Month: November 2014

Sir John, who, I don’t mind admitting, is my political, moral and intellectual idol, hit the nail on the head the other day, with Ukip being the nail and Nigel Farage the head.

Ukip, explained my idol, “is peddling sheer nastiness” that is “profoundly un-British in every way”.

In my case he was preaching to the choir, for I never diverge from Sir John’s judgement on anything. But, for the benefit of the nay-sayers among my readers (and God knows there are plenty of those), I rang Sir John up and asked him to enlarge on his concept of Britishness, so egregiously betrayed by Ukip.

The great man kindly took some time from his busy schedule of planning his season at the Oval and Lords to talk to me and, vicariously, to you. This is what he said:

“They are anti-everything. They are anti-politics, they are anti-foreigner, they are anti-immigrant, they are anti-aid.

“That’s un-British. Real Brits are never anti-anything. Except Ukip, that is, especially when they’re about to commit the ultimately un-British, treasonous act of winning another parliamentary seat from the Tories.

“For example, both Norma and Edwina are real Brits. That’s why they’re up for anything and down on nothing and, well, no one.

“So I asked them if they agreed with my judgement of Ukip. Now Norma and Edwina don’t always agree on everything and hardly ever on me, I mean with me.

“But here they refused to sit on the fence, or anything else for that matter. Yes, John, they said, you’re absolutely right.

“You were the best prime minister Britain has ever had, and you were for things, not against them. You were a pro kind of bloke and never a con.

“False modesty aside, I had to concur. I have deep convictions that are none of them negative, like Ukip’s. They’re all positive, even if the consequences of practising them sometimes weren’t.

“For example, I was very positive about Maggie when she was positive about me, all the way to making me Chancellor.

“Then I was equally positive about the chaps who stabbed Maggie in the back after she turned negative on me. John, she said, could make a good doorstop and that’s about it. Well, served her right, that… Sorry, I must remain positive.

“When I became prime minister, I was positive about Europe or, to be specific, the European Union.

“That’s why I signed the Maastricht Treaty with nary a negative thought in mind.

“Why? Because we’d had a good innings as an independent nation and what did we have to show for it? That… Maggie Thatcher.

“I felt it was time to say yes to all the good things in life: German bratwurst, Italian pasta, French wine, Romanian… well, you know what I mean.

“And the only way to enjoy all those wonderful things was to hand our so-called sovereignty to the Germans, French, Italians and yes, I stand by my convictions, Romanians.

“Hanging on to our so-called sovereignty was putting the negative cart before the positive horse, or leg before wicket, if you’d rather.

“I also felt positive about the single European currency. Part of the reason is that on my European travels I could never quite figure out how much a pack of Y-fronts cost in real money.

“Arithmetic was never my strong suit, which is why in my youth I failed the bus-conductor exam and decided to become prime minister instead.

“So, in my positive state of mind, I put Britain in the ERM and on course to joining the single currency designed to make us as successful as our oldest ally Portugal.

“The anti-everything bastards point out that as an immediate result Britain lost £3.4 billion, but I like to look on the bright, British side: my true Brit friend George Soros made £1 billion out of it and, apart from the EU, who better to spend our money for us?

“And I’m still as positive about the EU as I’ve always been. Outside the EU we’ll never become as prosperous as our oldest ally Portugal is. Or our newest ally Bulgaria.

“That’s what being British is all about. It’s also about sharing, and Norma and Edwina agree wholeheartedly, in that particularly British way of theirs.

“So I applaud my very British friend Dave for being ready to share our wealth, which we owe to the EU in any case.

“Dave is about to spend another £600 million on flood defences in Africa, which is a British thing to do.

“Those anti-everything Ukip bastards scream that Somerset is about to be hit by the worst floods in history, and there’s no money in the kitty to do anything about it.

“Charity, they say, begins at home, and trust them to come up with a phrase no real Brit has ever heard.

“What begins at home, you negative un-British bastards, isn’t charity but sheer nastiness.

“Transferring funds for fighting Ebola and Children in Need, I mean helping children in need, not fighting them, is British. Voting for Ukip isn’t.

“Why do people do it? Even though these bastards are anti-children and Ebola victims?

“Out of sheer frustration with the ongoing recession, the belief they are being left behind our oldest ally Portugal and our newest ally Bulgaria.

“The counterpoint to that, and I hope, Alex, you don’t mind the posh term, it means the British alternative, is to banish the negative thoughts and vote Tory or, at a pinch, Labour.

“You know and I know and your British readers know, that the economy will improve soon, by the end of next April to be exact.

“For as long as the coalition remains positive about getting our national debt up to two trillion, that’s 2.25 trillion euros by the way, the economy has nowhere to go but up.

“And once my friend Dave gets it up, people will again feel positive. They’ll feel British – unlike those nasty nattering negativists of Ukip.”        

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

Arithmetic and statistics are useful tools for liars. A little massaging here, a little bending there, and suddenly a lie sounds plausible.

When it comes to liars in our government, they don’t have to distort their sums to make a false point. All it takes is applying arithmetic to issues that cry out for more sophisticated tools, those requiring more than just the ability to add and subtract.

The recently released report on the economic effects of EU immigration is a case in point.

Reducing the whole complex argument to a simple calculation, our leaders added up the amount of tax EU immigrants have paid, subtracted the amount of benefits they’ve received, including their use of social services, and declared triumphantly that the difference is plus £5 billion or some such.

Considering such clear-cut advantages, the likes of John Major must be downright daft when they beg those stern EU officials to agree, in their munificence, to let us reduce the scale of immigration.

If the 243,000 migrants arriving from Europe in the year ending in March 2014 delivered five billion to our economy, then, say, 20 million of them would add half a trillion, a third of our national debt. And 60 million would wipe the debt off altogether. So why not fling our doors open even wider?

This report deceives by asserting implicitly that the economic effect of mass immigration is easy to calculate. It isn’t.

A little illustration, if I may. Confronted with a choice of earning £2,000 a month at a local garage or receiving £1,500 from ‘social’, a Polish welder commendably chooses the dignity of honest labour.

Ostensibly the Exchequer thus saves £1,500 it otherwise would have to pay out, while getting an extra £600 or thereabouts in tax.

Granted, the welder and his family will be using the NHS and his children will get the full benefit of our ‘free education’ (which is in fact neither). But the net effect of his presence in England still looks positive, which is what the report seeks to prove.

However, do let us take a closer look at the arithmetic, before we consider more serious matters. If the Pole hadn’t graced our shores with his presence, how would the welder vacancy have been filled?

