Phew, wotta scorcher!

The Politics of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition and how they is done.

With apologies to Patrick Barlow and the National Theatre. (Of Brent.)
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Do not start by having a philosophy of, say, what constitutes good government. You do not need policies by which to apply principles what you have not got. Politics ain't about that sort of hifalutin' rubbish which the common people are too thick to understand anyway. It is about going on The Telly and saying stuff what will give the Question Time audience the horn.

If you have time later you should try to memorise some Sayings Of Famous Philosophers because otherwise when you meet people from Newsnight and the papers in the conference bar they will be rude and call you A Salesman. No, not you, Ed. Don't you worry, son. You are definitely not a salesman.    

Dan Hodges, funnily enough, is not a Liberal Democrat although he writes like one (see below) and might make a fine job of carrying Simon Hughes's bags. No, Dan is a summa cum laude graduate in Blairistics from the University of Blair and a Westminster insider (not an outsider like Ed). He tells all.

You begin by deciding where you want to position yourself politically. You then develop a policy framework to support that positioning. And finally you construct a philosophical and intellectual narrative to define your programme as you sell it to the electorate.

Well, fancy that!

Something profound has changed. Germans have begun to sense that the preservation of their own democracy and rule of law is in conflict with demands from Europe. They must choose one or the other.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Who governs us, Mr Cameron?

A showdown with the EU may come sooner than we expect. The European Commission has today threatened to sue David Cameron’s government unless it starts letting EU citizens come here to claim benefits. Fraser Nelson

Mr Cameron, you must roar Britain's defiance at the EU over this, or the consequences for both you and the country will be dire.

These new proposals pose a fundamental challenge to the UK's social contract. They could mean the British taxpayer paying out over £2 billion extra a year in benefits to people who have no connection to our country and who have never paid in a penny in tax. This threatens to break the vital link which should exist between taxpayers and their own Government. Iain Duncan Smith

As Prime Minister of Britain you cannot accept instructions from a foreign power as to who may enter our home in order to force us to house, clothe, feed and support them and all their dependents for their lifetime, as the European Commission orders us to do.

NO. No, Mr Cameron.

If you accept this assertion of imperial power over our Parliament you will be telling the British people that our constitutional democracy, our Parliament -  and our Prime Minister - are meaningless, worthless, abolished, nothing more than 'heritage' baubles in a new and alienating national reality.

Be in no doubt that unless you defy Brussels over this, Mr Cameron, the British people will withdraw your mandate to govern, if that indeed is what you are now doing. Do not assume that you can escape the danger of this new challenge. You cannot, and we will not forgive you if you betray us over this.

The rule of law in Britain will be a thing of the past, for rule by law means government by consent. The British people have never consented and will never bow to dictatorship by foreigners, regardless of any treaty which your predecessor of bitter memory signed against our known will. But you know this, Mr Cameron, which is why you fear to give us a referendum on Europe. But perhaps there is another way which you may find more acceptable.  

Mr Cameron, when I say you must roar Britain's defiance at the European Commission, I mean you must roar. On our behalf, as our Prime Minister. The whole country has to hear you loud and clear, whether you and you coalition friends find it politically convenient or not.

Hitherto, only about four per cent of voters count 'the EU' as important when voting at a GE. This Commission ruling, brazenly rubbing our noses in our subservience to an unelected, foreign, de facto and de jure dictatorship on (courageous choice, Commissioner: immigration, and welfare immigration at that) a matter of over-riding importance to an already-angry British electorate, will wake up the other 96 per cent.

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries. 

If you act shrewdly now, Mr Cameron, you can win massive electoral support and effect a political paradigm shift.

It's time to play hardball, Mr Cameron. Tell the Commission that the United Kingdom refuses to comply with its instructions and invite them to do their worst. Tell them this: there are some lines a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom may not cross because the people will not permit it. 

Obviously, it will be a deal-breaker for your Liberal Democrat coalition partners. The priority of their loyalty to the European Union over any loyalty which they may feel to our country (your favourite phrase, I think?) will be on plain view and put beyond all doubt. They may take the suicide option and tear up the Coalition Agreement, which would suit the Conservative Party very well, but I suspect they will prefer being in government to sticking to their principles. (Principles? LibDems?) They may cling to their Cabinet chairs and defy you openly in which case you will be free to declare this matter a deal-breaker for a British Prime Minister. The Liberal Democrats, looking at your record of... conciliation will think you are bluffing. With the people behind you, roaring their defiance of European Union imperialism, you can call Mr Clegg's and Mr Huhne's bluff. You can call a snap election. You can ask the people, "Who governs us?"

If you do this, posing this question, millions of working class Labour voters will vote Tory. It is not unprecedented and it matters not a jot what the Labour Party leadership says. What remains of the Liberal Democrat vote will evaporate. UKIP and the libertarians will back you.

Call an election, Mr Cameron. Win a landslide victory of historic proportions. Free yourself of the Liberal Democrat homunculus and castrate the Labour Party. Be a Conservative Prime Minister in a Conservative government of a sovereign United Kingdom.

With an unprecedented democratic mandate you can renegotiate Britain's relationship with the European Union to Britain's advantage on terms acceptable to the sovereign British people.

Of course, I am assuming that you want to achieve all these things. Do you, Mr Cameron?

Europe:

A dyspeptic, demographically dwindling, Islam-raddled lumpen mass of welfare addicts.

... where... 

... migrant workers, after twelve weeks of evading police, would enjoy the same benefits as permanent workers; that artists would, for 70 years, receive a share in the resale profits on sales of their work; that, if a small enterprise laid off one of six workers, all six must reapply for work.

And the remedy?

The leaders of Britain, Germany, France, and Italy, however unlikely they may be, should put the hopeless and dangerously misguided European Commission in trusteeship; put Giscard d’Estaing’s cynical monstrosity of a constitution to the shredder; send the dirigiste apparat that regulates everything down to the supermarket display of bananas and the size of condoms, packing; stop propping up defaulting countries and support the lending banks instead; and let all member states keep the common market and cede only as much jurisdiction as they wish.

Conrad Black.

Yes. Yes.

Sent from my iPad

About that "long hard look", Harriet

Harman, my emphasis:

"Not everything we did in government turned out right. And people need to know [give me fucking strength] that over the past year we’ve taken a hard look at what we did and we’ve learnt lessons. But it’s time now to move on."

Didn't 'turn out right', huh?

