Month: July 2013

John Humphries is in hot water with his employer, the BBC.

The Radio 4 Today presenter said on air that “the welfare state is in crisis”. He then complained of “dependency culture that has grown steadily over the past year.”

For this he was chastised by the BBC Trust, and quite right too. What wasn’t right is that afterwards some pundits accused the BBC of “blatant Left-wing bias”.

Instead they should be telling the presenter to get his facts straight. The welfare state is no crisis whatsoever. In fact it’s doing extremely well. Because of this, it’s the rest of us who are in crisis, but the BBC is right to ignore such trivia.

Unlike Mr Humphries who saw fit to bite the hand that feeds him, the BBC is loyal to its employer, the state. The modern state, to be exact.

And the very nature of the modern state demands that it expand its power above any other consideration. The welfare state serves this purpose famously: by transferring money from those who earned it to those who didn’t, the state transfers more power its own way.

This is innate to the post-Enlightenment state, based as it on the premise that all men are created equal before the state, just as they used to be deemed to be equal before God.

“Democracy,” wrote Aristotle, “arose from men’s thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely.” This presumptive absolute equality had to be extended to economics.

Even the least successful layers of the population had to have their expectation built up, for otherwise they could unplug themselves from the democratic process, thereby weakening the political class’s hold on power.

Therefore the promise of wealth, or at least comfort, had to be substantially divorced from the ability to earn it. Since in reality the two go hand in hand, the political class came to be judged and rewarded on its ability to create the illusion of a narrowing gap between ability and expectation.

As failure to do so could spell its own demise, success in this illusion-building endeavour first became the main determining factor of political success, and eventually the only one.

Thus R.G. Collingwood’s analysis of the collapse of the Hellenic economy presages the collapse of ours:

“The critical moment was reached when Rome created an urban proletariat whose only function was to eat free bread and watch free shows. This meant the segregation of an entire class which had no work to do whatever; no positive function in society, whether economic or military or administrative or intellectual or religious; only the business of being supported and being amused. When that had been done, it was only a question of time until Plato’s nightmare of a consumers’ society came true; the drones set up their own king and the story of the hive came to an end.”

To make matters worse, enlightenment economists established a parallel between universal suffrage and private enterprise in people’s minds. Both were supposed to be based on individual responsibility for one’s future, either political or economic.

This was a simulacrum of Christian individualism, perverting it first by shifting it into a purely politicised material arena, and second by trying to legitimise a dubious political idea by letting it bask in the borrowed warmth of a sound economic one.

As a result, unchecked democracy and free enterprise became so inextricably linked that the failure of one would presumably lead to the failure of the other.

Since unlimited democracy was founded on the fallacious philosophy of egalitarianism, its practitioners now had to falsify the process of free enterprise as well to make sure its products could be more evenly distributed between the consumers and producers.

Failure to do so would jeopardise the status of those currently in power and undermine the future of the whole political class. Putting it crudely, votes – and the power they confer – had to be not only requested but also bought.

This had to be done with some delicacy: the success of wealth redistribution depended on the existence of wealth to be redistributed.

Therein lay the problem, for the only way to achieve such a symbiosis was to subvert the organic distribution of wealth in a successful economy, in which some people earned increasingly higher wages and some others made increasingly higher profits.

This arrangement had to be replaced by its simulacrum: an increase in the size of groups making a living without earning it, and the consequent plunder of wealth actually earned.

The entitlement group was bound to continue to increase, for human nature is such that the availability of unearned income and the number of those desiring it exist in a symbiotic relationship.

The process of redistribution, rather than being organic, had to become coercive: wealth producers were to be forced to part with greater and greater chunks of their wealth to support the expectations of greater and greater numbers of those who felt entitled to consume without earning.

Hence the emergence of the welfare state, and it’s naughty of John Humphries to have found anything wrong with it. Next thing we know he’ll find something wrong with modern democracy – and then we’ll know for sure he’ll burn in secular hell.  

 

 

It’s appearing on archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/‎

Hope to see you there.

I’m beginning to have doubts about Nigel Farage – not that I can ever be an unequivocal admirer of any politician.