When a garage needs a welder, it can’t do without one. Hence it would have hired a native-born worker, and don’t tell me that, even considering the catastrophe going by the name of our comprehensive education, a Brit can’t be taught how to weld.

That same Brit now goes unemployed, collecting instead the same £1,500 the Pole would have picked up had he not taken the job.

Also, had the garage hired Kevin instead of Zbigniew, the Brit would probably have been paid more.

As I can tell you from my own experience going back to the time long before either Kevin or Zbigniew was born, new arrivals are so desperate for a job they’ll accept derisory pay. To expect that employers wouldn’t take advantage of their plight constitutes a woeful misreading of the innate fallibility of man.

A higher pay would have meant a higher tax, making the Exchequer even better off. By contrast, the overall downward pressure on wages exerted by new arrivals, makes employment less desirable for Brits, and welfare more so. After all, expecting people to work when they can get the same income by doing nothing would again be presuming too much on human goodness.

All things considered, the economic balance sheet begins to look much less attractive than the government report wants us to believe.

These are just the most transparent falsehoods. Among the hidden costs, quite apart from the unbearable extra pressure on our already creaking social services, is the toll exacted on the whole infrastructure.

Take our streets and roads, as one example among many. With a quarter million new arrivals every year (and this is just from the EU), British thoroughfares are becoming more crowded than ever, which increases the number of accidents, especially since not all immigrants come from countries where they have to take a stringent driving test.

And, again spoken from personal experience, even a competent driver needs quite some time to adjust to driving on the left. Meanwhile he’s likely to cause an accident, potentially requiring more NHS time.

Also increasing is the wear and tear of road surfaces, necessitating more frequent repair works and again making accidents more likely.

These are small and seemingly trivial examples, but they add up with sufficient persuasiveness to make us abhor the statistical larceny of the report.

Another, still purely arithmetical, falsehood is treating all immigrants from the EU as a homogeneous group, wherein average numbers actually mean something.

If you take the Duke of Westminster, Richard Branson and every member of my family, our average annual income will be in eight digits. On the basis of this perfectly accurate statistic, what do you think you’ve learned? The square root of zilch, is the answer.

Contrary to the assurances of EU champions, there isn’t, nor will there ever be, such a thing as a single European nation. Europe may cease to be an aggregate of states, but it will for ever remain an aggregate of nations.

And looking at, say, France and Bulgaria, it takes a blind man not to see they’re as different from each other as either of them is from Peru or Mexico.

Lumping together a French banker pulling down £1,000,000 a year in the City and a Romany beggar harassing pedestrians in Piccadilly can be done for one purpose only: to cheat.

All in all calculating the overall economic effect of mass EU immigration is difficult, but it’s not impossible. It would, however, take serious thought along with much gathering and classification of information, putting into the equation infinitely more variables than the half dozen or so used in the report.

What’s impossible to calculate is the cultural and social damage.

All arrivals from the EU have been raised in a culture and under a legal system based on different or, in the case of Eastern Europe, diametrically opposite principles from ours. The aforementioned French banker may be trusted to adapt, but what about the aforementioned Romany beggar?

Again the government resorts to the same trick of lumping the two together. This is sufficient to claim that crime falls, rather than rises, in areas where many immigrants live.

True enough, the arrival of thousands of French families into my part of London hasn’t noticeably made the streets unsafe to walk. But areas blessed with the blight of heavy Romanian and Bulgarian influx report altogether different results.

Yet even supposing that all EU immigrants are well-behaved, law-abiding and generally angelic, their presence beyond a certain critical mass is destructive.

A few thousand Poles here or there would add to the rich panoply of life, and I for one like the odd authentically Polish meal in a local restaurant. However, a few million of them, plus tens of millions of other foreigners, may well change England beyond a point where it remains England.

Such an outcome is precisely what the EU, aided and abetted by our ruling elite, craves. And, considering the credulity, or perhaps indifference, of a growing swathe of our population, they may just get what they want.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

The famous, if probably apocryphal, headline in a London newspaper said “Fog over Channel, continent cut off.”

Whether real or made up, the phrase has become proverbial for the same reason proverbs become proverbial: it conveys a simple truth.

People tend to view geography from the vantage point of their own country. It is central; other lands are peripheral.

Never mind that the continent is somewhat larger than Britain. For an Englishman his country is larger than life.

The headline proceeds from this assumption and yet also has a chuckle about it. Sure enough, most Englishmen would agree with Cecil Rhodes that “to be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life.” But they’ll do so with an ironic and self-deprecating smile.

It’s partly because of its ability to laugh at itself that this island has never become insular. While singing about England’s green and pleasant land providing the site for a new Jerusalem, the country has always happily intermingled and traded with other nations in every corner of His creation.

Russia lacks this ability. Her patriotism is served neat, undiluted by self-irony, good taste or any sense of history and her real place in it. That’s a heady drink, with enough punch to intoxicate the nation into crazy behaviour.

Thus for much of her history Russia, despite straddling two continents, has found herself in isolation from the rest of the world. Or rather, it is the world that has been isolated from the glorious Third Rome, if the Russians are to be believed.

If the world refuses to share Russia’s view of herself, she can go it alone. If the world isn’t with Russia, it’s against her, and so much the worse for the world.

It’s in the context of this mentality that Putin’s Russia and her current actions are to be viewed. Perceiving correctly that the demob-happy West has neither the stomach nor the wherewithal to fight, Putin has begun an aggressive war against a sovereign European state.

In spite of that the West has refused to let on that it’s aware of the savage nature of Putin’s Russia. In spite of imposing mildly painful punitive sanctions, Western leaders continue to wipe Putin’s sputum off their faces and invite him to come back into their eagerly awaiting embrace.

One such invitation was to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, and you’d think Putin would RSVP with an enthusiastic acceptance.

Here’s his chance to present Russia’s case, which does need presenting. As the sanctions, feeble though they are, begin to bite, gnawing at Russia’s brittle economic bones, and the price of oil drops below $80 a barrel (at least $20 under the level at which Russia’s Nigeria-style economy can remain solvent), what better moment to negotiate? What better time to fake friendliness even if it’s not sincerely felt?

Instead Russia crumbled the proffered invitation and flung it into the West’s face. Neither Putin nor even his poodle Medvedev will be attending the Davos talk shop, it has been declared.

The underlying message is as simple as it’s eternal to Russia. If the West, and industrialised East, choose to isolate themselves from Russia, let them. With Putin in the lead, and his poodle on the lead, Russia will henceforth decline any mollifying peace offers.