'Best intentions' though, Hat? Just... the results weren't quite, y'know...? It would all have been wonderful  if hadn't been for 'shit happens'? The policies themselves were fine, yes? Your abolition of civil liberties? Your wars? The Lisbon treaty? Your 'unannounced' unlimited immigration? Your buying-off the can't-be-arsed-trainee-looter class whom you paid to do fuck-all all day, out of the almost-half of the hard-earned wages of the workers that you grabbed before they even saw their wage packets? Your colossal economic arrogance and your boss's vanity-fantasy, assiduously fed by that nasty bastard you're married to, leading to your lethal fuck-up of financial service regulation? Your insane spending? Your 100 tax-hikes-by-stealth? Your sacrifice of education, and thereby our children, on the altar of your anti-human 'equality before justice' dogma? Your preference for public-payroll taxsuckers over their taxpayer victims? Your policy of systematically lying about all the above? Those policies which just sorta didn't turn out right?

Is that it? Nil points.

Learnt lessons? I am so terribly happy for you. It will make you a better person. Funnily enough, I learned a lot myself in the Labour years. But enough about me. Is there anything, you know, specific that you learned that you'd care to share with the poor bloody voters? Apart from the not-turning-out-right thing, obviously. Anything at all? (I've asked Liam Byrne and several other sacked Labour ministers the same question but answer came there none.)

Nothing? No? Nil points.

Time to move on, is it, dear? Hm... what does that remind... ah, yes.



Time to move on, my arse. If you and your comrades think the voters are going to let you draw a line (© T Blair) under your years of haughty, malignant malfeasance and all the damage your inherently evil Gramscian-Marcusian  Fabian Labour party has done to real, living, suffering people - AGAIN - so that you can escape years of ordure being piled upon you, think again. As the saying goes, shit happens, and it's going to happen to you.

Have a nice day.

To be fair to Ed Miliband... ...

... not something I ever expected to type but there you go...the media were never going to give him a chance.

Almost to a hack, the media have been insulting Ed Miliband ceaselessly (one sympathises but I mean to say...) since the moment he stuck that knife in his brother's back - and there's the reason, right there.

The ladees and gennlemen of the press believed that Mister Tony had changed the Labour Party once and for all when he dragged it into the real world from its Marxism Today comfort zone. They bought his  'social demcracy' and 'mixed economy' riffs. He abolished Clause IV, FFS! Bob Crow was the last remnant of the Morbid Tendency...  

When Blair was defenestrated and Brown strung up by the people (I can dream, can't I?) the media expected the Blairite David to become leader of the New Labour Party. Head and shoulders... foregone conclusion...

OMG! It's the wrong brother! WTF?

Yes, in an undreamt-of reversal of an ancient tale, young Abel killed his elder brother, Cain. How appropriate for our exciting new post-religious society!

Some of the more arcane, Manichean interpretations of the Cain and Abel story have it that the name 'Cain' means 'son of evil', even going so far as to give the Serpent, the Devil, as Cain's father, rather than Adam. That would make the elder brother, Cain, inherently evil and less than human...

If, as in modern Labourology, Tony Blair is the Devil Incarnate, why would the faithful want the son of the Father of New Labour Lies as leader?  No, time for an Old Labour Man, a Socialist. Ed Miliband. The younger brother. Abel. And so it came to pass.

So once again the Labour Party is toasting the good old days of freedom, unelectability and seemingly permanent opposition, back when the Marxoid prophets Foot, Kinnock ('I've got my party back!'), Benn and Meacher held sway and the Guardian was a newspaper. What a relief, what a delight, freely to be able to boo the 'Tory' (ultimate insult, otherwise meaningless) bastard who three times received from the British people a mandate to govern in the name of the, erm, Labour party. 'What? Oh. who cares? That was then. Werl, it kept the Tories out.'

Blair is now the Devil, to be scorned and reviled, and the Blairite elder Miliband was his son: Cain.

The Miliband fratricide is exactly what the party faithful wanted in its Old Labour guts, even though they dared not say it out loud in the presence of the electorate, so the Union Brotherhoods, keepers of the Flame and not beholden to the bloody voters, got Ed elected. What a relief!

Now Ed, the young Abel, has freed them from all prospect of having to take responsibility or even to think and talk like political adults. They are free to revert to behaving like political teenage boys, admiring each other's Che posters, wearing shit T-shirts which they think are cool, playing loud music chosen because everyone hates it, watching porn and having wanking contests when Mum's safely out of the house, blowing the dope-smoke out the window and talking the kind of testosterone-driven crap about fighting that only Labour cadres and hormonal, acne-plagued teenage boys think has any connection with reality. 

And the voters? Hah. The Labour Party can afford to wank on for a while yet, scorning the judgement of the very few swing voters who might be watching them. It'll be years before what the voters think actually matters. Three years? Eight? Thirteen? What the hell. Let's have some good old socialist, class war fun. Fuck the Tories, it's your round, ged 'em in. Cheers.

So, whodathortit? Abel killing Cain? Nobody expected that. No wonder the media pundits are angry. They knew it could never happen. But it did.

"I mean, Ed Miliband? How dare he? Who does he think he is? We'll show him. Him and his party." Well, all except the usual suspects. And the Staggers and the Guardian, obviously.

Questions, questions - part 2

Questions, Questions (part 1) is here.

Q. Why is Islam so intransigent over Israel and the Palestinians?
A. How can it not be?

I came across a blog by a Muslim Arab (there are still some other kinds of Arab) who does not hate Israel.

"I am speaking my conscience. I respect [the Jews'] right to live in peace in their tiny homeland, Israel. I understand how that could be puzzling and unbelievable to many Arabs, to love both Jews and Arabs."  

This writer covers some of the answers, answers, to my questions, questions. This is an extract from her apologia to her fellow Arabs. For the sake of the ignorant arse who occasionally visits this blog, apologia does not mean apology.

It is worth reading the whole thing.

"Under Islamic law, non-Muslim countries are never equal to Muslim countries and actually their sovereignty as a non-Muslim nation must always be challenged by Islamic jihad. 

"Islamic law codified jihad as a permanent war with non-Muslims to establish the religion. Muslims thus have to use Taquiyya, lies, to legitimize their aggression on Israel and the West. That is why Muslim countries can never abandon the constant hate propaganda, lies and misinformation about Israel and the West. If that ends, their jihad ends. 

"The UN must be constantly bombarded by complaints from Arab countries against Israel. The Arab street must be constantly bombarded with ridiculous accusations and Zionist conspiracies. 

"Lately on Syrian TV a Syrian intellectual accused Israel of stealing human organs in Haiti while they were helping them after the earthquake. This is not something new; it started in the 7th century, when the prophet Mohammed accused the Jews of treason to justify killing and expelling them and taking over their wealth. To explain this away, he stated that Jews are worthy of this treatment since they are the descendants of apes and pigs and enemies of Allah. Muslims still use the same dynamic and the world still falls for it every time. 