By itself, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that he gave an interview to our leftmost broadsheet The Guardian. Farage is duty-bound to seek an audience wherever he can find it, making his views heard as widely as possible.

The trouble begins when he adapts his views to his audience, especially that particular audience. The only way to endear oneself to that crowd is to start spouting the same things they say between cocktails at Notting Hill and Islington.

This is what Farage tried to do by referring to Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech as “a disaster”. “Everybody ran scared of discussing this [immigration] for decades,” he added.

“Now, I think what UKIP has done is to help make immigration a sensible, moderate, realistic, mainstream debate.”

UKIP has done nothing of the sort. This debate can never become “moderate” because it’s never conducted on merit, at least not by both sides. The left side of the debate only ever uses it either to restate its PC credentials or, more macabre, to rip even wider the traditional fabric of our society.

Powell, possibly the last great parliamentarian, knew that uncontrolled immigration of cultural aliens, or especially hostiles, would achieve this very purpose. And he communicated this knowledge with prophetic powers seldom seen this side of the Scripture.

“We must be mad”, he said, “literally mad, as a nation, to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents… It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”

As we’re bracing ourselves for the likely arrival of 500,000 Romanians and Bulgarians next year, most of them Gypsies, we should recall Powell’s rhetoric and tremble.

“The urban part of whole towns and cities in Yorkshire, the Midlands and the Home Counties would be preponderantly of exclusively Afro-Asian population. …The people of England, who fondly imagine that this is their country and these are their hometowns, would have been dislodged…”

At that time the non-white population of England was a mere 1,000,000, but Powell saw the signs with the clarity of a prophet. At this writing the populations of Inner London, Bradford, Leeds, Wolverhampton, Birmingham and so forth are a quarter to a third Afro-Asian – and the demographic takeover is accelerating by the day.

This is no longer mere immigration – when it reaches such proportions, immigration becomes colonisation. And it’s not as if the greater Muslim part of the colonisers are adapting to our civilisation. On the contrary, they expect us to adapt to them.

Already whole communities live by Sharia law; our ministers and prelates are already saying that “elements of Sharia should be incorporated into our law”; already the BBC is broadcasting a muezzin’s call to prayer every day at Ramadan.

That’s what Farage’s new friends either don’t want to hear or choose to ignore. All they remember from Enoch Powell’s speech is one turn of phrase, which they first distort and then repeat ad nauseum.

The classically educated statesman quoted from Virgil’s Aeneid: “As I look ahead,” he said, “I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”

That was exactly the figure of speech the lefties needed. They grabbed it with both hands and have been waving it like a PC flag ever since.

Whoever wishes for England to remain England is a sadistic fanatic who can’t wait to see – or better still to spill – rivers of blood. Never mind that ‘rivers of blood’ appear nowhere in the speech – if facts don’t support ideology, so much the worse for facts.

That’s all it was, a figure of speech, pure and simple. Some may like it, some may find it unfortunate. But the point remains, and I’ll spell it out in capitals: POWELL WAS RIGHT.

The leader of the party whose main plank is protecting Britain’s sovereignty ought to be throwing this capitalised phrase contemptuously in the faces of The Guardian lot. Instead of calling it a disaster he should be calling it prophecy.

It’s not because of Powell that “everyone ran scared… for decades”. It was because of our predominantly leftwing press that has been repeating the ‘rivers of blood’ mantra with maniacal persistence.

It was because our PC mouthpieces correctly see uncontrolled immigration as the battering ram of modernity, punching breaches in what used to be the impregnable walls of our civilisation.

By trying to speak to them in their language, one runs the risk of eventually thinking in their way, or at least of muting one’s own thought to a point where it’s hardly heard. If that’s the price one has to pay for electoral success, the success isn’t worth having.

Words matter, Nigel, and what’s behind them matters even more.

 

A certain amount of technological ineptitude is a sine qua non of a conservative, especially one no longer in the first flush of youth. As if to prove my conservative credentials, I confused the Archbishop Cranmer addesses for its blog, for which I’ll be writing from time to time, and e-mail.

Sorry about the confusion this might have caused. Anyway, my today’s blog appears on archbishop–cranmer.blogspot.com.