Meanwhile, Russian tanks and personnel carriers are driving into the Ukraine, with President Poroshenko honestly admitting they can’t be stopped by any military means. The Ukraine has to rely on ‘negotiations’ instead, which is akin to negotiating with a mugger to leave you two quid for the bus fare home.

For the first time since 1945 a European country is being dismembered by invaders. However, in this instance the invader has no just cause.

The situation is fraught with danger. By refusing every overture offered by the West, Putin is painting himself into a corner and may feel he has to fight his way out.

The West doesn’t have much room for manoeuvre either. Just like those Left Bank Parisians shrugging their shoulders and asking rhetorically “Mourir pour Danzig?” in 1939, it’s reasonably clear that Europeans won’t want to die for Kiev in 2014.

Even if they felt differently, Nato no longer has enough presence in Europe to stop Putin’s tanks in their tracks. The only possible restraining mechanism is the same one that so far has prevented major wars in Europe since 1945: and it’s not the EU, as it mendaciously claims. It’s the American nuclear umbrella.

However, by effectively declaring war on what’s left of our civilisation, Putin implies he has no fear that this umbrella will be opened over Russian cities as he’s devastating Ukrainian ones. He’s probably right.

So what countermeasures are left? More sanctions? Driving the price of oil down artificially?

Such measures may prove devastating to a country where millions already subsist on the brink of starvation. Yet anyone who thinks that starving Russians are ever a burning concern for Russian leaders, should read a few textbooks on modern Russian history.

Putin’s billions are intact in Western banks, and so are the billions of his cronies. If not all of them can have access to their purloined wealth at the moment, so what?

Their money will simply accrue interest, while Russia finds herself one on one with the world – not for the first time, nor for the last. It’s just that at this time the world seems more impotent than ever.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being constitutionally unable to admire demagogues, whatever their sermon, I could never warm up to Martin Luther King.

This isn’t to say that his cause, as generally perceived, wasn’t just. Racial discrimination is abominable on every level, moral, practical, legal, intellectual – and above all religious.

How self-professed Christians, who had equality inscribed even on their secular banners, could enforce Jim Crow segregation laws until 1965, is a question I’ve always found baffling.

The same way, I suppose the answer should be, as Thomas Jefferson, the man who did the actual inscribing, could whip his slaves to mincemeat for trying to escape or breed them (at times personally) using the same husbandry methods that worked a treat on livestock.

It’s clear that even in his time, to say nothing of ours, there was a large gap between a politician’s actions, indeed beliefs, in private and his pronouncements in public. Demagoguery is there to fill the gap, and it generally does a good job unless what’s to be filled isn’t so much a gap as a chasm.

When this is the case, private actions can jeopardise the cause championed by the politician. Res privata can destroy res publica.

The destruction can be especially severe when the politician spends his spare time in Sodom and Gomorrah while preaching from the pulpit the moral delights of the garden of Eden.

Yet King’s public cause was so just that it survived his wholehearted attempts to undermine it by his private dissolution. What is truly amazing is that his personal reputation has also survived intact. In fact, King has been elevated to secular sainthood, and woe betide anyone attempting to remove or sully his halo.

It’s in this context that one should read a letter written to King by one of J. Edgar Hoover’s deputies, generally believed to be William C. Sullivan.

(I inserted the disclaimer simply because the author of the letter describes King as “a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes”, and Sullivan appears to be white in his photographs.)

In a way the precise authorship of the missive is a matter of academic interest only, for it’s clear it came from the highest echelons of the FBI.

The author attaches the tapes secretly recorded by FBI taps on King’s phone and bugs in his hotel rooms, a surveillance programme authorised by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

He issued that authorisation because an investigation had shown that Stanley Levinson, one of King’s trusted advisers, was a CPUSA member and Soviet spy through whom KGB funds were pumped into the civil rights movement.

In other words, the Soviets were using the movement for their own nefarious purposes in exactly the same way they used their entire network of front organisations, such as our own dear CND.

This justified the taps, yet they yielded results that had more to do with perversion than subversion. For King’s sex life, as revealed by the recordings, made Sodom look like a kindergarten outing to the Science Museum.

The author of the letter enclosed the tapes and commented on their content in a language of moral outrage that no politician of today would either feel or dare express.

Suggesting that King’s “immoral conduct [was] lower than that of a beast”, the author vented his feelings with unremitting gusto. Here are some scattered fragments (I retain the original syntax and spelling):

“You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that.”

“…a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile…”

Listen to the tapes and “you will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time…”

“…you will find… your filthy, dirty evil companions, male and female giving expression with you to your hidious abnormalities.”

“Satan could not do more.”

“Listen to yourself you filthy abnormal animal…”

The author then promised to publish the transcripts in 34 days, thereby destroying King for ever. However, he offered the addressee the honourable way out: suicide.

This was akin to an officers’ court convicting one of their comrades of dishonourable conduct and leaving him in a room alone with a bottle of whisky and a loaded revolver.

Since Martin Luther King was neither an officer nor a gentleman, it wasn’t his own bullet that ended his life. Yet the facts caught on tape, apart from the allusion to homosexual orgies, were widely known at the time.

Both King’s wife Coretta and his second in command Ralph Abernathy begged him to modify his behaviour, but in vain. King ignored Ralph and beat Coretta, another practice that doesn’t exactly jibe with secular canonisation.

The transcripts were never published in King’s lifetime, and he denied all charges of dissolution, prompting Hoover to call him “the most notorious liar in the country”.

Hoover judging someone else’s sexual morality may make the words ‘teapot’ and ‘kettle’ pop up in one’s mind. But, unlike King, Hoover neither sought nor received a posthumous reputation for rectitude.

Don’t know about you, but I experience intense Schadenfreude every time a leftie idol is brought down a peg or two. The question is, does a leader’s personal behaviour cast aspersion on his cause?

I can only answer this with a resounding ‘it depends’ – on the nature of the cause and the degree of misbehaviour. Privately though, I have to fight nausea every time I see someone living in the gutter trying to claim high moral ground.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

No doubt remembering that the devil finds work for idle hands, my friend Vlad has been a busy boy.

Thereby he has stayed on the side of the angels, even though not every one of his numerous exploits can be truthfully described as angelic.

For example, his Chinese hosts took exception to Vlad’s chivalrous gesture of wrapping a shawl around the shoulders of Peng Liyuan, President Xi Jinping’s wife.

