OECD's grip on £13bn of UK tax must be severed at the wrist

Following the post below on the £13bn a year DFID budget, it has become clear that Priti Patel can't use any of that money for Irma relief however much she wants to - because the OECD forbids it. She can throw as much of it as she wishes at nepotistic and corrupt UN agencies run by third world spivs and crooks, at risibly crooked development schemes from North Korea to Pakistan, but can't spend even a fiver on fuel oil for the old Andrew's warships to task to the disaster zone.  

The £13bn DFID budget is fully one-third of the UK's defence budget, but we can't spend it to help our overseas territories because of the petulant edicts of a bunch of shiny-arsed globalists. 

There can be only one response to that. Transfer 40% of the DFID budget immediately to the MoD and another 40% to the FCO. The OECD can pick the bones out of the remaining 20% until it fades away. 

The United Kingdom will NOT be dictated to in this manner.

'EU is not a benign force' says Herr Juncker

In an extraordinary speech yesterday in which he admitted the full anti-democratic malignancy of the EU Empire, Herr Juncker, the Federation's senior unelected official, finally put paid to the hopes of UK Remainers. As Nigel Farage in the Telegraph points out, after yesterday, there is simply no-way now that the UK 'Remain' bloc could ever win another referendum. In a series of coming power-grabs that emasculate Europe's nation-states and disenfranchise a population of over 400 million, Herr Juncker set out his plans -

• A single, unelected, Federation President, with full powers
• A standing Federation army
• Full Federation tax and fiscal control over the 27 satrap states
• Federation alone to determine foreign policy
• Funding block on all anti-EU parties, but generous funding for Federations own 'tame' parties
• EU immigration policy compulsory for all members
• Euro made compulsory - robbing nation states of the last vestige of independence

British politicians who claimed during last year's referendum campaign that warnings of these EU ambitions were 'fantasy' are now left looking very foolish, and Soros-funded shills and Brexit saboteurs now stand revealed as the anti-democratic agents of a most malign and dangerous totalitarian force. 

Whether Europe's people will acquiesce in their own disenfranchisement and the destruction of their nation-states is another matter. But the UK will now never regret making the decision to leave.

Blair excoriated in withering dismissal

For those of you who have not yet read Matthew Norman's shredding of Bloody Blair in the Indie, I urge you to create a quality ten minutes with the tipple of your choice and savour the flaying of any shred of political credibility from Blair's permatanned hide. Turn away now to avoid a brief extract, as they say ...

For most of the past year, he has been attempting to use the issue of Brexit and the resentments it has unleashed as the catalyst for the formation of a new centrist political party, which he could control from offstage. Any doubt about that was removed by the movement of his lips when he denied it to Marr.

The glib vagaries that served him superbly in the mid-nineties boom times – the cultivated vagueness evident from his vacuous witterings about conjuring up some magically EU-friendly immigration constraints – are out of vogue. Theresa May could have told him this, but there is no appetite for bland reassurance and vapid rhetoric when people in full-time work cannot afford to feed their children, let alone to buy or rent a decent home.

If Blair is a kind of tragicomic Napoleon gazing across the sea from Elba, he is no longer a good general. He isn’t even the bad general of cliché. He isn’t fighting the last war. He isn’t fighting the war before that. He is fighting no war at all outside his own narcissistic head. The war he is fighting is the one against his own irrelevance, and that was lost a long time ago.

Exquisite. 

A good time to stop wasting 0.7% of UK GDP

If you're a UK taxpayer, don't bother donating to the British Red Cross for the relief of Hurricane Irma. You're already giving. About £13bn a year of tax. Not all to the Red Cross of course - they get only a fraction of this. The bulk of it goes to teaching Ethiopian nomads how to play electric guitar, setting up pedicure shops in Sudan and sending top British hat-designers to Basutoland to show the natives how to fashion Crêpe De Chine and ostrich feathers into women's headgear. In other words, the bulk of this money is wasted on hopeless schemes that don't develop anything by one iota. 