"The Arab mind was trained to never venture outside of the box of Islamic superiority, and that prevented us from treating the rest of humanity as equals.

[...] 

"I often get mail from secular Muslims who ask me: I can understand that you chose to leave Islam, but how can you support the Jews? I get mail like this because, in the Muslim mindset, loving, accepting and feeling good about Jews or Christians and thinking of them as equals, is unthinkable and an act of treason to Islam itself and even worse. It is as though the whole religion of Islam is dedicated to hating and killing Jews. 

"After centuries of this kind of education, the Muslim world produced a dysfunctional society, unable to relate to the rest of the world. While wanting to convince the world they are a religion of peace, do not be afraid of Islam, they are still hell-bent on conquering the world for Islam. That is Islam’s dilemma today. 

"What I, and a few others, are trying to do is to bring the truth to both Muslims and non-Muslims to finally face this sick game. We want to encourage Arabs to look at Jews and others as human beings and not as enemies to conquer. What kind of God will tell his followers to kill more than half of humanity if they don’t submit to Islam? 

"The Muslim world today is a disaster waiting to happen. Ahmadinejad, who is not an Arab, wants to continue the Islamic jihad against Jews by destroying Israel. I have news to especially the Left in Europe and America: Islamic jihad will not end with Israel; you will be next.

"Dear Gaza resident, yes, I cannot blame the Jewish people, or the government of Israel, for what you call the ‘misery’ of the Palestinians. I can only blame Arab and Islamic culture which used and abused you and which you allowed. I believe that this is an Arab self-inflicted crisis that has nothing to do with Israel. 

"Arab education has never told us the truth about the Israeli people and the story from their side and what Jerusalem means to them. We were told that Jerusalem was a Muslim city simply because Mohammed dreamt one night that he went to the farthest mosque but he never mentioned Jerusalem. The Koran never mentioned Jerusalem, which is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible as the heart and soul of the Jewish people. ! 

"We as Muslims never respected other religions holy cites and always claimed them to Islam; even Spain and India are being claimed as Muslim land. It was the tradition of Muslim conquerors to convert churches and temples to mosques and that is exactly what happened to the Jewish Temple Mount when 100 years after the prophet Mohammed died, Muslim conquerors built the mosque right on top of it. Just imagine if Jews or Christians had built a temple on top of the Kaaba in Mecca. This is how Islam has treated the Jews. 

"It is time for Muslims to seek redemption and forgiveness and to extend the hand of reconciliation and peace to the Jewish people."

The write is a brave woman, especially given that this is the sort of opposition people like her can expect - if they're lucky.

Would you buy a 1974 election manifesto from this man?

Just asking.

Ballsonomics

This says it all. Excellent journalism.

Further comment is unnecessary. I thank you.

What rhymes with 'anchor'?

"Labour's shadow cabinet needs to acknowledge that it doesn't understand business, has almost no direct and relevant experience and, accordingly distrusts and is distrusted by business. 

This needs correcting. If this is done we might see the emergence of more serious pro-growth policies than some of the inept and inconsequential nonsense that previously masqueraded as business policy."

Lord Myners, Gordon Brown's banker friend, via Paul Waugh.

Oho, what's this, what's this?

"We set up the Financial Services Authority.... That was a big mistake. We did not understand just how entangled things were.

We did not understand how risk was spread across the system, we did not understand the entanglements of different institutions and we did not understand, even though we talked about it, just how global things were. 

So we created a monitoring system which looked at individual institutions. That was the big mistake."

Thus Gordon Brown, saviour of the world world banking system.

Anyone remember watching Brown in the Commons and struttting about the world's financial meetings during the banking crisis? Yes, me too.

Anyone remember him ever admitting an error while he was in office? Nor do I.

Arse.

Vain arse. 

Criminally arrogant arse.

Arse.

Feel-gooders and their playthings

"Modern-day activists need humanitarian crises in order to feel alive, purposeful, possessed of historic, Nazi-battling momentum. They live off ‘humanitarian crises’, like moral parasites on a hippopotamus’s arse, and thus it is in their interests always to exaggerate the extent of such crises. After all, the bigger the crisis, the bigger the thrill they get from tweeting about it."

O'Neill. Again.

A wicked old witch

"It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them, and that every member's recollection of them differs violently from every other member's recollection; consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials; from which it emerges with elegant inevitability, that any decision which has been officially reached would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, and any decisions which is not recorded in the minutes by the officials has not been officially reached, even if one or more members believe they can recollect it; so in this particular case, if the decision would have been officially reached, it would have been recorded in the minutes by the officials and it isn't so it wasn't."

As Sir Humphrey said of government minutes, so the honest historian will say of the wider historical record. So Goebbels said of the zeitgeist and the national myth.

British contemporary history, the most egregious example being that of the 1980s, is 'minuted' and thus mediated to the overwhelming majority through the BBC's NUT-approved Guardianista prism. No alternative worldview is allowed oxygen, save to encourage the hurling of rotten fruit (comedy is the most effective ballista) and the occasional execution of a heretic or two in an auto da fé.

One can hardly be surprised at the increasingly, uniformly unbalanced and naive political opinions of the young when their political 'information' comes from a single, powerful and powerfully supported monopoly.

Liberty of thought and choice are sine qua non for a healthy polis and a free people. The de facto monopoly of the BBC over the contemporaneous account, the popular memory of news and public affairs, and consequently the collective myth, must be abolished.

Auntie loves children

Auntie Beeb is no longer the cuddly national treasure whom we are lucky to have, bless her. She has aged, badly, into a warty, wizened, wicked old witch who cackles horribly effective imprecations at any who so much as raise an eyebrow at her dangerous practices.


She has great power now, acquired over decades of receiving unwonted tributes from rulers, both craven and cynical, who rob the poor to buy her golden cauldrons and expensive potions with which to make her poisons.

'A nice juicy apple, my dear? Or perhaps a little gingerbread?'

With her evil spells she paralyses, kills and eats her enemies, cursing those who try to heal the wounds she inflicts. Defy Auntie if you dare.

The wicked witch is poisoning our wells. She must be surrounded, smoked out and smashed.

But of course, like all tyrants, the witch has powerful friends...

Questions, questions

So the Gentile asks, 'Why does a Jew always answer a question with a question?' The Jew replies, 'Why not? Isn't it a reasonable thing to do?'

Yes, it is, in Christianity as in its elder brother, Judaism. But not in Islam.