Dave’s Home Office launched a poster campaign aimed to encourage illegal immigrants to do the decent thing and go back where they came from, without trouble like.

The posters show a pair of handcuffs and say, ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’

The response was predictable in some quarters (LibDem spokesmen) and unpredictable in others (Nigel Farage).

The former complained that “these poster vans were not cleared or agreed by Lib Dems in government” and called them a “disproportionate, distasteful and ineffective way to do it.”

Farage jumped on the bandwagon by opining that “the tone of the billboards is nasty, unpleasant”.

The only adjective in the whole lot that makes any sense is ‘ineffective’. The rest of them are frankly puzzling.

Doing anything illegal presupposes the likelihood of arrest. The two go together like politics and opportunism. I mean, the posters didn’t show the muzzle of a gun pointing at the camera with a caption of “come to Britain illegally, see the sights.”

‘Ineffective’ is just about right. The government already has a backlog of 500,000 cases, which cover an estimated half of all illegals in the UK. Clearing those cases would take more than a long lifetime even with the will to do so.

Rather than proving yet again that all politicians are alike, Nigel Farage ought not to distract attention from the second part of his message: the real problem we have isn’t with illegal but legal immigration.

In five months, any of the 28 million Romanians and Bulgarians will be able to settle in Britain as of right. The government is assuring us that only very few will want to do so.

Where have we heard this before? Oh yes, in 2004, when citizens of eight Eastern European countries became eligible for entry into Britain.

Not to worry, said the government then as it’s saying now. No more than 10,000 would come. Well, pushing the envelope all the way, let’s say 13,000. Tops.

How many did come immediately? 627,000. Fifty times as many as predicted. And many more in the next several years.

Of course my old friend Vince Cable doesn’t think this is a problem. Quite the opposite: those immigrants are like new blood flowing into the veins of our economy.

Think of all those Polish plumbers fixing all those leaking taps. Think of all those funny-sounding scaffolders, working for £5 an hour, cash. Brits, says Vince, wouldn’t cross the street for that kind of dosh, never mind climbing six storeys up.

Well, part of the reason the Brits wouldn’t want low-paying work is that socialists like Vince have created the welfare state. It takes a reasonably well-paying job to earn as much as full benefits – and few of those on the dole are qualified to get any job at all, never mind a good one.

You see, in parallel with creating the welfare state socialists like Vince also created a system of education that only trains a pupil to collect a welfare cheque and sign his name on the receipt – in the unlikely event that he knows how.

But even the argument that those hardworking, low-paid immigrants are good for the economy is specious. For in a few months or years they too will qualify for welfare and, since the education in their home countries is better than ours, they’ll figure out that it makes no sense to seek menial work.

So whatever benefit they do bring is strictly short-term – especially since a great part of their income isn’t spent in Britain. It is Western-Unioned straight back home.

Yet when talking about Romanians and Bulgarians, one doesn’t anticipate any net benefit at all. We don’t know how many of the 28 million will come, though close to a million would be a fair guess.

We can be absolutely certain though that the Gypsy population of both countries will make up a lion’s share of new arrivals. This population isn’t negligible.

At last count there are 621,573 Gypsies in Romania and 325,343 in Bulgaria. Considering that Britain is considerably fuller of easy pickings than their homelands, one can confidently predict that at least half a million will end up in our streets.

If you’re wondering what effect they’ll have, we already have a taste of things to come. There are already 200,000 Gypsies in British housing and at least 100,000 on sites, technically homeless.

Most of them don’t become plumbers or scaffolders – they become beggars, thieves, pimps, muggers, squatters and fraudsters. Now triple or quadruple their number in your head and feel it explode.

Dave’s head doesn’t. He’s happy with the situation. His own street is blocked off by a cast-iron fence manned around the clock by sharpshooting guards, so Sam has nothing to worry about.

Meanwhile he can busily erect a multitude of Potemkin villages hiding until the next elections the catastrophic state of our economy, public services, education, defence capability.

And immigration? Well, just put out a few inane posters and hope that not too many voters will get mugged or raped between January, 2014, and mid-2015.

Hope’s cheap. But it can be very dear at the price.

