiers can do that. 

Cafe Rossi - All day breakfast a fiver

Germany will never, ever pay more than now for NATO

Many of us will have grown up with the BAOR - either as serving soldiers or like myself as army brats. There was a time when Gütersloh, Fallingbostel or Sennelager were more familiar to us than Slough, Reading or Peterborough. The BBC even had a forces radio programme, and knowing at least half a dozen BFPO numbers was par for the course. Well, BAOR disappeared without notice in 1994. The 25,000 remaining troops in Germany became BFG, now down to about 4,000 and scheduled to pull out completely by 2020, almost exactly in line with Brexit. 

The change came with the fall of the wall in 1989. Before then, our lads were to play a vital role in forming a heroic but utterly pointless sacrifice in holding up the Soviet advance through Germany to France for about 72 hours. Then we all thought it an essential sacrifice. Now we wonder, why bother? Perhaps France and Germany would be better off under Russian rule. Why shed British blood in their defence? 

When Trump abstained from the traditional annual G7 offering of American blood in Germany's defence last week he too must have felt the same. Germany has been financially raping Europe for thirty years, sitting on a vast pile of gold as she threatens, bullies and manoeuvres others to pay for everything, like some nightmare dining partner endlessly disputing the division of the restaurant bill.  

Turkey is now a Salafist terrorist nation  and belongs nowhere near NATO. In bullying the Netherlands into ignoring the veto of the Dutch people and extending full EU privileges to Ukraine, the EU has just given Putin another poke with a sharp stick. The UK will find it hard to mobilise even 6,500 troops - we need a standing army of 100,000 to put an adequate force in the field. Germany's armed forces are to all purposes entirely useless. Amidst the ruins of NATO (and oh yes it's now finished in all but name*) there's only France to defend the EU. 

Merkel may gamble that she'll get away with it, and perhaps she will. But without British and American wealth and blood to pay for it. We're done. 

*Also proving the rule that corporations are most likely to fail at the point at which they open a spanking glossy new multi billion dollar HQ