HT Cranmer

Q. Why is Islam so intransigent over Israel and the Palestinians?
A. How can it not be?

The reasons for Islam's intransigence are ancient and cultural. Israel is merely Islam's fracas du jour. The reasons pre-date Islam, and have remained constant throughout history up to and beyond the fall of the last Islamic (the Ottoman) Empire in the first world war, out of which collapse the Jewish state was born.

But first, a little theology to focus on the abiding philosophical, as opposed to cultural, chasm and antipathy between the Islamic worldview and that of Judaism-Christianity.

In their self-consciousness, self-descriptions and creeds, the three strands of Christianity, which is to say the Protestant, 'Roman' Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches all deploy the word 'catholic', in its strict meaning of 'universal'. This is because they share the common theological proposition that the offer made by Jesus Christ was and is universal: offered freely to all people who are free to reject it. This is because Jesus himself compelled no-one. A young man asked him how to attain eternal salvation and, not liking Jesus's answer, walked away, but Jesus did not call him back or condemn him, but, sadly, just watched him go. (Matt 19:22)

Such freedom is the opposite of Islam.

The Christian offering is based on the concept of a free divine will which ordains that human persons similarly have free will and reason. In his free will, Man is made in the image of God.

This proposition is an outrage to Islam.

One is free to accept or reject the Judaeo-Christian account of reality because this freedom is inherent in the nature of God as understood in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. This ancient and absolutely fundamental  characteristic of Judaic tradition continues through the development of Judaism's daughter, Christian theology in the scholarly tradition of argument, debate, dispute.

Such questioning is anathema in Islam.

(Yes, all right, I know, Christians rarely live up to their creeds and ideals - but that believers can be faithless and unworthy does not alter the validity of their belief. As it happens, Christians believe that Jesus came to save sinners from themselves and it's just as well, isn't it? We can be a really horrible lot whom only God could love. Let us move on.)

I had a philosophy teacher who defined philosophical enquiry as 'a process of taking one careful step after another - backwards'. He meant that the proper response to any proposition is the question, 'But what do you mean by...?' Let us go back to the essence of the terms we shall use and agree upon them, and only then can we go forward together to any profit to either of us.

Going forward together is anathema to Islam.

The Hellenisation of Hebrew scholarship resulted in a happy merger of Greek dialectical metaphysical scholarship with the unique Jewish understanding of monotheism which, philosophically, is the most reasonable and subtle of all theist positions. It was from this happy marriage that, over millennia, the Christian theological twins of rational enquiry and liberty to choose developed, and continue and will continue to develop, in the very nature of the basic proposition.

Enquiry and liberty are forbidden in Islam which demands their opposite: submission.

The concept of free will is the single most important philosophical foundation underlying both Judaism and Christianity. It led Europe and the West to Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, political emancipation, the abolition of slavery and universal education. It is ab initio inimical to the fundamental tenet of Islam. The very word Islam means 'submission'. It admits of no free will and therefore no questioning, no discussion.

This is the opposite of Judaeo-Christianity.

In Mohammed's earliest reflections on what might be the links between Man and God, musing (as we see in the Qur'an) on the traditions of Judaism and Christianity, he said, 'There is no compulsion in religion'. At this point, he was just beginning, an insignificant tribal thinker in a brutal, patriarchal, polytheistic wilderness.

Gradually, his monotheistic insights (gleaned, as we know from his writings, from Judaeo-Christian thought) gained currency among and offered a prospect of political unity and strength to the bellicose tribes of the region. Mohammed and his prominent followers were instructed, they believed, by Allah. This conviction strengthened their arm, enabling them to conquer surrounding tribes very rapidly by the normative, that is to say, murderous methods of that place, culture and time.

Thus Mohammed's new religion was enforced over a vast area as violence and terror ensured submission to the new religion of submission by any who challenged either his teaching or the authority of his warlords who, as it happens, gained political power and wealth even as they spread the word.  Thus Islam, a unified and militarised movement, quickly abandoned Mohammed's initially indulgent 'Judaeo-Christian' position of 'no compulsion', in favour of the more effective 'preaching by the sword'. Mohammed became a general, soldiering in the name of Allah.

Like all successful conquerors, Mohammed and his commanders recognised the limits of what was militarily, economically and politically practical. They found it convenient to permit disarmed non-submitters to co-exist on condition that their infidelity was invisible to worshippers of Allah (on penalty of death) and on payment of the taxes due to Allah's followers from second class citizens.

From its very beginnings, the Islamic proposition has been naked of all pretence to reason or the concept of free will, in its world-view. It stands on Mohammed's twin doctrines that Allah is, in his essential nature, so other that he is not bound by any human category, including rationality, and that the worshippers of Allah, those who submit to his inscrutable will, are not to be challenged, ever, for any reason, for to defy Allah's followers is to defy Allah himself, meriting death and eternal damnation.

Lucifer challenged God and by so doing became the Father of Evil, the Great Satan. Anyone who challenges the rulers of the worshippers of Allah is Satan against whom all the believers must make war until the end of time, which will come when the last infidel submits or is destroyed by the worshippers of Allah, in Allah's name.

To repeat: in the Islamic religion there is no reason, because Allah, being utterly other, is not bound by reason, a purely human category, and simply must be obeyed - submitted-to, without question. Ditto his prophet against whom no human authority can stand.

Allah may order, through his prophet and other spokesmen, mass murder, Jew-murder, self-immolation and various other practices which to the Judaeo-Christian mind seem unreasonable or even evil, which is oxymoronic because Allah is definitively good and merciful. (Goodness and mercy, unlike reason, are not merely human concepts. You may not question this mystery.)  Even if both those things are true, Allah must be obeyed because defiance of the will of Allah is forbidden.

Allah is permitted, in Mohammed's theology, to be entirely capricious. His will is beyond question. If he is capricious, and of course no-one is permitted even to ask whether he is, there is nothing humans can or may do but they must submit to his will as mediated by his prophets, muftis, imams, caliphs, emirs and ayatollahs.

The interesting question is how the self-immolaters and infidel-killers receive Allah's orders. Obviously through the prophets, muftis, imams, caliphs, emirs and ayatollahs, but who says they are right? They do. Which takes us back to the question of authority in the society in which Islam, with its characteristic, essential intransigence, arose.

The Islamic concept of authority descends undiluted from the social culture of Mohammed's life and experience in the desert of the 7th century. The entire Islamic edifice is embedded in the social system of a desert-nomad, warlord patriarchy in which servants, slaves, women and children are owned, controlled, instructed and punished by armed men licensed by patriarchs whose will, in turn, is enforced by violence. Pre-Islamic tribal/political culture informs Islamic thought and leadership.

Might is right. I have a big stick, and you will submit.