That act of avuncular kindness was mistaken for a flirtatious pick-up attempt, which it probably wasn’t. The only thing Vlad could be accused of was ignorance of foreign mores, but that’s only a minor misdemeanour.

Other accusations fall more into the area of felony. For example, Vlad’s tanks are driving into the Ukraine, in defiance of the treaties, which, to be fair, no one this side of Peter Hitchens ever took seriously.

At the same time Vlad has been sending his warplanes on missions either invading the airspace of still independent nations or coming dangerously close to it.

Nato interceptors are being scrambled on a scale not seen since the Cold War, with Putin’s nuclear bombers overflying, well, the world. His tireless airborne activity has scared the wits out of Norwegians, Estonians, Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Canadians and even Californians.

At the same time Vlad has made arrangements to flog eight nuclear reactors to Iran, and there I was, thinking he was concerned about the Islamic threat. That bit of news upset me.

After all, since all the world leaders agree, in deed if not yet in word, that Iran is going to become a nuclear power come what may, it would be better if the Ayatollahs’ billions went to a Western country, such as France.

But what caught my eye more than anything else is Vlad’s foray into scholarly pursuits, specifically history.

Displaying the catholicity of interests not seen in any Soviet leader since Stalin, Vlad gathered historians together and taught them, well, history.

Or, to be more exact, he taught them how to teach history, to what purpose and based on which premises.

Vlad began by saying “Russia’s past was amazing, her present is more than marvellous and, as for the future, it’s greater than anything the wildest imagination could picture – that is the point of view for examining and writing Russian history.”

Oops, I’ve failed to check my sources yet again: Vlad didn’t say that. The author of that stimulating directive was actually Count Benckendorff (d. 1844), head of Russia’s secret police in the reign of Nicholas I.

Mea culpa, but I do plead extenuating circumstances. For what Vlad actually said faithfully reflected the spirit of Benckendorff’s command, and came close to reflecting the letter as well.

Not to cut too fine a point, Putin ordered historians to fiddle facts in the interests of the state.

A historian’s task, he orated, consists in defending “our views and interests”. He, the historian, must “convince the overwhelming majority of citizens that our approaches  are correct and objective [or rather]… win the battle for the minds, encouraging the people to adopt an active position on the basis of the knowledge you present as objective.”

To achieve this ambitious goal, “the content must be good, and the wrapper must be lurid and impressive”.

Benckendorff expressed himself more eloquently, but it’s the thought that counts, and the similarity between the two secret policemen that charms. Then again, Putin did say on 9 May that “continuity of generations is our chief asset”.

Another parallel I’ve unsuccessfully tried to suppress is between Putin’s lesson to historians and Stalin’s to writers.

In 1932 Putin’s idol assembled as many scribes as could fit into Gorky’s house and unveiled socialist realism, one artistic discipline obligatory for all.

The perplexed heirs to Tolstoy were more than ready to comply but, in order to avoid potentially fatal mistakes, begged the leader for a clarification. What exactly is socialist realism? “Write the truth,” explained Stalin. “That’s what socialist realism is all about.”

Eighty-two years later similarly inspired historians asked today’s leader to illustrate his meaning on the example of any event of the past.

Vlad kindly obliged, overturning with a magisterial swipe of hand every fact accepted as such by any historian pursuing the truth, rather than ‘our interests’.

An example, is that what you want? Well, here it is: the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Toxic falsifiers of history claim that it pushed the button for the Second World War. The two most satanic regimes in history formed an ad hoc alliance to divide Europe between them.

Both predators intended to attack the new ally at the first opportunity, with the victor feasting on the spoils of pan-European, and prospectively global, conquest. Meanwhile, they kicked off history’s most devastating war by assaulting Poland from two sides.

Yet, if we accept Putin’s belief that truth is anything that advances his interests, none of this is true.

The pact, explained Vlad, proved Stalin’s peaceful intentions. And as to Poland, she had only herself to blame. Didn’t she grab a chunk of Czechoslovakia in 1938, when the Germans moved in?

Well then, the subsequent bilateral rape of Poland merely evened the accounts (“scored an equalising puck”, was how Vlad put it, somewhat frivolously, in the terms of his beloved ice hockey).

Hence Poland was at least as culpable for starting the war as Hitler and infinitely more than Stalin – such is the truth, as the word is used in the name of Putin’s favourite newspaper (Pravda is the Russian for truth).

The real truth, as known to every serious historian beyond the reach of Putin’s thugs, is somewhat different. None of them disputes that Stalin planned to conquer Europe, striking the Nazis in the back when they were bogged down in the western theatre.

The only disagreement concerns the date of the planned invasion. Some think Hitler beat Stalin to the punch by days, others by weeks, still others by months. The question to all of them isn’t if but when.

Such historians have facts on their side. For the Soviets had embarked on a military build-up unseen in history either before or since. By turning his enslaved, starving nation into a military cum concentration camp, Stalin mobilised the country’s resources to one end only: achieving military supremacy.

That things didn’t quite pan out the way Putin’s idol had planned shouldn’t distract us from the gruesome reality.

As of 1 June, 1941, the Soviets had 25,479 frontline tanks, as opposed to Germany’s 6,292, and 24,488 warplanes against Germany’s 6,852. The quality of the planes was comparable, but the quality of the tanks wasn’t: the Soviet machines were infinitely superior.

Their KV and T-34 didn’t have any German analogues until Stalingrad, and most of the Soviet ‘obsolete’ tanks, such as the 25.2-tonne T-28 armed with a 76mm cannon, were more than a match even for the Germans’ best tank T-IV (20-22.3 tonnes, 75mm).

The Soviets had more airborne troops than the rest of the world combined, and paratroops are only ever used for offensive purposes. These formed a significant chunk of the Soviet forces deployed in the west of the country before Hitler struck on 22 June, 1941.

The Soviets enjoyed a more than 2:1 superiority over the Nazis in the armies facing each other in Poland (with infinitely greater reserves), and both juggernauts were deployed in a strictly offensive battle order, putting a premium on first strike.

Stalin’s army formed two long salients aimed at the heart of Germany. This formation made them exceedingly vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike, as Nazi generals went on to demonstrate.

Cutting the Lvov and Bialystok salients at the base rendered them ripe for a series of lethal envelopments, which the Germans executed with well-drilled élan. The ensuing rout of Stalin’s regular army gave rise to the subsequent lies about his ‘peaceful intentions’.