 

P.S. My tomorrow’s blog will appear on archbishop–cranmer.blogspot.com/

 

 

It would be fair to say that not everyone is jubilant about the birth of the future George VII.

For example, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of Russia’s Liberal Democratic party and Vice-Chairman of the Duma, doesn’t “care about the heir”.

“The British monarchy,” he declared, “destroyed our state. That is why the birth of another British monarch, who will suck our blood somewhere in the mid-21st century, cannot bring us any kind of happiness.”

For those of you who don’t follow Russian politics, their LibDems are just like ours in that they’re the country’s third party. Unlike our LibDems, they aren’t likely to be bumped down to fourth place. Also unlike ours, their LibDems are fascists.

All told, Zhirinovsky represents a viable political force in Russia and, though regarded as rather colourful, he is a legitimate part of the mainstream political mix.

That confers a certain quality on Russia’s mainstream that should make our ears perk up: civilised people should listen when political leaders speak in a rogue state that happens to be one of the world’s two greatest military powers.

In the past Mr Zhirinovsky enunciated, in his inimitable manner, Russia’s traditional geopolitical ambitions that tend to be vectored southwards. Specifically he predicted that “Russian soldiers will wash their boots in the Indian ocean”, which is a long way to go for a shoeshine.

A master of all media, Zhirinovsky was once filmed drinking with his acolytes and ranting about the then US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to whose putative bellicosity he had taken an exception.

As a curative for that condition, the Vice Speaker of the Russian parliament suggested the “black bitch” should come to Russia and visit Spetznaz barracks. There she would be gang-banged until “soldierly sperm would come out of her ears”, thereby rendering her foreign policy more to Russia’s liking.

Say what you will about Nick Clegg, but our LibDem leader would never utter such a thing about a foreign politician, especially a lady. Not on video at any rate.

I found two things fascinating about Zhirinovsky’s tirade about our future king. First, it’s his interpretation of history.

Exactly how did the British monarchy destroy the Russian state? It’s true that both Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra were first cousins to George V, but that doesn’t make them British monarchs.

All European royal families were interrelated, and Nicholas’s exotic blood mix featured considerably more Danish blood than Russian. He was also first cousin to the Kaiser, which didn’t make him a German ruler either.

So even assuming for the sake of argument that Zhirinovsky blames Nicholas for destroying the Russian state, the tsar certainly didn’t do so because he was related to Queen Victoria. But the Russians have a particular knack for blaming others for their misfortunes.

What really amazed me about Zhirinovsky’s diatribe is his optimistic prognosis for Britain’s future. Though clearly not the best friend of our country, he’s predicting its growing infinitely more powerful than it is at present. Moreover, he expects not only the country to grow stronger, but also its monarchy.

How else will our future king be able to suck Russian blood by mid-century? English monarchs, or for that matter Britain, were unable to act in that capacity even when Britannia ruled the waves.

Does Zhirinovsky feel that the geopolitical balance will shift our way? And that our monarchs will have a bigger role to play? I do hope he’s right, but I fear he isn’t. In fact, his other prediction, about the Russian boots and the Indian Ocean, is much more likely to come true.

It’s amazing how historical reputations linger long after any reasonable justification for them is gone. Britain, struggling to hold on to her dwindling status, indeed sovereignty, in Europe, is a far cry from the greatest empire the world has ever known.

And even when it was the greatest empire the world has ever known, Britain was far from the world’s greatest blood sucker. Quite the opposite: the empire left a great legacy off which countries like India still live.

Russia too benefited from the creative energy coursing through the empire’s blood. It was the British who discovered and put at Russia’s disposal the first oil fields in the country. It was the British who created the great coal-producing region in the Ukraine.

Its centre is now called Donetsk. In the past it was called Stalino, but its original name was Yuzovka. Few Russians know the etymology of the name, but in fact it came from Hughes, the Welsh mining entrepreneur who developed the region.

Having said all that, it would be nice if in a few decades Britain could be strong enough to get something out of Russia, other than mafioso ‘businessmen’ and KGB assassins.

Zhirinovsky’s nightmare is my dream. Neither, I’m afraid, will come true. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the birth of their son, our future king.

Few of us will live to see his reign, but all of us can pray that it’ll be a happy one, over a peaceful, prosperous realm. Meanwhile we can rejoice.