Admittedly Islam was a bit of an improvement, in the 7th century, on the brutality it displaced, giving some limited but undreamed-of rights to women, for instance, but only under conditions of general servitude... to men.

Jewish and Christian social mores were once similar, but both Jews and Christians, in their understanding of the human person and optimal societies, have moved cosmic distances from that mindset over centuries during which Islamic teaching has expressly and deliberately ossified the social rules and structures with which its prophet rules that it is co-terminous, for ever.

Islam's leaders taught from the beginning, leaving aside that momentary hesitation on Mohammed's part, that the Muslim worldview is the only one sanctioned by their god and that they are divinely instructed to kill or conquer any who defy that view. Defiant infidels are ipso facto Satan, waging war on Allah. For young, naive, inexperienced hearers of authoritarian Muslim leaders, Islamist jihad and Jew-hatred are no-brainers, not susceptible to reasoned questioning which anyway is forbidden by Allah. And so it goes on from generation to generation: the way, the truth and the death.

By its very nature, there is no place in such a system, where only might is right, for either reason or discussion, let alone reformation in the Christian sense. Reformation would mean radical transformation of a centuries old societal dispensation which holds that its social habits and its theology are one and the same, mandated by a god who defines them as immutable and to be enforced without change whatever the cost in human suffering and death of self or enemy.

In Islam time stands still, and humanity with it. And for Man to require 'justice' of Allah is blasphemy. 

Christianity and Judaism both permit - no, recommend, their own development, in discussion, exploration in harmony with the observable fact of the forward progress over time of human thought and knowledge: aggiornamento, in worshipful dialogue with a Creator who has demonstrated by intervention in history that he is intimately engaged with and in reasoned dialogue with humanity.

This is the opposite of Islam.

Christianity goes further down this road than Judaism, with the belief that the creator actually went so far as to become human in order to demonstrate corporeally his immanence.

In Islam, the notion of divine immanence is blasphemy.

Is there hope of an Islamic Reformation, some time in the future? It seems improbable since Islam admits no development in religious thought. Islam does admit the development of non-theological thought. It supports the acquisition of material/scientific information but draws the line at accepting the consequences of that learning for the understanding of the human condition in the context of the transcendent.

How can there be a Reformation without reason? Islam proclaims that its divinity by his very nature has no connection whatsoever with reason. No wonder its leaders will not permit the translation of its scriptures, which, as Judaeo-Christianity knows, and one surmises that Mohammed well understood when he banned it, opens the sanctuary door to reasonable questions by non-scholars, questions which may lead to the overthrow of demagoguery and dictators. This is the religion of a fearful people.

Pope Benedict XVI's plea, in a talk to his scholar-peers in Regensburg, for a rapprochement between Christianity and Islam based on reason and mutual freedom to question in fraternal conversation, met with world-wide violence from Muslim mobs whipped up by teachers who lied to them about the Pope's words and his pacific intentions. And of course with howls of support for their lies from their useful idiots among the hard left and militant secularists, to whom reasonable Christianity is a far greater philosophical and ethical challenge than unreasonable Islam which they embrace on the basis that their enemy's enemy is their friend. They forget that first they came for the Jews...

So, back to the present conundrum. Palestine, Israel, two states? How? Islam admits the possibility only of one Jew-free (and of course, gay-free) Islamic state.

As the video at the top of this rather long post shows, it is bootless for Israel to offer anything but total submission, which of course means Jewish mass suicide. Islam will never allow Muslims  to accept any offer from 'the Jews'. Only submission will do.

Historically, the Jews, like the Arabs, are a group of Semitic desert tribes, so, sort-of cousins, and consequently despised as only relatives can be despised. The pesky Jew-cousins have always denied the Arab-Muslim cousins' order to submit.

They would never, will never submit, never surrender their independence of soul, their adherence to reason or the freedom to question and think for themselves which has put them among the leading scholars in every discipline in every time and place. Therefore these stiff-necked infidel Jews and their freedom-loving infidel allies are The Great Satan and must be destroyed. QED.

Which is about as reasonable as this chap:



The defiance by Jews of violence which will not reason, and their proclamation of liberty of thought and will as the fundamental human attribute and the basis of human fulfillment, are why this blog stands with Israel.

The besieged Jews of Israel are civilisation's vanguard. Their enemies are the enemies of humane thought and liberty.

The Jews and especially the Israelis are defending the light of reason against the darkness of un-reason.

Israel is besieged by forces of of violent oppression which have survived since the dark ages by the deployment of lethal force by people who believe that their god - who is categorically unlike the God of the Jews and Christians - orders them to conquer and destroy in his name.

First they came for the Jews...













___________________________________________

The subject of this post being the religion of peace and its chosen enemies, a few rules regarding comments are needed - for the first time. O tempora... 

• Unreasonable comments, whether accusing the writer of 'Islamophobia' or attributing all the world's ills to belief in 'sky-fairies', will not be welcomed, for obvious reasons (see discussion of 'reason', above). 
• Ditto wailing about the 3000+ -years old accounts of tribal gods and desert warfare in the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible. That was then, this is now. 
• Ditto that Islam preserved the Greek scholarly oeuvre. No, the Byzantines (Eastern Roman Empire/Greek Christians) did. 
• Ditto complaints about 'the Crusades' for which there was, at the time, reasonable justification: defence against Islamic attack. (Were you there? What would you have done, without your 20th century head on your shoulders and your Enlightenment books?) 
• Simple abuse will be deleted. If any, that is. 
• My blog. My rules.

You'd need a heart of stone...

 ... not to laugh as the Guardianistas boomerang themselves senseless. Well, I say senseless, as though that were a new thing in Guardianistas, but you get the picture.

As it happens, I’m utterly opposed to the Met’s moves against the Guardian, which are profoundly illiberal, and I hope the Guardian refuses to name its source rather than repeating the Sarah Tisdall debacle of the 1980s. But I am also opposed to the Guardian’s moral rehabilitation of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (one of New Labour’s most authoritarian pieces of legislation) and its insistence that the police use this intolerant, intrusive law to invade the offices of tabloid newspapers and feel the collars of tabloid hacks. The Met’s extension of its investigations to encompass the Guardian isn’t a case of the goodies turning on their fellow goodies – it’s the ugly end result of having foolishly invited the police in the first place to harry and hector and fix the media. Who issued that invitation? The “goodies”. Brendan O'Neill

Memo to Mayor Boris

Rotterdam isn't the world's loveliest city (it was bombed flat in World War 2 and badly rebuilt), and I've known better halls than the De Doelen there. BUT…it provides plenty of space to sit down before a concert (unlike the Albert Hall), and in foyers blissfully uncluttered by people running small businesses, dealing in drugs, begging for money, or practising rap routines to the accompaniment of ghetto-blasters as happens in the shabby bazaar that is now the South Bank Centre. 