However, it's the use of this money to fund disaster relief that interests us. It seems the Foreign Secretary, the man tasked with organising aid and relief to Brit islands in the Hurricane path, doesn't have a budget worth talking about for this sort of thing. However, some 17% - some £2.2bn annually - of the IDF is earmarked for this very purpose. DFID - independent of the FCO since Blair, and its current SoS Priti Patel  - is in charge of the purse strings. 

Oh good, you may think, the government already has a pot to pay for tents, water, C130s, medical teams, hospital ships and the panoply of disaster relief. How reassuring. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. You see, that £2.2bn mainly goes to UN organisations - organisations that undermine European efforts to control economic migration, that openly criticise our elected government, that work to subvert the efforts of our elected politicians. WFP, UNICEF, OCHA, UNHCR and WHO are not friends of the UK - yet UK taxpayers are funding their bloated and corrupt organisations. 

And what about the costs to the poor bloody Navy, down to 17 warships and cut off at the knee by spending pressures? Who pays for the fuel oil, the maintenance, the supplies, the emergency aid they are distributing in the Caribbean? Well the Treasury will just tell them to find the costs from within their existing budgets. They always do. 

It's high time to reform that humanitarian / emergency aid pot. It should take a bigger share of the ODF for a start. And instead of paying a cabal of corrupt UN agencies who are determined upon our destruction, why not fund our own Navy, Royal Engineers, RAF transport  command, volunteer police officers and the like to respond fully and effectively, unconstrained by the swingeing cuts to their operational budgets?

Conservative leadership ballsup

Young Jacob Rees-Mogg would make an amusing dinner guest; erudite, charming and blessed with an eccentricity that only wealth and privilege can allow. As a leader of the Conservative party he would be catastrophic. It's an indication of the dire state of the parliamentary party that there are no near runners to young Rees-Mogg on the race card. Not one bloody senior Conservative politician who can connect with the public just enough to win their vote.  The Tories would have to be as mad as a bucket of eels to pick the tweedy weirdo as Leader. 

And as for those idiotic EU immigration proposals from the Home Office I have no scorn derisive enough. It seems we want French pastry chefs, Dutch hydro-engineers, German surgeons and Italian hat-makers, who do not depress the earnings of their native peers, but do not want Polish plumbers, Romanian ground-workers, Slovenian electricians or Estonian dumper drivers, who do depress the earnings of their native peers, but we cannot figure out how to do this without depriving farmers and growers of the migrant workforce who put food on the table, flowers in the vase and sandwiches on the shelves of M&S. We also want the wage growth that restricting trade skills would bring without the inflation that it would also cause, and must want to build even fewer houses than we are building now.

Brexit seems to have addled Tory brains. Let's just pray they can get through on autopilot alone, sans cerebrum, until we're out. Then I don't give a fig.   

EU prepared to bleed 27 nations dry in order to hurt UK

Herr Barnier, an unelected EU apparatchik, declared yesterday that the EU will teach the UK the consequences of leaving the single market - irrespective of the cost to the 27 remaining members. Our pain, he said, will serve as a good lesson to any other nations thinking of leaving. This level of Euro-fanaticism, in which the good of the EU institutions and their unelected officials rides roughshod over the people, businesses and nations of Europe, has been exposed by Herr Barnier's own very poor performance leading the Brussels team.

That this is indeed, incredibly, the self-obsessed position of the EU is substantiated by their obsession with the UK 'divorce bill' - money which will benefit only the behemoth in Brussels and its bloated bureaucrats in their corrupt, tax-free Nirvana. The good of the people of Europe, of national economies, of trade and citizens' welfare comes very low on the EU's agenda. 

Indeed, the EU's pressure on the UK and Irish governments to reintroduce a border - against the natural wishes and inclination of both nations - is motivated solely by a concern for EU tax revenue and the maintenance of protectionist and restrictive trade barriers that cost the people of Europe billions in higher food costs. 

All of which are of no concern to the EU's unelected officials. They are prepared to bleed their 27 member nations dry to preserve their own corrupt privilege.