We should also congratulate ourselves – not only on someone who was born but also on something that wasn’t: yet another act of constitutional vandalism.

God has interfered to avoid another exercise in subversion by our Prime Spiv Dave. Having already shoved through Parliament the law abandoning royal male primogeniture, he was waiting for endorsement from other Commonwealth countries to make sure that the monarch’s first child, regardless of sex, would inherit the throne.

Dave improbably styles himself as a conservative, so he must be aware of the virtue of prudence. This was expressed epigrammatically in 1641 by Lucius Cary, 2^nd Viscount Falkland: “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

As a true-blue conservative Dave must repeat those words every morning, before screaming, “Sam, have you run my bloody bath?” Therefore he must believe that abandoning the succession law that has existed for over a millennium was necessary.

May one enquire as to the nature of this necessity? What is it about the law of primogeniture that has let the country down? How has it run foul of the constitution?

It hasn’t. What the law of succession has run foul of is the sole faith by which our spivocrats live: political expediency. In search of a few extra votes that would keep them in power they’re ready to trample over the constitution, sovereignty, religion – anything.

You see, primogeniture violates the politically correct tenet of ‘gender equality’ (‘sex equality’ would be correct linguistically but not politically). That’s why our true-blue Dave won’t be held back by historical considerations.

Male primogeniture predates political correctness by centuries, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the next election, which Dave hopes to win by appealing to the intellectually and morally corrupted segment of the population.

It would be pointless trying to explain to him how cosmically wrong he is: he either wouldn’t understand or wouldn’t care. But those of us who do care must realise that the monarchy isn’t there to jump up and salute every time our spivs perch a newfangled piety on top of the totem pole.

In addition to their main duties, both the Church and the monarchy perform the vital function of linking the generations past, present and future.

Aware of this, the people of Britain and other European kingdoms have preserved their monarchies (with minor hiatuses here and there), even though they may have divested them of any real executive power.

However, they understand intuitively that dispensing with even the seemingly powerless monarchs would represent an irreplaceable loss. Unlike Walter Bagehot, they know that the monarchy is so much more than just “the decorative aspect” of the constitution.

As all those countries are now enthusiastically secular and ideologically democratic, few people there would be able to identify what it is that they would be reluctant to lose. If pressed, they would probably refer obliquely to ‘tradition’, without fully realising what it is.

Many would resent the thought that monarchies link their secular present with their Christian past, yet this is precisely what monarchies do. They are Christendom’s envoys to modernity, and even those people who would throw up their arms in horror at this suggestion will still hear vague, intuitive echoes in their souls.

Royal families remind them of the origin of their own families – kings and queens are their link to the past they ostensibly no longer cherish and to God in whom they ostensibly no longer believe.

This is whence they derive their sense of organic continuity, something they desperately, if often unwittingly, crave – and something that is denied to nations where monarchies no longer exist or have never existed.

They may not know exactly what they are missing, but rest assured that deep down they all know they are missing something vital, something they will not get from any secular creed – and certainly not from the nauseatingly puny cult of political correctness.

Just observe the intensity with which the royal birth was watched in the first two revolutionary republics of modernity, the USA and France. One can detect, among other things, a distinct longing for something not to be found in their own lands.

Dave and his jolly spivs don’t share such feelings. They long for nothing but power, their own and that of the new political class whose very existence is incompatible with England’s ancient constitution. So they yearn to destroy it.

The people of our country have proved to be either too indifferent or too weak to stop this act of constitutional vandalism, or many others like it. So thank God for His timely interference. It’s a boy!

 

In addition to his many sterling qualities, my friend Peter loves Mozart. So did Stalin and Beria, head of his secret police.

Yet in spite of this shared passion, never once have I heard Peter say anything nice about either chap. In fact, he loathes them and everything they stood for with the passion to be expected in any decent man.

For all her many fine qualities, my friend Daniele is a vegetarian. So were Hitler and Himmler, his head of the SS.

Yet in spite of this shared eating disorder, Daniele has never had anything nice to say about either villain. If asked I’m sure she’d express nothing short of revulsion for them.