What's more, De Doelen Hall provides its audience with free tea and coffee, not only during the interval but after the show – encouraging concert-goers to stay, and meet, and talk about the music they've just heard. How civilised the Dutch can be, compared to us.

Michael White (no relation)

The Balls around Ed Miliband's ankles

Dan Hodges at the New Statesman writes that Ed Miliband should sack Ed Balls. He also suggests that Balls should distance himself from the policies of Gordon Brown.

So, let's see... the Hodges recipe for Labour's return to office is based on the theory that if my auntie had balls she'd be my uncle. Well, OK. Whatever gets you through the day, old son, but we grown-ups really do have to get back to Planet Earth, now.

Ed Balls distancing himself from the policies of Gordon Brown? It simply cannot happen. Equally improbable is the idea of Miliband sacking Balls. Although, after what he did to his brother, it shouldn't be ruled out entirely.

The economic governance of Britain throughout the entire Blair-Brown era (including but not only the opaque speeches and the brazen de haut en bas lies) was all Balls.

Balls was the master and Brown his pupil. Brown has admitted openly (but only after the electorate threw him out for making the most almighty Balls-up of our economy) that he is an historian and not an economist. Fancy that! By contrast, Balls was a professional economist before entering politics which he did at Brown's insistence. A very bad economist, obviously, but an economist nevertheless, and the highly political, Labour-tribalist, non-economist Brown needed him badly. Balls devised the economic instruments by which Brown would, so he thought, achieve his socialist political objectives.

It was Balls who match-made the Brown-Prudence marriage, and once the lady had been deflowered, insisted on a quickie divorce, with all the dreadful consequences which the Labour hierarchy now admits but only through gritted teeth and only in dimly-lit, smoke-free Party rooms, when they think no outsiders are watching.

Whatever opprobrium the present Labour leadership would like to lay on the widely-hated but conveniently absent Brown, the scapegoat for their years of supine complicity in his ruinous policies, belongs equally to Balls. As indeed it does to Ed Miliband, who for many years worked hand in hand with Balls in the Treasury to enforce Balls doctrine in the name of Brown.

Balls and Miliband are conjoined twins and the country knows it. As long as either or both of them remains in a leadership position, the Labour party will be despised as an incompetent, fantasist shambles not to be allowed near sharp objects like economies.

You picked the wrong brother, Labour, and along with him, the Balls around his ankles. You need to ditch both the Eds as soon as convenient. You know it, but you daren't admit it. Not even to your sorry-arsed selves.

Nurse!

Vince is out of bed again.

He's wandering around Birmingham, dressing gown flapping, gurning into the faces of startled business owners and mumbling, 'What do you think this is, a fucking free country?'

Every few minutes, he shouts at passing buses, 'Rich fuckers! You! Gimme yer money, yer capitalist bastards!'

When last seen, he was gripping the arm of an elderly man in a tweed suit and shouting, 'Don't you know who I am, you fucking Tory, you?'

I leaned my back up against an oak

The green Conservative tree has gone from this blog's sidebar, replaced by this one.

I leaned my back up against an oak
Thinking that he was a trusty tree
But first he bended, then he broke
And so did my false love to me. source

You'll remember Dave's hug-a-huskie, see-me-I'm-Modern phase, when he replaced the Tory torch with a nice tree. Well, a pretty sketch of a tree, anyway. But a tree. Solid things, trees. Very British. Constable country. Heart of Oak. That sort of thing. I like trees. A lot.

So I went along with it. 

Dave's watermelonish ecowankery grated, but once a Tory, always a Tory (stay with me, here). I've been a Conservative since I was in the sixth form, a hell of a long time. I remember Mac, just about. I hit political puberty when Wilson defeated Douglas-Home. I saw Heath and Thatcher come and go. The desperation of the après-Major near-death experience nearly overwhelmed me but here I still was when it became clear that Cameron was the best hope of getting Labour out of office (always an overriding consideration) and installing a Conservative government.

I knew the task ahead was Sisyphean. I knew that extraordinary positions would have to be adopted and accepted. That there would have to be compromise. That it would be a painful, rough ride.

But I went along with it.

I went along with it because I trusted that the core of Conservative values would remain uncompromised. I believed Cameron when he spoke at the 2009 conference which I attended, of promoting commerce and industry to create wealth in order to help the helpless. I believed him when he said he would stand up for marriage and the traditional family. After all, even bloody Toynbee (surely?) can see the overwhelmingly convincing evidence of its utility for the greatest good of the greatest number of individuals and therefore of the societies they live in. 

So I went along with it.

I believed Cameron when he said he would defend this country's liberties, culture and integrity, and to that end would put a stop to Labour's deliberate, malign policy of unlimited immigration (engineered by stealth and against the known wishes of the vast majority in this country) by which vast numbers of defiant and barely English-speaking trouble-makers, from cultures incompatible with ours, can arrive at our ports and immediately receive benefits for which the natives have to work a lifetime while quietly plotting to destroy our heritage and, oh, yes - kill us. I believed him when he said he would ensure that foreign murderers and rapists would be deported. I believed him when he said he would reign back rule by unelected foreign dictators with an agenda wholly inimical to the interests of this country. 

So I went along with it.

It almost worked. Against overwhelming odds, the Conservative party almost won the election. Cameron brought us back from near oblivion and into government. 

Coalition was unavoidable. But for true Conservatives, having our party shackled to the ever-venal, self-interested, Brussels-contaminated, socialist-lite, petty-dictators of the Illiberal Undemocrats has proved painful beyond measure. The rage in Conservative conversations, out of earshot of Portcullis House and Notting Hill, is unprintable. Not that the Party leadership gives a flying fuck about that.

Allowing that there are among them one (perhaps two) men (sic) of integrity and authentically Liberal character, the LibDem members of this coalition government are, like their party as a whole, a fractious, puffed up, self-righteous bunch of cynical hypocrites whose Liberal and Socialist wings can barely conceal their internecine snarling long enough to remember to call the Conservatives 'the enemy'. Yes, even Dave's friend Nick. This article nails the Liberal Democrats for what they are. 

(By the way, how courageous of you, Deputy Prime Minister, to make a head-on attack on the terrifically popular Daily Mail, with its highly political readership, just because it is the bête-noir of the currently LibDem-supporting Guardian-Brigstocke tendency.)

Clegg even talks of the Tories as his "enemies". Talk about smug. 