Herr Barnier descends into histrionics

The EU got the negotiations disastrously wrong from the start. Their cause was crippled not by the UK but by the territorial in-fighting between the Parliament and the unelected officials of the Commission. Herr Verhofstadt, who would have loved nothing more than to have faced the hated Brits across the table himself, only consented to Herr Barnier taking this place if he was constrained not to depart from the EP's detailed instructions by a millimetre. And instead of keeping this crippling disability secret, Herr Verhofstadt rose to his hind feet and crowed it all over Europe.

The EU assumed of course that their usual Panzer tactics would work; first they ridicule, undermine and insult us, then wear us down with verbiage and papers, all the time proclaiming that only they have control of the agenda and the UK must obey like a recalcitrant schoolboy. Boy, how little they know us.

This week it was time for the UK to tell the king he was wearing no clothes. The Berlaymont bullies sat gobsmacked with hanging jaws as some young Treasury rasper with an Oxbridge double first completely demolished the legal basis of their money grab. Then we had to tell them to get serious about negotiating - that in effect Herr Verhofstadt must allow Herr Barnier some flexibility.

An irascible Herr Barnier, undermined and on the back-foot, descended into Gallo-German histrionics at the press conference; the UK was finished (untrue) we would be forced out of Europol (untrue) and our nation would sink 'neath the waves. I was only waiting for the poor little man to turn to David Davis and exclaim "Your mother was a Hamster and your father smelt of Elderberries!"

Vote Socialist - Get Fascist

There is a fascinating dialogue in the comments to the post below that highlights how history is re-written. It was during WWII, I suspect, that the US government realised that securing black commitment to the war effort was critical. The trope was then developed that the US government - in direct succession to Abe Lincoln's Union - was the manumitter of Southern slaves and the champion of freedom, and this was the reason the civil war had been fought. This is the version of history that has stuck. The alternative reality - that the war was about the Constitution, in which victory for the Union meant that local power and autonomy was made forever subservient to the central State - has been lost. The latter reality makes it personal, as the statues being pulled down are of men who fought for Localism, a particular passion of mine. It's easy to hate someone for supporting slavery, harder to condemn them for their support of Burke's Little Platoons.

And so to Lord Tebbit (one of the few life peers I am happy to acknowledge) and his gentle reminder in the Telegraph that Fascism sprung from the left. Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf were both proto-Nazis, as most Fabians were in those days, advocating extermination camps using gas to kill (but humanely, in the English way) the poor, the genetically wanting, the educationally subnormal and anyone else who threatened the racial purity of their Fabian paradise. The Lefty Swedes were still compulsorily ripping out the wombs and excising the testicles of the mentally sub-normal until 1975, thirty years after we hanged a number of Germans for doing the same thing. Please do read the good Lord's piece if you can. It's a reminder of the truth of the warning "Vote Socialist - Get Fascist"

'Swivel Eyed' Brussels is 'Away with the Fairies' on Brexit

Mainland Brits and the Irish have been coming to terms with each other for around a thousand years. We both have a certain amount of experience. We both have skin in the game. We're both going for a solution that pretty much leaves the border exactly as it is. All of which has prompted the crude Brussels thugs and Berlaymont bullies to fling insults at us again last week. If they seriously think we're stupid enough to trade peace and mutual benefit for protecting the EU's tax coffers, they are away with the fairies. It simply won't happen. 

The Guardian reports that senior EU clerks have been 'eye rolling' over the border issue; I suppose this is the same as being swivel-eyed. And they're certainly lunatic if they imagine either we or Eire will change our positions.  

Negotiations start again on Monday, and the Federast freaks have pompously declared they will be producing an end-of-term report to opine on whether the UK has submitted sufficiently quietly to the Empire's demands. The answer, as we all already know, will be negative. 

Failing the EU's exam will be a singular mark of success for our negotiating team and they should be rewarded at this point; greeting cards, tributes from the floor of the Commons, a crowd-funded champagne fund, a ticker tape reception for the Eurostar carrying them home are all possibilities. 

However, the half time whistle has not yet blown - and we must knuckle down at this critical stage of the game and ensure that we DO fail their crooked little tests in the next few weeks.

Judicial competence

This is a post in praise of the EU. Or maybe to the UK's influence in having introduced to sclerotic and protectionist Europe just a little of the many advantages in terms of access to justice that we enjoy in the UK.