Scientific historians have long since dispelled the lies for what they are. But Vlad doesn’t want Russian historians to be scientists. He wants them to be agitprop hacks – and I for one trust Vlad to get exactly what he wants.

This fiddler on the hoof can be as persuasive as Stalin, albeit still on a smaller scale.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

 

 

The debate about the European Arrest Warrant  predictably produced an ungainly mess. The pro and con sides mounted their rhetorical steeds and rode them into the joust, with only our constitution unsaddled in the end.

In the process Dave came within nine votes of losing the Commons, which may yet become a big problem for him. What is already a gigantic problem for us is that neither side seemed to understand the real issue at stake.

The Warrant effectively replaces, yet again, the law of our nation with the quasi-legal denationalised regulations imposed by the EU.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the English Common Law is inadequate when it comes to extradition, which inadequacy may at times be detrimental to justice.

Yet superseding it with a law of foreign provenance will do infinitely more damage even in the short term. Over time this will prove catastrophic.

Essentially the Warrant will enable police officers from any EU country to arrest, or demand practically instant extradition of, any British subject for any transgression, regardless of whether or not it would be illegal in the UK.

The argument in favour of this crypto-totalitarian measure is that career criminals will presumably find it harder to stay on the run. That may be, although I doubt that the few lifelong fugitives one has heard of will ever present a serious danger to our constitution.

But one way or the other it doesn’t really matter. The constitutional issues at stake are much more vital than the purely utilitarian considerations.

Britain has by far the best and the oldest system of justice in Europe. It’s not ideal, for nothing in this world is, except perhaps a decent single malt after dinner.

However, eschewing absolute standards in favour of relative ones, there’s nothing about our laws for which we have to apologise to anyone in Europe, including its most civilised parts.

If our laws are being abused or not applied properly, then such mechanical problems must be fixed internally. However, replacing our laws with those of different provenance, different principles and different design is tantamount to ditching a car because its ashtray is full.

Many cornerstones of the English Common Law, such as jury trial, the right to refuse to provide self-incriminating evidence, double jeopardy, habeas corpus etc., either don’t exist in many European countries or are treated as mere statements of intent.

And even in places where they do exist, such cornerstones have no patina of age that can only come from centuries of trial and error.

I for one would hate to be tried in a country where a mere generation ago people were put into concentration camps for disagreeing with the government, especially if my crime wouldn’t be treated as such in Britain.

If, after committing such a non-crime in, say, Bucharest and then returning home, I’d hate to find at my London doorstep a couple of Romanian cops armed with handcuffs and the European Arrest Warrant. So would any Brit, and some have suffered this outrage already.

By debating this vital issue solely, or even mainly, on the basis of utilitarian considerations, our MPs show how little they understand the very essence of their country.

Dave’s flagship policy, that of scrapping the Human Rights Act and replacing it with a new Bill of Rights, guaranteeing, among other novelties, freedom of the press we’ve had since at least William III, shows exactly the same failing.

Given the choice between the two documents, any right-thinking person would instantly cast his vote for neither.

The very philosophy of the English law precludes any need for a written document to enshrine a practice that has already been enshrined by centuries of experience.

We don’t need the state to protect our traditional liberties. We need to have our traditional liberties protected from the state.

When the state attacks such liberties, which it does with increasing regularity, the counterattack can be launched in the time-honoured battleground of our own courts and Parliament – no help from a piece of paper is needed, thank you very much.

That Blair’s Human Rights Act, policed by the European Court of Human Rights, is toxic is beyond dispute (just consider the source). But Dave’s brainchild, another Bill of Rights, is just as defective in the context of the world’s most ancient extant constitution.

And you know what is the scariest thing of all? That such things need saying at all – in a country that centuries ago showed the world the value of just laws based on national experience lovingly collected and passed on from one generation to the next.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

   

Dave tried to move Angie closer and turn her around. “Assume a more flexible position, Liebchen,” he said.

“Nein,” gasped Angie, “nein, bitte, nein…”

“Nine?” thundered Dave. “Eight-fifty and not a million more!” He spun around and left.

Or, to be more exact, he left and George spun. Angie agreeing to an EU surcharge of merely £850 million payable in two instalments next year, as opposed to the initially demanded £1.7 billion on the nail, said George, proves that she’s ready to bend over backwards to satisfy us.

However, upon closer examination it turned out that Angie’s position remained as unbending as ever. All she did was agree to apply to the payment demand the rebate we were due anyway.

That makes the whole thrust of Dave’s and George’s triumphant declaration as feeble as we suspected. They’re impotent in the face of an irresistible EU fronted by Angie.

Having failed at conducting any meaningful intercourse with Angie, HMG switched its attention to promoting sexual intercourse among consenting infants.

Children as young as nine, decreed our Department of Education, ought to be taught the whole gamut of exciting and acrobatic possibilities offered by both heterosexual and homosexual fornication or, in the absence of a partner, masturbation.

That way they’ll be ready to put theory into practice by the time they turn 13, exploring such wide-open avenues as “consenting oral and/or penetrative sex with others of the same or opposite gender who are of similar age and developmental ability.”

This would reflect “natural curiosity, experimentation, consensual activities and positive choices.” In the past children used to apply all such commendable impulses to playing with erector sets together, but now that’s deemed to be a wrong kind of erection.

I’m appalled. Here we have a government supposedly committed to equality and yet indulging in blatant ageist discrimination.

The whole timeframe must be moved several years back. Instead of imposing arbitrary age limits on healthy ‘consensual activities’, HMG should embark on a campaign under the provisional umbrella of ‘Eight Is Too Late”.

After all, in our enlightened and physically stimulating age, many boys, and more girls, are technically capable of ‘consenting oral and/or penetrative sex’ at the very age of nine at which, according to the discriminatory guidelines, they’re still supposed to be in the training stage only.

How much better would it be then to start such training when the tots are still in their prams. Their dummies could then be used as valuable teaching aids, augmented by their parents’ gently whispering obscenities in their ears.

By the time their age moves into double digits (no pun intended), boys will be fully ready to impregnate girls and exchange not the obsolete vows but utterly modern and upbeat STDs.

Neither eventuality is particularly off-putting, what with the instant availability of both antibiotics (or antiretroviral drugs if appropriate) and abortion.

Speaking of which, another news item has caught my eye. Drinking alcohol during pregnancy will soon subject women to criminal prosecution, as is already the case in some American states.

I must say I don’t get it. Here I was, thinking that a foetus has no legal rights because it’s dependent on the mother’s body and therefore constitutes but a part of it, like the appendix or, say, an ingrown toenail.