But who is surprised? This is the party whose official, documented election campaign policy is 'Say what the audience wants to hear'. Never truer than when addressing the leftwing mass of the party at the annual jamboree. All together now, follow the bouncing ball: 'Tories are ruthless bastards!'

Cameron sought to bind his enemies the LibDems to him for five years, to give him long enough in government to undo the worst of Brown's near-terminal damage (little did he know...) He thought that meant giving them real power: more power than in the wildest dreams which Clegg, Cable and Huhne dared dream. More than that unlovely gang asked for. So generous, Dave, so generous. Clegg and his historically unpopular, near-lunatic party were given power beyond their weight or their worth. 

Now, every day we get a LibDem announcement about how virtuous they are and what bastards the majority Conservatives are. How every good thing coming out of Whitehall is from the LibDem manifesto. How the Conservatives, with vastly more electoral support than they and vastly greater numbers of MPs, are being prevented from showing 'their true colours' by the nice LibDems. 

Such fucking, lying hubris. Who the fuck do they think they are?

Just look at the numbers. At the council elections in May they lost 700 seats and posted their worst result for 25 years. In their pursuit of their Holy Grail of voting reform, they lost by a margin of 2:1. Their poll ratings are in single figures, less than half the support they secured at the general election. Nick Clegg scores 12 per cent on the question of who would make the best PM.

In another poll, 63 per cent of people say they don't know what the Lib Dems stand for. At the last election, despite a brief bout of Cleggmania driven by the novelty of TV debates between the leaders, they actually lost seats. And to put all this in a historical context, they have not won a general election since the end of World War I. 

Don't they get it? After decades of boring the country rigid, they are, truly, deeply, madly unpopular. They couldn't win an election if they were running against Colonel Gaddafi and Osama Bin Laden - and they never will. 

The Liberal Democrats are abusing their position - daily, gleefully, mendaciously (it means they're liars). It is tasteless, undignified and an insult to the electorate.  

They prattle on about what a great job they are doing in government, about the sacrifices they are making, and, most of all, how they are civilising the Conservative barbarians making up the vast bulk of the coalition. 

This is armour-plated, ocean-going self-righteousness of awesome proportions. After 200 years on the ballot paper in one guise or another and after being the dominant political party of the 19th Century, they seem completely untroubled by the fact that only one person in ten now thinks they are fit to run the country.

And now, Cameron is Clegg's prisoner, and he is exhibiting all the signs of Stockholm Syndrome. His 'friendship' with Clegg is preventing him from being a Conservative and from governing as a Conservative, albeit in coalition. 

Worse, Cameron refuses to acknowledge, in any practical sense, Britain's increasingly vocal anger at government by Clegg's lodestone an unelected foreign dictatorship, the real-world cash-cost of which is finally coming home to even the thickest British citizen. You know, that bloke who can't even spell 'E-U'. 

These are two astronomical political failures as well as failures of government.

Cameron might as well not be a Conservative at all. He looks quite happy, for all the world like an Orange Booker, perfectly comfortable, for pragmatic purposes, to share a bed with the life-long socialist enemies of my party like Huhne and Cable, both of whom are actually damaging this country - Huhne to a catastrophic degree.

Is Cameron happy with this? Seriously? Does he think the Conservative Party at large is happy with this, or the millions who voted Conservative? 

Or is the realpolitik of his position such that he must say nothing, and allow this appalling state of affairs to continue, letting the Liberal Democrats shrewdly and assiduously build their bona fides with the BBC and enough voters ('We are a party of government again! Look at our record!') that, at the next general election, they will be in contention for enough swing votes to split the anti-Labour vote? 

By sleeping with my enemy, Cameron is doing almost all that is necessary to hand this country back to Gordon Brown's two most teeth-clenchingly loyal fixers, his accessories before during and after the fact of his ruination of the country's social fabric and economy, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls.

For that is what I can see coming at me from the other end of this long dark political tunnel. In the dark days ahead the electorate will vent its anger with the coalition government. If David Cameron does not change course, his successor in Number Ten will be Miliband. The Weird One. All he has to do is... nothing.

So, yes, my heart remains Conservative. But is my party with me? Are you, Mr Cameron? Daily I ask myself how much longer I can remain a member of the Cameroon Conservative Party.

And yet... God help us if Labour get back into government. That fear is the only thing keeping me on side. To leave the Tories now would give me huge, bitter satisfaction - and enliven this blog no end. But I can't. No, not because of you, Mr Cameron. Because of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. A lipsmacking Up Yours, Dave, would turn to ashes in my mouth the moment I saw the Weird One on the news.  

It's autumn. The winds are starting to blow. That lovely Conservative tree is no longer green, no longer strong enough to lean on. The nights are drawing in. It's getting cold. 

      

   

So, not just me, then

The Nobel* Prize-winning economist Martin Feldstein argued that the creation of a single European currency, far from encouraging peace and harmony, would increase tension and conflict between nation states, and with other global powers.

- Norman Lamont

* Rendered by the Telegraph writer as 'Noble'. I blame the teachers.

New gods

Congratulations to the top right wing, conservative and libertarian bloggers of 2010-11. Keep sticking it to the socialists, the Righteous and the enemies of freedom. I read you with delight.

For the first time in five years, this blog has not made it into Iain Dale's (rather shrunken) pantheon.

Am I shedding bitter tears? Er, hardly. I have always written this blog for my own satisfaction; eavesdroppers welcome. Bring a bottle and don't stamp out fags on the carpet.

Two things appear to have changed. Possibly three.

First, the right wing 'sphere is now vastly bigger, more widely read and more politically influential than when I started this little blog. My pathetic peepings are drowned out by booming throngs of better bloggers than I, more diligent scribes of similar political and philosophical bent. Hooray. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Second, some would say, my fire's gone out. Well, no, not exactly. My days of making sparks on the keyboard several times daily are over, yes, but - trust me - this is a sign of mental health, not mental fatigue. The anger remains, even as we struggle on, up to our necks in the noisome ashes of the malign, treacherous and incompetent Blair-Brown governments, but it is effectively expressed for me by the rhetoric of a growing number of better bloggers than your humble servant. Uneasy lies the head, eh, Dave? Jolly good. The night has a thousand eyes. And growing.

The third, and it would not have occurred to me had I not seen acid cries of 'Referee!' on Twitter, is that the good people at Total Politics have cocked up. Unlikely, I feel, and anyway such allegations stink of sour grapes. The referee's ruling is final.

To those who voted for me this year and in the past, thank you. I'll continue to tap out a few obiter dicta which may amuse my loyal reader and even the odd passer-by.

The Fall of Rome

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

- W H Auden (1947)

With thanks to Dan Hannan for the awful reminder of an awful reminder.