Austria, like much of Europe, has no commercial law small claims procedure. To resolve an intractable contract dispute here, even a small one, means each side lawyering-up at €300/hr for even the most mediocre and least competent of lawyers and a full court hearing before career commercial judges. Contrast with the UK, in which claims for up to £10,000 (£1,000 for personal injury and landlord/tenant) are dealt with under the small claims track of civil procedure, often called small claims courts or county courts, in which an experienced local solicitor often sits as Recorder. Legal costs are not claimable, and court fees are fixed in advance. 

Well, the EU has introduced a cross-Europe small claims track, and you can sense the dragging of the vast protectionist hulk of Euronational self-interest in opposition to it. For a start, the limit is €5,000. And it only applies to disputes with persons or firms in other EU countries. Otherwise, it's remarkably like our own small claims procedure. It's invaluable to anyone doing business with Germans, who have still to discover how customer relations works. I buy a lot of building material online from German firms - they tend to be 30% cheaper than local Austrian outlets for the same materials - and of course from time to time there are problems. 

I ordered two WCs for the en-suites from a German firm. One was broken in transit and they went back to the firm without reaching me. A UK firm would have said "Tut mir leid Herr Raedwald we've broken one of your WCs. We can't get another for three weeks. So if it's OK we'll send you the good one now and the other when they come into stock. And we'll give you a £50 online voucher by way of apology". 

The German way? "One of your WCs has been broken and we can't replace it until September. If you want the other one now, that will be an additional €90 carriage." Well, I wasn't happy. The emails went back and forth until the Germans smugly responded "And what are you going to do about it?" whereupon I sent them my draft of the EU claim form, requesting also that the case be heard near to me in Austria, by an Austrian court, this option being available for consumers when dealing with foreign firms. 

The result? No online voucher - they haven't learnt that much - but a surly confirmation that my intact WC was on its way. Free of additional charge.   

Pulling down statues

Those engaging in the current orgy of statue-toppling need to be aware of the rules of the sport. I publish an extract below;

"... statues in public places are classified into three classes, as below

CLASS I - Erected by dictators, rulers, absolute monarchs, depicting themselves in poses of vainglorious pomposity. E.g. Saddam Hussein. These may be torn down, abused, insulted and destroyed without further consideration

CLASS II - Erected by public subscription, private societies, arselicking subordinates, official bodies using tax money, depicting their private hero or heroine in a public place, or a living figure with whom they seek to curry favour. These should in the first instance be offered back to their erectors to be re-sited on private land. Secondly they should be moved to some obscure location out of the public eye. E.g. Embankment Gardens in London, home to naff, unwanted, outdated or obscure bits of public statuary removed from the streets. Here they are planted deep in shrub beds in which ivy can gracefully cover them. Or the huge park in Budapest at the top of Andrassy Ut, around Vajdahunyad castle, to which all the city's communist-era brutalist statuary have been moved. Marx in the woods.  

CLASS III - Erected by popular demand to honour true national heroes to commemorate victories or glorious defeats, or feats of statecraft or heroism, statues of dogs, whimsical statues having a place in public consciousness. These should under no circumstances be removed but rather protected and preserved. E.g. Nelson, Churchill in Parliament Square, Cromwell outside Westminster Palace, Greyfriars Bobby, Manikin Pis. 

Statues of classes II or III should under no circumstances be threatened by racial or religious crowds or mobs incited by specious rhetoric, incendiary bluster, mass ignorance or sheer stupidity. ..."

There.  

Yet more lies from the False News BBC

Booker details in the Telegraph the heinous falsification of historical fact on Kirsty Wark's Newsnight. The lie propagated in the programme was that the 2m deaths upon partition - Hindu on Muslim, Sikh on Muslim, Muslim on Hindu and Sikh, rape, murder and carnage - were all the fault of the British for partitioning the Indian Empire into India and East and West Pakistan. 

No doubt this is not just BBC fake news but the lies are taught in schools to children of Indian and Pakistani immigrants. 

As Booker points out, it was the Muslim leader Jinnah who refused to accept a single nation and insisted on lines on a map dividing Hindu India from Muslim Pakistan and which led directly to an ocean of blood and 2m slaughtered across the subcontinent. 