Hence a mother is perfectly justified to have the foetus scraped out of her womb bit by bit, which is a moral and legal equivalent of appendectomy. But God forbid she should harm the foetus by doing what these days comes so naturally to our women of child-bearing age: getting pissed.

The whole thing doesn’t seem to add up, but perhaps I’m missing a couple of intermediate logical steps. As it is, it sounds to me as if killing a human being is fine, but buying him a drink isn’t.

According to our laws, the foetus has no legal rights more or less throughout pregnancy, and some women get abortions in the third trimester, even though this isn’t recommended. Yet the very same foetus, once pregnancy tests establish the fact of conception, instantly acquires legal rights when the mother decides to keep it.

I’m confused, and fresh news about those Libyan soldiers confuse me even more. As their officers kindly enlightened us, some of those chaps had never seen a woman other than their mothers and sisters before being sent to Cambridgeshire for training.

That means they had led a rather cloistered existence, but I don’t know enough about life in Libya to prove or disprove the claim. However, the explanation still strikes me as wanting.

For example, I was roughly the same age as the Libyan warriors when I first saw an armadillo. Yet that visual jolt didn’t make me try to corrupt the morals of a sheep.

Similarly, I don’t understand why, shaken by the seismic exposure to a strange woman for the first time, some of those Libyans went on to rape a man, and some others tried to buy a few male British soldiers for sexual purposes.

To be fair, some of them did rape women too, which is a more logical, if no less objectionable, response to the visual shock. But then those Cambridgeshire lasses had been warned by the police not to go out ‘for their own safety’.

At first glance, staying under virtual house arrest for five months (the planned duration of the training programme, now cut short) would have been a hard thing to do for the local women and, come to think of it, men.

Such advice was probably also difficult to accept, for the locals must have been labouring under the misapprehension that their village was their home. This goes to show the government must step up its already impressive efforts to educate people about the delights of multiculturalism.

Well, at least they’re doing a superb job training prepubescent children to experience the joys of ‘consenting oral and/or penetrative sex’ – and the rest of us to accept economic chicanery at face value.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

In the past I’ve found myself in the ranks of Dave detractors. So much more pleasing it is to be able to commend our beleaguered PM on his enlightened approach to selecting possible successors to the office Dave himself occupies with such distinction.

Specifically, he expressed a heartfelt desire to see an Asian prime minister in his lifetime, and the multi-culti egalitarian in me has to rejoice.

The occasion for this coup was the GG2 Leadership Award Dave had the honour of presenting to the Culture Secretary Sajid Javid.

Now, for the benefit of outlanders, in this context the word ‘Asian’ doesn’t mean a Korean, Japanese, Chinese or Mongolian. It means a Pakistani, whether born in this country or not.

Yet Dave had to say ‘Asian’. First, it sounds more inclusive than ‘Pakistani’, though in fact it means exactly the same thing. Second, it sounds less specific than ‘Muslim’, and also less potentially threatening.

Had Dave said he dearly hoped that one day we’d have an Arab Muslim prime minister, there would be more defections to Ukip, which could put Dave on course to a lucrative lecture tour immediately after May, 2015.

As it was, who could have possibly complained about the word ‘Asian’? Only inveterate racists and Ukip members, or simply Ukip members who, as we all know, are inveterate racists to a man.

Oh yes, then there are those reactionaries, some of whom are also to be found among Ukip members, who come up with the outdated objection that the race of a prime minister matters rather less than his ability to govern.

This can only mean that they too are inveterate racists, but those lacking the courage to come out and say what they really mean. What’s important in a candidate for any political office is his ability to tick all the relevant boxes. Any other ability is irrelevant and often undesirable.

Dave in his wisdom realises this better than anyone. Hence in 2012 he promoted to the cabinet Baroness Sayeeda ‘Token’ Warsi, whose sole prior foray into politics had been losing a winnable Tory seat.

Therefore she had to be fast-tracked into Dave’s cabinet via the House of Lords. After all, Sayeeda Warsi ticked all the relevant boxes. Woman – tick. Muslim – two ticks at least. Working class – tick. Multi-culti accent – tick. Under 40 – tick.

Painfully aware that neither he himself nor anyone else in his cabinet possessed all such vital qualifications, Dave used the Lords as a clever detour to pave Sayeeda’s way into government.

However, eventually the ungrateful Baroness let Dave down. She resigned from the cabinet because it didn’t overtly share her deep – in fact only – conviction that Israel has no right to exist.

Still, on the scale of Dave’s criteria, Mr Javid must be distinctly second best to Baroness Warsi. But judge for yourself.

When still at university he campaigned against the disastrous decision of Margaret Thatcher’s government to join the ERM. This may suggest that he harbours latent Eurosceptic views – that’s one point against him, actually a handful of them.

Then, before entering politics, Javid had had a successful career in finance, earning the better part of £3,000,000 a year. That’s another two points against him: he’s clearly out of touch with the prevalent trend in our politics, and he’s probably clever. Call yourself a politician, Sajid?

Two more negatives: though a son of a Pakistani bus driver in Lancashire, Javid neither espouses Islam nor sounds like a son of a Pakistani bus driver in Lancashire.

The first negative suggests he isn’t sufficiently multi-culti, and nor does he realise the importance of appealing to the growing bloc of Jihadist voters.

The second black mark shows that, while Dave and his fellow Etonians in the cabinet are desperately trying to drop their ‘haitches’ all over the place, Mr Javid speaks in the cadences of his education, not his birth.

How reactionary is that? Dave must have made a mental note to tell Sajid to start working on his glottal stops if he’s ever to become the first Asian PM.

To throw a bit more black dye on his record, Mr Javid is the wrong side of 40, which is almost a disqualifying circumstance in our paedocratic (not to be confused with paedophiliac) times.

Then – are you ready for this? – Javid is on record as saying that “we should recognise that Christianity is the religion of our country”. Dave knows we should do no such thing. Christianity is only as good as any other religion, and not nearly as good as atheism.

Next thing you know Javid will suggest that our policies should agree with Christian principles, which is another way of saying that Dave should be out of a job. Can’t have that, can we now?

And to crown it all, this overachiever dares to say that, if he had to live in the Middle East, Israel would be the only country that would make him and his children feel free.

Now, in view of the recent parliamentary vote inspired by Dave, this is borderline treasonous. What’s wrong with Saudi Arabia, Sajid? Don’t you remember where oil comes from?