Yeah, but... who, exactly, Mister Knacker?

Source.

Fawkes has a reward up. I wonder how long it'll be... closing time tonight?  

Schadenfreude. Suddenly, not so much fun.

The Polish Prime Minister is murmuring, apparently, about 'war within ten years' if the Eurozone.collapse should lead to the break-up of the EU.

Those of us who, right from the start, feared and warned that the Euro was an impossibly insane scheme which would inevitably end in tears - or worse - are not enjoying the increased likelihood being proved right.

Shut up. I'm reading.

I make a point of spurning the Booker shortlist. Too many of the usual suspects, dreadful people with inflated opinions of their own opinions, make a point of reading all of them and then boring everyone by repeating  exactly what they said last year: They are all wonderful. Any of them would make a worthy winner.'

No, they wouldn't. Even most of the winners are unworthy winners chosen by friends of the author or his publisher.

Backscratching, incestuous luvvie garbage.



 

They can't hear you, Nige.

Judenrein

First they came for the Jews...

The Day of the Jackals, starring Perry Mason and Pontius Pilate

The Murdoch hunt is a smokescreen. Thanks to the Independent, we get another glimpse of the throng of whited sepulchres huddling together in the murk.

Newspapers and magazines also used the agency to illicitly obtain thousands of private telephone numbers, often including the details held by telephone companies under the category "Friends and Family". In total, the Whittamore files reference 17,489 orders from media organisations.

• Some 1,028 are in the so-called "blue book", which was essentially dedicated to News International. 

• The "red book" contained 6,774 jobs, most on behalf of Trinity Mirror titles.

• The "green book", which includes work from Associated Newspapers titles, Express Newspapers and some celebrity magazines, has 2,227 references. 

• And the "yellow book", which is miscellaneous, has 7,460 orders.

Of all these hacks, then, those employed by Murdoch's titles committed fewer child-murders engaged in fewer illicit practices than their competitors.

Thus the Murdoch-hunting party can be seen in context for what it is: a pack of hyenas turning on one of their own, hoping that the scent of its blood will draw in a pack of jackals to distract the bigger beasts, while they, having gorged on its lifeblood, slink back to their lairs.

The unfortunate impression that Tom Watson MP's Perry Mason turn is entirely politically motivated can now only be altered if he mounts an equally ferocious attack on Murdoch's competitors, perhaps starting with the slavishly Labour-supporting Mirror to demonstrate his impartiality as a tribune of the people. After all, Mr Watson is an honourable man.

Wash his hands as ostentatiously as he might, Pontius Pilate the Information Commissioner will have even more difficulty than Mr Watson in neutralising the stink accompanying his every word in this matter. He protests his well-meaning  impotence, as the lead investigator on the Motorman enquiry tells the Indy that his team was

forbidden from interviewing journalists who were paying for criminal records checks, vehicle registration searches, and other illegal practices.

Forbidden? By whom and why?

In a signed witness statement given to The Independent, Motorman's original lead investigator, a retired police inspector with 30 years' experience, accuses the authorities of serious failings, and of being too "frightened" to question journalists. 

"I feel the investigation should have been conducted a lot more vigorously, a lot more thoroughly and it may have revealed a lot more information," he said. "I was disappointed and somewhat disillusioned with the senior management ..."

Frightened? By whom and why?

The High Court has ruled that journalists are generally protected by freedom of information legislation except where national security concerns may override that protection. Does this ruling prevent journalists from being investigated for suspected crimes? Infringement of the Computer Misuse Act (amended) and corruption or encouraging the corruption of public officials including police officers are crimes.

I ask again, 'What stopped you from pursuing and prosecuting journalists on the Mirror, the Mail and the  Express, Mr Pilate Information Commissioner?'

In memoriam

Hopey-changey (NSFW version)

As advocated by an official of the Obama-supporting ILWU (dockworkers' union).

Enjoy.

Via

Hey, Ed.

Education news

Consternation within the student union at the LSE, where bright sparks raise cash and prompt a lively discussion on academic elitism. All via a carrier bag bearing the logo "More intelligent than you since 1895!". Complaints aplenty. "This is, in some ways, worse than awarding Saif Gaddafi a PhD," says one web protester. "Maybe Cambridge should have one saying 'More intelligent than you since 1284'," suggests another. "Then Oxford could come out with one saying 'More intelligent than you between 1100 and 1283'." 

How much easier it is for Professor Niall Ferguson. He just smiles that smile and we get the message. - Hugh Muir

Well, as my grandfather used to say, 'Some's got it, and some ain't.'  Ferguson's got it. Yeeeeharrrr!

MORE INTELLIGENT THAN YOU

Bugrit, let's elect everybody

"Universities are run by unaccountable, unelected managers..." said Michael Chessum, an NUS executive member and co-founder of the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts. - Indy

HT Guido.

STF up, madam

Sue Freeth, of the Royal British Legion, warned that after a decade of war the public was “coming close to the end of its willingness to contribute to people from this campaign”.

Did the Queen know David Miliband was trashing 500 years of Crown treaties?

In a barbaric and near-criminal act, David Miliband ordered the closure of the Foreign Office library, containing the records of 500 years of Britain’s overseas entanglements, including the original copies of all our treaties. This institution was described by Gladstone’s foreign secretary, Lord Granville, as “the pivot on which the whole machinery of the Office turned”. Recently, I inspected its empty shelves, their contents having been dispersed, some turning up on eBay: it was both too sad for words, and a piquant symbol of New Labour’s neglect of the lessons of history. - Telegraph

I didn't know. Now I do. And I am FUCKING angry. By what fucking right...

That is my history, my heritage, Miliband, you arrogant, incompetent, embarrassment of an utter, utter fucking bastard fit only for the seditious, destructive Labour Party and no other. You are not even good enough for the  Liberal Democrats.

And I still haven't forgotten this buttock-clenchingly shaming outrage by your staff when you were at the FCO.

Give me strength.

And all this was happening while this negligent, treacherous bastard's ridiculous brother and his criminally arrogant right hand man, Balls, were determinedly running the country's economy deep into the ground, with their not-so-novel socialist policy of piss-it-up-the-wall-because-we-can, with its scorched-earth culmination in near catastrophic national economic and financial liabilities which will work themselves out only over a generation or two, in bankruptcies, unemployment, worthless and destroyed life-savings and pensions, distress, poverty and suicides.

And even as their own comrades are beginning to realise that they have to accept responsibility for the damage they wrought, the guilty men are refusing to look the truth in the eye but instead, plotting their comeback.

Gentlemen, you are pissing in the fucking wind.

Labour should never be allowed to govern again., Ever. Ever.



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