Even the BBC cannot get away with telling a lie this big.

"The executioner was such a nice boy .."

Channel 4, that other broadcaster funded by the TV tax, is to air a slick drama from tomorrow about four 'heroic' Islamist dupes who desert the UK to fight for ISIS. Deborah Davies at the Mail had the benefit of a preview tape and has done a superlative and carefully balanced job of reviewing it. 

There's not a hope in Hell of stopping the broadcast, even as the tiny bodies of infants crushed by Islamists in Barcelona are hardly cold. But it will damage our fight against Islamism terribly.

An important part of the peace process in Northern Ireland was the depiction, on film and TV, of IRA terrorists as ordinary people to whom we could relate. When Gerry Adams could be heard for the first time (without his words having to be spoken by an actor) he had a surprisingly soft and gentle voice. When you're sitting at a conference table to negotiate peace, rather than to accept an act of unconditional surrender, it's actually necessary for each side to understand the other. And so John Major's quiet legacy has left us a finely balanced peace in the Province.

It's hardly necessary to write that while only a small number of British Muslims are Islamists, all British Islamists are Muslims. But that those few Islamists are implacable; they're not interested in negotiations, not interested in winning political power. They want only the complete destruction of Western civilisation and the death of every one of us kuffirs. There's no point in humanising Islamists; we're never going to sit at a conference table with them. In fact, as they must be ruthlessly destroyed, we need to dehumanise them even more, so our lads and lasses have no hesitation whatsoever in squeezing the trigger. 

What we need is a TV series that shows loyal, sensible, heroic Muslims rejecting and denouncing the Islamist animals that dwell among them, that shows Islamists torn apart in a hail of gunfire as the police and security forces hunt them down, that shows Muslim SAS troopers back in the family home on leave after slaughtering Jihadists. What we don't need is Channel 4 Islamist propaganda that tells us what a nice boy the Islamist executioner is.

Is Germany seeking to revive the Afrika Korps?

Tripolitania and Cyrenaica are the scene of a new battle, this time not between the Commonwealth and Rommel's forces, but between the French and Italians. At stake is millions in revenue for various factions of people smugglers and Libya's oil and gas. Italy and its Eni SpA oil company, backing Fayez Sarraj, are promoting holding and clearance centres in Libya for African economic migrants, with Italy and the EU paying the running costs and Sarraj's tame smugglers charging African migrants a ransom migrant tax. Against them are France and its oil company Multi Total, backing General Khalifa Haftar who has his own tame people smugglers and controls the main oil port. Oil and sub-saharan Africans are now Libya's main exports.

The old regions of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica are the key to understanding Libya. Tripolitania to the West is home to a Maghrebi culture, common to Tunisia and Morocco, whilst Cyrenaica is home to a gulf arab culture, the Mashriq. Libya, in common with most ME nations, is not a natural country.

Into this mess wades German Interior Minister de Maizière. He wants a new EU armed force to operate far in the south of Libya, in the desert, stopping Migrants from reaching the coast in the first place, der Spiegel tells us. One can see the attraction of a desert campaign to the German mind; the French and the legion etrangere have recent experience whilst North Africa was the only Wehrmacht operational area not fouled by German war crimes and atrocities, and Rommel and the Afrika Korps one of the few 'clean' units. What better foundation for the Franco-German contribution to the EU army to build upon?

EU game plan to foment UK-Irish conflict - but we're not playing

Five-and-twenty ponies, trotting through the dark—
With brandy for the Parson and 'baccy for the Clerk.
Laces for a lady and letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

I can remember my usual border crossing , back in the day when one crossed from the land of the Punt to that of the Pound, with ease. It was a small B country road that ran through a village;  tractors and trailers chugged unhindered from nation to nation carrying sheep, cattle, fodder or other goods and only gradually did the mix of national number plates become polarised as distance from the border increased. Never once did I encounter a barrier or a check. The border was completely open and it served everyone well. The porosity meant a great deal of smuggling of course - but as this brought wealth and benefits to all (except the respective national tax authorities) no one minded very much. 