It’s a massive feather in Dave’s cap that he’s ready to overlook all these tragic failings and still reward Mr Javid with the leadership accolade. In Dave’s eyes, Sajid has one merit that outweighs the demerits: HE IS ASIAN.

I’m sure Mr Javid is happy to know that, if he ever ascends to Downing Street, everyone will think that it’s because of his ethnicity, not his other accomplishments that would be extremely impressive in a man of any other genetic makeup.

While praising Dave for grasping what’s really important in statesmanship, I have to admit with some sadness and bemusement that not everyone joins in. One commentator, for example, quipped that he wished we’d have a conservative prime minister in his lifetime.

The implication is that Dave isn’t one such, which is most unfair. Dave is conservative in exactly the same sense in which Nick is a liberal.

It’s just that the modern political lexicon operates on the principle of inversion: party nomenclatures mean exactly their former opposites.

Thus a party dedicated to increasing the power of the state vis-à-vis the individual would have been called anti-liberal in the past. However, it’s called Liberal now because, as the less literate of my acquaintances keep telling me, the language changes.

And someone like my friend Dave, who believes in reverse discrimination on the basis of PC criteria, is a true conservative PM.

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, as Dave must have been taught at Eton, and he knows he must atone for that blip on his CV.   

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

Before all my friends disown me, my wife hits me on the head with a frying pan and my detractors flash QED smiles, allow me to reassure you.

I’ve in no way changed my views on the EU generally and our membership in it specifically. In fact I go quite a bit further than my Ukip friends in my contempt for this wicked offshoot of the wartime alliance between Nazi Germany and Vichy France.

Just as they do, I dearly hope we can shake the dust of that foul obscenity off our feet. But I also hope all other countries will follow us out of the door, reducing the EU to a ghastly memory that’ll for ever make them cringe recalling it.

Since I’m still opposed to the In-Out referendum so dear to Ukip hearts, it’s obvious I don’t believe this vehicle will carry us to the desired destination.

As a general observation, direct democracy by plebiscite is the worst possible kind of this method of government, which isn’t without fundamental problems even at its best.

This sort of thing only became possible after the Enlightenment perverted the metaphysical premise on which Western civilisation was built. Our formative notion of original sin was replaced with the modern notion of original virtue.

Rather than being compromised by the Fall, man, according to Rousseau and his jolly friends, was both perfect and tautologically perfectible ab initio. Since man demonstrably didn’t end up perfect, it was the fault of society, what with its two-pronged oppressive strategy based on the crown and the church.

The conclusion was obvious: man could return to his original virtue if the oppressors were eliminated and paths leading to liberation were opened.

One of the paths was political: the Enlighteners insisted that perfect and further perfectible citizens could play a hands-on role in government with no outside help necessary. Hence democracy, the rule of the people.

Such Enlightenment thinkers as Smith and Hume realised that people would vote on the basis of their selfish interests, not all of which would be praiseworthy. They just felt that all those private, often clashing, interests could be tossed into a giant cauldron to produce a tasty stew of public virtue.

The two Scots made one fundamental error. They thought that society could for ever continue to draw on the moral capital amassed by Christianity, thereby keeping base passions in check. They couldn’t imagine in their scariest dreams that one day their own atheism would reign supreme.

Once the transcendent restraints on behaviour were removed, no tasty stew would emerge from the cauldron. On the contrary, the resulting concoction would emphasise the rancid taste of each ingredient.

Liberty without “wisdom and virtue”, wrote Burke prophetically, “is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice and madness, without tuition or restraint”. The great Whig had no doubts on the sole possible source of such restraining mechanisms.

That source has run dry in our public life. Consequently collective wisdom and virtue are no longer in evidence, and therefore neither is liberty in whose name modernity conquered.

Democracy no longer reliably produces virtuous results, nor brings to power virtuous people. The nature of modern politics, nay modern societies, is such that people will vote wrong even when they have a valid choice (which they increasingly don’t).

This isn’t to say that people’s instincts are always, indeed usually, wrong. It’s just that, in the absence of Burkean ‘wisdom and virtue’, those instincts can easily be overridden by mass propaganda and general demagoguery.

That’s why democracy, when it goes unchecked by competing methods of government, ends up belying its etymology, withdrawing power from the people and passing it on to professional demagogues who manipulate the electorate using increasingly sophisticated means at their disposal.

Issues put to a vote are thus decided not by their intrinsic merit but by the agitprop weight brought to bear on one end or the other.

It follows that any In-Out referendum will be decided not by a contest between truth and falsehood but by the decibel level of the propaganda pro or con. 

In practical terms this means that Her Majesty’s government, especially if it’s supported by Her Majesty’s opposition, is the odds-on favourite to get the result it wants: its agitprop resources can’t be matched by any rivals.

So let’s assume for the sake of argument, and it’s an unsafe assumption, that the Tories will either form the next government on their own or at least play a decisive role in it.

Since all other parties except Ukip are fanatic European federalists, the Out vote could only result from the Tories aggressively campaigning for it. Supported by our most popular newspapers, they could realistically expect to counteract the vast resources of the EU propaganda machine.

How likely is it that the Tories will commit to such a campaign? Well, about as likely as the MPs on both front benches sporting T-shirts saying This Is What a Spiv Looks Like.

Dave made this abundantly clear yesterday, when asked in the Commons six times whether he’d ever campaign to get the country out of the EU.

Each time his reply branded him not only as the fanatic of European federalism he is, but also as the unprincipled spiv he pretends not to be: “I want Britain,” he said, “ to stay in a reformed EU.”

This after both the de jure head of the EU Jean-Claude Juncker and its de facto head Angela Merkel declared publicly, unequivocally and, for once, truthfully that no meaningful reform was going to happen.

Had Dave wished to follow Angela’s lead and be truthful this once, he would have simply replied no, he’d never campaign for the Out vote. As it was, he couched the answer in his usual waffle without changing its meaning.

Therefore we can confidently assume that if the Tories somehow cling on to power next May, and if Dave keeps his promise to hold the referendum in 2017, he’ll campaign to stay in.

No doubt the EU will throw the bone of one or two meaningless concessions his way to help Dave propagate his lie about ‘a reformed EU’. The two spivocracies, national and supranational, will fling the sluice gates open and flood the British with an outpouring of scaremongering lies – just like they did in 1975.

The result will also be the same: the Out vote will lose, at which point the unwritten EU law will come into play.

If a national referendum yields a result that’s not to the EU’s liking, the people will be told to vote again and continue to do so until they get it right. However, a pro-EU vote is irreversible, chiselled in indestructible stone.