This is natural. Both Peter and Daniele know that even as one swallow does not a summer make (or is it supper?), a single commendable commitment isn’t sufficient to chalk up either a despot or his state among the good things in life.

You’d think that all intelligent people would accept the general wisdom of this statement and apply it unfailingly to every particular situation. Well, if you think so you’re mistaken.

For recently I’ve met both in England and in France quite a few otherwise intelligent individuals who profess admiration for Putin’s Russia. Some have even converted to Russian Orthodoxy for that reason, or are contemplating such a step.

Why? Because they approve of Putin’s stand on ‘gay rights’. Shell-shocked by their own governments’ subversive slant towards homomarriage, they turn to Russia to find some residual sanity in the world.

The young editor of France’s only conservative magazine (which has once had my mug shot on the cover, I’ll have you know) told me at a party the other day that young French conservatives are confused.

They hate the rock into which France is calcifying so much that they don’t see Russia for the hard place that it is. “They like Putin because he hates gay rights,” said the editor. “So did bin Laden,” I replied. “Did they like him too?” “Well, they are confused,” admitted my young friend. “They don’t know where to turn.”

Our Home Secretary Theresa May is a professional politician. Therefore she has a weathervane’s certainty of exactly where to turn: wherever the wind is blowing.

That’s why she has decided not to hold a public inquiry into the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London. Instead she has appointed Robert Owen, a senior judge, to conduct an inquest in camera.

Now at the time he was poisoned by polonium 210 Litvinenko, formerly Putin’s colleague in the KGB, was a British subject. His murder was the first ever case of nuclear terrorism, probably a harbinger of things to come.

There’s little doubt that the crime was committed by the Russians, in all probability by one specific Russian, another KGB veteran Andrei Lugovoi. In any case, anyone familiar with Russia’s decision-making process will know that such an action had to be ordered by Putin personally.

Lugovoi was promptly charged with murder but managed to get away to Moscow. Britain’s extradition request was dismissed out of hand and, to make double sure, Lugovoi was hastily elected to the Duma, where he now enjoys parliamentary immunity.

The exotic weapon that killed Litvinenko was unique, but this method of dealing with critics of Putin isn’t. At least 40 journalists and political activists have been murdered on Putin’s watch, many more maimed, tortured or imprisoned. Just a few days ago Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most vociferous critic, was sentenced to five years in prison on a trumped-up fraud charge.

Without splitting too many taxonomic hairs, a regime that handles dissidents in this manner is fascist. Add to this suppression of the free press, all-pervasive corruption and the dictatorial powers wielded by Putin, and the fascist glove begins to fit ever more snugly.  

In the relatively recent past, any foreign power murdering a British subject, especially in Britain, wouldn’t have been regarded as a friend of ours. Its refusal to extradite the culprit would have been seen as sufficient grounds for severing diplomatic relations at least.

So what did our Home Secretary write to Judge Owen? “An inquest managed and run by an independent coroner is more readily explainable to some of our foreign partners, and the integrity of the process more readily grasped, than an inquiry, which has the power to see government material potentially relevant to their interests, in secret.”

If you can decipher Mrs May’s convoluted prose, which “foreign partners” do you think she means? Italy? Norway? But neither is implicated in the murder. Putin’s Russia is, and it’s her delicate sensibilities that our Home Secretary wishes to spare.

“It is true that international relations have been a factor in the government’s decision making,” she admitted rather superfluously.

International relations were also a factor in 1938 when Neville Chamberlain waved that piece of paper in the air. We all know what happened next – as a direct consequence of the attempt to appease a fascist chieftain.

Dare one say it, but perhaps our politicians would be on firmer ground if they occasionally treated British justice and Christian morality as “factors in their decision making”. Then fewer people would be confused in general and about Putin in particular.

If such, in Mrs May’s estimation, are our cherished “partners”, one wonders what her definition of an enemy would be. Any real conservative, would be my guess.

The Leader of the Free World seems to forget at times that he’s no longer a community organiser or a civil rights lawyer in a bad part of Chicago.

He’s in his second term as president of the United States. In this capacity he’s sworn to uphold the interests of the whole nation, most of which is still white.