The UK's offer to maintain the Irish border in this state is a sound one. You can be sure they are not creating an open door for Islamist terrorists. Anyone flying from Brussels to Galway who then travels to the mainland by ferry will be intercepted. Henna-bearded Islamists claiming to be there to visit the Catholic shrine at Knock will be so welcome at mass that the Garda will escort them there and back. Sudanese killers claiming to be there for the November brown trout season on Loch Corrib will be given frozen Mayflies. Islamism is as hateful to Catholic Ireland as to us - if not more so. You can be sure there is already a high degree of co-operation between us. 

And if this route was a feasible entry point for economic migrants of the sort clustered around the Channel ports they would already be using it. 

In the event of vileness, spite and viciousness from Brussels over Brexit, the natural anarchic independence of spirit of the Irish and stubborn bloody-mindedness of the Brits will ensure the EU is flouted, ignored and humiliated by an open border that neither the British or Irish governments have any interest in closing.  

All of which is exactly why Herr Barnier, Herr Juncker and Herr Verhofstadt will now do everything they can to force a hard border on us both. Just as they fomented conflict in the Balkans that set the region ablaze, just as they provoked a bloody civil war in Ukraine and just as they have destabilised nations around them, the unelected clerks in Brussels will do their utmost to stoke UK-Irish conflict.

Herr Barnier stomps his little boots

The Empire's frontman, Herr Barnier, is reported to be stomping his little boots in frustration at Britain's continued refusal to submit to EU commands. This alone is reasonably positive news. Better still is the initial reception of the UK's paper on a transitional period and the Irish border. This was published after a careful official leaking of the £36bn settlement figure whilst Mrs May was on holiday, making the point that whatever the EU say, the figure is linked to at least a transitional trade deal. So when Herr Verhofstadt went to print declaring the paper 'rubbish' before even reading it, it's fair to think that he was responding to the leaked figure (on which he can't comment) as much as to the UK's eminent reasonableness. 

Meanwhile pundits are forecasting a change in the exchange rate wind by the end of the year, with the € unable to maintain its overvalue. A few more fipronil egg scandals (in the UK we put it on cats to stop fleas), a bit of Greece, the termination of a sick Italian bank and a return to €1.30 would shrink that €40bn offer down to £30.7bn, or allow our team to increase their offer to the Herren to €47bn without busting the leaked £36bn figure. Of course if the goes the other way towards parity no loss - it was only a leak. 

All in all, I remain cheerful. 

With apologies to Sunderland ...

I was looking back on posts made here about ten years ago, to see what I had written about the great crash. The astonishing thing is that the blog has been going for this long - 4,560 posts, 3m pageviews, 30,000 comments. Anyway, I'm not sure I said much about the great crash except to savagely excoriate Gordon Brown, but I found the following. It made me chuckle, so perhaps worth another outing:-

10/08/08
Many of you will be familiar with the London conference hotels that cluster in the hinterland between the Euston Road and Oxford Street; bland, anonymous 80s-ish foyers, conference rooms equipped with audio and projectors for the ubiquitous Powerpoint presentations, and kitchens equipped to dish out a 20 minute lunch. I would usually rather have a fork thrust in my eyeballs than spend a day in one of these places, but a couple of years ago, despite every ingenious effort on my part to escape, I was obliged to do so. These things are perennially popular with Northern middle managers for some reason; pompous, inflated little balloons of men who fiddle incessantly with their testicles and whose requests to ".. bring us a black coffee, will you, pet" to the Lithuanian staff are met with incomprehension.

Anyway, on this day the conference kitchens had excelled themselves. The buffet lunch was a massive stainless steel bed of crushed ice on which were laid salver after salver of living and dead water-creatures; oysters, green-lipped mussels, sea urchins, sushi and sashimi, several varieties of Nethrops, a poached salmon, nestling in beds of crisp lettuce from which the fluorescent glow of lemons shone as artistic highlights. In the queue before me a knot of Northern balloons worked their fingers frantically in their trouser pockets. "I can't eat that; it's bloody raw fish" "Lewk, George, there's some crabsticks there" "Where?" "There, in the corner by those slimy things" "Have you got any bread, love?".