Hence an In-Out referendum will spell relinquishing Britain’s sovereignty irretrievably and eternally, which is hardly the result desired by those who are pushing for it.

The only way for the country to get out is for the next election to produce a government in which Ukip will play a serious role. This can only be a Tory-Ukip coalition in which Ukip could mobilise the anti-EU faction within the Conservative Party to force Dave to do what he hates: campaign for the Out vote.

In any other scenario Britain is almost guaranteed to become and remain but a gau in an EU dominated by Germany. I just hope we’ll still be allowed to wear poppies on 11 November.

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

Now that the celebrated group is no longer performing, trust the Ministry of Defence to step into the breach.  

What prompted its officials to seek an alternative career in stand-up comedy is the clever plan to train 2,000 Libyan soldiers in Cambridgeshire, which produced highly predictable results.

The need to whip the Libyan army into shape arose in the first place thanks to HMG’s inspired policy of unseating Col. Gaddafi’s government, thereby plunging the country into a blood-soaked chaos.

That policy slotted neatly into our overall strategy of radicalising the Middle East to a point where it would implode, conceivably burying millions under the rubble.

The shockwaves of the implosion are already reaching Europe, where Muslim violence, not least towards Jews, is becoming uncontainable.

Displaying the staggering hypocrisy we’ve learned to expect from our leaders, Ed Miliband yesterday shed a tear for British Jews, who feel insecure in the face of rising anti-Semitism.

He forgot to mention that most anti-Semitic violence in Britain, France and elsewhere in Europe is committed by Muslims, either native-born or cordially invited from the Middle East to add the spice of multi-culti variety to our otherwise humdrum life.

The increasingly anti-Israeli policy of our main parties, including Ed’s own, acts as a spur to violence, and a sharp one at that.

The parties on either side of the aisle are sending a loud and clear signal by their endorsement of what they call a Palestinian state and what in effect will become a legitimised base for global terrorism.

This can’t help encouraging our resident Muslims in feeling that their hatred of Jews, only slightly more febrile than their hatred of the West, has been justified all along. Their cause has been just, as Western governments are acknowledging.

But God forbid our leaders utter a single word suggesting they realise that the West and Islam are irreconcilable – that even in its present debauched state our civilisation simply can’t accommodate Islam as a dynamic force within our borders.

Yet our electorate has been corrupted to such an extent that, for any ‘statesman’ to be politically successful, he has to be politically correct. Hence the respect, both preached and practised, for any religion or civilisation, provided it isn’t Christian.

Hence also the criminal stupidity of our leaders who destroyed the demonstrably un-Western but still workable power balance in the Middle East to plunge the region into a blood-filled abyss of violence and unrest.

Now that the violence looks as if it’s about to spill over way beyond Iraq, Syria and Libya, our governments are reviewing their options.

One of them is yet another direct military intervention, and we all know how hugely successful this has proved so far.

Another is to intervene by proxy, using Iran (what with the Nato member Turkey refusing to play) to do the fighting for us. Ancient Rome had that kind of arrangement with the Vandals, remember how that turned out?

We may suffer the same way, since the inevitable price for Iran’s involvement will be the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons, and you aren’t getting three guesses to figure out how they’ll be used.

The third option is related to the second: arming and training those local groups we perceive as our friends. ‘Perceive’ is the operative word: there are no groups in the Islamic world that are genuinely friendly to the West.

Some, however, are ready to fake amiability for tactical reasons, something we accept as the real thing. Both sides are perfectly aware of the ad hoc nature of any such alliance, invariably underpinned as it always is by background hostility.

They pretend to be our friends, we pretend to believe them. However, the two sides still diverge in one important area. They have a long-term strategy, we can’t think beyond the next election.

That’s why we refuse to recall that every time we trained and armed Muslim soldiers in the past they eventually turned their weapons against us. Who do you think armed the Taliban? Al-Qaeda? Saddam? Gaddafi? Isis?

Training thousands of Libyan soldiers at our Cambridgeshire base is a sign that we’re as ever prepared to equip our future enemies while pretending they’re our present friends.

We simply refuse to admit that our quarrel isn’t with this or that Islamic faction but with Islam as such. Well, if we still haven’t realised that there’s a clash of civilisations under way, we ought to be thankful to the Libyan soldiers for clarifying the point.

Since arriving in June they’ve succeeded in turning their corner of sleepy Cambridgeshire into a scaled-down version of Tripoli’s outskirts.

The Libyans went on an alcohol-fuelled rampage and there I was, thinking Muslims were supposed to be teetotal. A few of them spent £1,000 on booze in a single visit to a supermarket, an amount that buys a lot of mayhem.

Two of the soldiers have now been charged with raping a man, who presumably was wearing a provocative business suit. Not to discriminate, three others are being held on remand for several counts of sexual assault against women.

These peccadilloes were augmented by attendant charges of theft and threatening behaviour towards a police officer, which is legalese for head-butting. (Since no one has suggested that ‘Glasgow kiss’ be renamed ‘Tripoli kiss’, I’m hereby putting this initiative forth as my own.)

Anyway, this is where our MoD officials unveiled their comedy routine, and I thank them for making my morning so much more upbeat for it.

In a nutshell, the training programme, originally supposed to last until the end of the month, is being terminated effective immediately, and no future training will be done in Britain, what with the UK’s surfeit of tasty men and women roaming the countryside freely.

Instead of describing this simple development in this kind of language or, as would be my preference, more colloquially, the MoD spokesman delivered his first knee-slapping line:

“We have agreed with the Libyan government that it is best for all involved to bring forward the training completion date”. (“We can’t have too many raping and thieving Muzzie soldiers about…”)

Encouraged by the outburst of laughter, he continued in the same vein: “There have been disciplinary issues.”

I suppose homosexual rape, sexual assault on women, theft and head-butting a cop could be described that way for comic effect, but, playing it straight, I’d have settled for ‘crimes’ instead.

And then came the kicker, having punters rolling in the aisles: “As part of our support for the Libyan government, we will review how best to train Libyan security forces – including whether training further tranches of recruits in the UK is the best way forward.” (“…and neither do we want them to darken our doorstep ever again.”)

To add a few delicious touches to the stand-up gig, several Libyan soldiers, presumably not the defendants, have requested political asylum in Britain. And their government has so far failed to pay for the programme, while not offering much hope it’ll do so in the future.

Oh well, we’ve made our bed of nails, so we must lie in it – and it’s no laughing matter.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752