His comments on the Trayvon Martin case point at a conflict between his brain and his heart. The upper organ put him on the right track by making him say that “the jury has spoken” and leaving it at that.

However, the lower organ was restless. You see, Obama is black. Actually, saying that is being unfair to his white mother, who is implicitly discounted as an annoying irrelevance. It’s as if Obama père had produced little Barack Hussein by parthenogenesis.

Yet both the black community in America and the left half of the white one still appear to be living by Jim Crow laws. In the old days white racists in places like Alabama would hiss “a drop of tar, all nigger”. Though ‘liberal’ Americans eschew the ‘n’ word nowadays, they seem to live by the principles that inspired its formerly wide use.

That makes Barack Hussein unreservedly black, in most people’s minds probably, in his own definitely. Without in any way suggesting that his heart is black morally, it evidently is racially.

Thus last week Obama had to make two statements in addition to the commendable one that had come from his brain. In one he opined that if he had a son, the boy would look like Trayvon Martin. What, dead? Presumably, Barack Hussein didn’t mean that.

Then Obama made a surprise appearance in the White House press room to inform the furiously scribbling pundits that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

When that eye-opening statement was communicated to the country, many sighed wistfully. Considering Obama’s record in office, the thought that he could have been shot in self-defence at age 16 wasn’t without appeal.

Obama’s head knew better than to question the jury verdict based on a long trial in which dozens of witnesses were heard, 250 pages of evidence were presented, and the defence made its case.

He probably also realises that to call for the case to be retried in the federal human-rights court would only lead to more violent riots all across the country. This is something professional blacks like Al Sharpton wish to see, but for a president to share such cravings would be going a bit too far.

But the president’s heart overrode his head, making him meet Sharpton halfway. “There are very few African-American men,” said the president, “who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happened to me – at least before I was a senator.” Connotation running riot; denotation fleeing in disarray.

Has he ever wondered why those locks click? Is it because of white America’s congenital Negrophobia? Is it because white Americans are ignorant of the facts of life? Or is it precisely because they do know them?

New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly certainly does. According to him, blacks and Hispanics commit 96 percent of all crimes in the city, with 98 percent of all gun assaults and muggings.

Fernando Mateo, himself both a black and a Hispanic, heads the New York taxicab union. According to him, “The God’s honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing cab drivers are blacks and Hispanics.”

What about interracial crimes then? There’s no shortage of those, according to the FBI study for 2007, cited in Pat Buchanan’s book Suicide of a Superpower. Except that 433,934 such crimes were committed by blacks on whites – four times the number of those going the other way. Blacks also perpetrated 14,000 assaults on white women – with exactly zero committed by white men on black women.

That’s why, Mr President, those locks click on car doors when a black man walks down the street. Americans aren’t racist, at least not en masse. They’re just prudent. They know what to expect from a group in which 73 percent of all children are born on the wrong side of the blanket.

Obviously, the Leader of the Free World knows such facts – in his head. But his heart doesn’t want to know.

Mr Obama really ought to confine his thinking to his brain, rather than other parts of his anatomy. That way he’d make fewer people in America and elsewhere wish he had indeed suffered Trayvon Martin’s fate 35 years ago.

Much has been written about the burden placed on the fragile shoulders of our treasury by the huge influx of immigrants from alien cultures.

Coming from lands utterly corrupted by either Islam or communism, many of them can’t pay their way in a Western economy. Alas, nowadays Western economies are conditioned to open their coffers to those who shouldn’t have access to them.

Hence the ruinous public spending which is the primary cause of the current crisis. Hence also the rapidly declining quality of our legislators who now have a glorious opportunity to bribe their way to power.

All they have to do to make sure Paul will vote for them is rob Peter and transfer the loot Paul’s way. And this points at the gravest damage done by the immigration deluge. It isn’t financial. It’s moral.

Rather than adapting to our ways, all those Romanian or Bulgarian gypsies and especially Muslims from Asia or Africa want to impose their ways on us.

When their numbers reach a certain critical mass, the damage becomes incalculable. It’s noticeable in our schools, with many – in some places most – pupils unable to speak English properly. Our hospitals also suffer, what with many doctors’ qualifications not meeting civilised standards. The traditional practices of our founding religion are becoming offensive to millions, who have to be mollified and mollycoddled.