If you visit the pages of the Sunderland Echo to gauge the reaction of that place to the news that Policy Exchange thinks we should stop spending our tax subsidies here, you will be presented with a recruitment video for the local Barclays call centre. A call centre worker steps from a limo of the kind favoured by suburban hen-parties to the corporate HQ; the camera pans lovingly around the corporate gym and the cafeteria, the chilled shelves of which will be reassuringly devoid of raw fish, and the shot closes with the monstrous sign over the corporate front door that reads "Through these doors walk the loveliest people in Sunderland. And you're one of them". You just know that as the head-balloon stood inspecting the newly-erected sign and counting his testicles that he longed to add a comma and 'pet' to the final sentence.

I suspect that Barclays confines its Northern middle-managers to their own call centres and an occasional two days at a London conference hotel. If these little bundles of wool-polyester pomposity were ever allowed into the bank's docklands tower to meet the teenagers with iPod earphones slung around their necks and take-away sushi boxes littering their desks who earn six times their own salary, it would have the same effect as a drunk with a cigarette at a children's balloon party. Scraps of wool-polyester and bits of limp testicle would lie scattered from Bow to ExCel.

And the adage that you can take the man out of Sunderland but you can't take Sunderland out of the man holds true. It would be cruel and unusual punishment indeed to take these fish from their small ponds to resettle them. The piece in the Sunderland Echo uncannily parrots the Onion in quoting "We have the Winter Gardens, the Glass Centre, the Aquatic Centre, the football team – and the only way is up". Alright, pet.

BBC - Just Lies, no Secrets

If you rely solely on the BBC for your news, you could be forgiven for understanding that the civil disturbances rocking the southern US were protests by pro-Trump white supremacists against something unspecified. With a headline 'Charlottesville: Virginia governor tells white supremacists: 'Go home'', you need to read down past the emotive picture to the tenth paragraph to get a clue as to what the protests are about. To get an idea of just how distorted the BBC's coverage is, try the story in the New York Times 'White Nationalists Wield Torches at Confederate Statue Rally' 

It's not just Virginia. In New Orleans the white Mayor is overseeing the removal of Confederate statues which, it is alleged, promote white supremacism. There can be no excusing the vile treatment of black people in the southern states, from the lynchings and corrupt disenfranchisements to segregated buses and the evils still prevalent during my youth. But one needs to understand that not everyone with some regard for the losing side in America's divisive civil war is a racist white supremacist, and not everyone who thinks that book burning and statue destruction are wrong is a violent nationalist.

The figures of one notorious white slave-owner seem safe for now; no one is tearing down statues of George Washington. Yet.

General Robert E Lee was greatly loved by his men, even in defeat. One needs to understand the place he still holds in the respect and affections of many southerners to begin to understand the complex emotions invoked in tearing down his statue in Virginia. All of which is of no interest to the BBC, who have just used the story in their agitprop war against those who disagree with their own values and worldview. 

But those of my age will recall a different BBC screening the Dukes of Hazzard, a comedy programme about, as the BBC would explain now, white supremacists. Only they weren't, of course. It was also about their car, General Lee. It was rubbish, but objectively more accurate than the BBC news you are reading today. 

The power of lightning

If there's one thing that the Alps do well it's thunder and lightning. As a big noise fan, I generally delight in the ear-splitting, crockery-rattling great peals of thunder like some monstrous carronade barrage rolling down the valley. And you get used to the outages; all power cables are above ground here, so one banks on losing power for a few minutes during a corker.

Sunday's storm was particularly spectacular - fierce, prolonged and right overhead. A lightning strike on the road about 150m away tore a 1m hole in the bitmac, a 3m trench to a pine tree and blasted off all the bark from one side but without a single scorch mark. We lost power three times, at worst for two hours. But hey. We have oil lamps.

The internet was not quite so robust. The problem with running blistering fast interweb over 4G mobile networks is vulnerability - and after gamely surviving the worst of the storm on Sunday, the internet died at about midnight and only came back yesterday evening. Two days without the internet showed just how dependent I am on it. Which is possibly a good reason to lose it from time to time.