Perhaps even the greater damage is political. I’ve already mentioned that vast communities where few people are employed pave the way to Westminster for out-and-out spivs, and that’s bad enough. For it’s these spivs who make all those outrages possible, with the acquiescence of a largely inert populace.

But predominantly Muslim communities, whose number is mushrooming, also wash ashore at Westminster the flotsam of real creepy-crawlies. Such as David Ward, LibDem MP for Bradford East, where few Christians are to be found.

Every time I write about this creature, I feel the urge to run a damp cloth over the keyboard afterwards. For Ward is a virulent, zoological anti-Semite.

He isn’t the only one, it has to be said. This little idiosyncrasy is reasonably widespread, and even some outstanding people aren’t immune to it – Chesterton comes to mind, along with Belloc, Waugh, Kingsley Amis, perhaps even Shakespeare.

Closer to our time, one can think of a few anti-Semitic politicians, specifically within the ranks of the SDP, the predecessor of today’s LibDems. One gets the impression that perhaps they misunderstand the meaning of the word ‘liberal’ in their party name.

However, in the past such politicians this side of Oswald Mosley kept that charming trait to themselves, when addressing a wide audience at any rate. The creepy-crawly Ward doesn’t feel he has to. On the contrary, he knows that the more hatred towards Jews he evinces, the more he’ll appeal to his voters.

Hence he keeps talking about the ‘Jewish atrocities’ in Palestine, feigning dismay that “the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps, be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians… and continue to do so.”

When Ward first tweeted this drivel, he received a mild slap on the wrist from Nick Clegg, who threatened to withdraw the party whip. Ward offered a feeble apology, but only after stating that he and his party had ‘a difference of opinion.’

That happened in January, when he was also told to use ‘proportionate and precise language’ henceforth. The party bosses should have been careful what they wished for. Ward’s idea of ‘precise language’ would doubtless be saying that it’s a pity Hitler didn’t quite finish the job, leaving so much for the Muslims to mop up.

Two days ago he came close to such precision by tweeting more hateful nonsense: “At long last the Zionists are losing the battle – how long can the apartheid State of Israel last?”

If this ‘apartheid state’ ceases to exist, say after a military defeat, millions of Jews will be murdered on the spot, an outcome Ward would no doubt applaud. Such a heartfelt sentiment deserved a slap on the other wrist, and it promptly came.

Ward had the party whip suspended for two months – exactly the two months during which Parliament will be in recess anyway. According to the party bosses, his offence was again in using “disproportionate and imprecise language.”

This sort of thing, the letter explained, makes it hard for the party to criticise Israel, something it dearly wants to do, especially when it comes to “addressing the plight of the Palestinian people.”

Perhaps the party could do better by criticising not Israel but the crazed fanatics threatening to “push it into the sea.”

This isn’t to say that Israel is beyond criticism. In this world we’re blessed with neither ideal states nor perfect institutions, and Israel is far from being paradise on earth. However, it’s surrounded by hell on earth – and it’s this hell that Israel keeps at bay for all our sakes.

The State of Israel has been thrust in the role of vanguard in the West’s conflict with Islam. This conflict predates Israel by about 1,400 years, so it can hardly be blamed for instigating the hostilities.

According to Descartes, all knowledge comes either from intuition or from comparing two or more things, and this is one thing he got right.

So by all means the LibDems and the rest of us should criticise Israel, if such is our wish. But while doing so, do let’s compare it to every other state in the region, along with its profusion of terrorist gangs. If Descartes was right, then knowledge will emerge at the other end: Israel, for all its imperfections, is civilised, and the other lot aren’t.

Far be it from me to say that any criticism of Israel betokens anti-Semitism – as long as we agree that some definitely does. In his rants Ward uses ‘Israel’ as shorthand for world Jewry and ‘Zionists’ as simply another word for Jews, whom he hates viscerally.

The derisory punishment for voicing such sentiments brings into question his party’s stand on such issues. My guess is that no further chastisement is forthcoming: Nick will hate to lose one of his handful of remaining MPs. It goes without saying that political considerations trump all others.