Author: Alexander Boot

Seeing the multitudes, Dave went up into Westminster: and when he was set, his Ministers and the multitudes came upon him:

And Dave opened his mouth and taught them, saying,

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; but I say unto you that whosoever payeth cash shall be in danger of hell fire.

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit tax evasion: But I say unto you that whosoever committeth avoidance hath committed evasion already in his heart; his is hell fire.

And if the State will sue thee at law for avoidance, and take away thy money, let it take thy house also.

Therefore when the State doest thou out of thine alms, verily I say unto you, Give it its reward.

Blessed are the poor in mind for they shall inherit Westminster.

Blessed are the poor in money for they shall inherit the social alms.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst for the dole as they shall be filled.

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For the State knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

Blessed are the fatherless for they shall be called the wards of the State.

Behold the fowls of the air; for they sow not, neither do they reap; yet your State feedeth them.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the State shall take thought for things of itself.

Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad: for great is thy reward from the State.

The State is the light of the world. A mountain of debt cannot be hid.

So forgive the State its debts as It shalt not forgive thine.

Let the State’s light so shine before men that they may see its good works, and glorify Him which is in Downing Street, and his number is ten.

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise remain in thy pocket, till all are poor.

And when the State doest alms, let thy left hand be tied to thy right hand, and thy left foot to thy right foot.

It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife shalt be smitten for murder, but I say unto you that marriage is in no wise righteous save for marriage betwixt two men, and two women also.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye. But I say unto you that whosoever punisheth an unrighteous man cannot be my servant.

Give to George that he asketh thee, and to him that would borrow a mountain turn not thou away.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Though shalt love thy neighbour. But I say unto you, Love thy State, bless them that ruin you, be good to them that take thy country away, and pray for them that persecute you.

That ye may be the children of thy State which is in Westminster, for it decideth what is good for you and samewise what is bad.

For your State knoweth what things ye have need of, and what ye have no need of.

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your State which is in Westminster is perfect.

Lay up for yourselves treasures upon the State, where thieves break through and steal.

For where your treasure is, there will your State be also.

Ye cannot serve the State and God.

I am the State, thy God.

 

Just as the baritone Yevgeny Nikitin was about to become the first Russian to sing the lead role in a Wagner opera (The Flying Dutchman) at Bayreuth, a scandal broke out. Alas, the elaborate pattern of tattoos covering most of Mr Nikitin’s body included a swastika with a superimposed emblem of the SS.

It has to be said – and I realise that there exist notable exceptions – that in musical circles singers vie with percussionists for the honour of being the most stupid musicians of all. Mr Nikitin happens to be both a singer and a drummer, so the poor lad never had a chance.

Even considering that, the apology he offered is remarkable in its sheer daftness: ‘I was not aware of the extent of the irritation and offence these signs and symbols would cause, particularly in Bayreuth given the context of the festival’s history.’

Really? How daft does one have to be not to realise this? As a brush, is the answer to that one. Bayreuth organisers are understandably sensitive about any open manifestations of pro-Nazi sentiments. It’s not just that some of their predecessors, such as Winifred Wagner, were out-and-out Nazis – let bygones be bygones and all that. But Wagner himself, both in his writings and his music, exerted a formative influence on Nazism.

Jumping backwards, Wagner, this ‘Puccini of music’, leapfrogged two millennia of Western culture, landing in the middle of Germany’s pagan past. His sylvan world full of hobgoblins, magicians and witches was filled with pagan images and sounds. Profoundly anti-Christian, his music not so much contradicted as complemented his writings that were one contiguous anti-Semitic rant.

The quality of this music is in my view grossly overrated. Though undoubtedly gifted, Wagner relied heavily on emotional manipulation, which made his work highly seductive. So much so that even people with decent taste are often seduced by it, though those whose taste goes beyond decent usually see through Wagner well enough and tend to stay immune to his emotional blackmail.

Hitler and his friends found in German Romanticism in general and particularly in Wagner the aesthetic and philosophical justification for their monstrosity. The Nazis, including der Führer himself, would weep at Bayreuth and, thus inspired, would go off to murder millions. That doesn’t mean Wagner’s music shouldn’t be played, and Israel’s near-ban on performing it is in my judgment wrong. But neither should the link between Wagner and Nazism be dismissed as post hoc ergo propter hoc.

That explains why the current organisers of the festival are touchy about the swastika, and why Nikitin, jumping before he was pushed, had to pull out of his engagement in all haste. Personally, if I were the organiser, I would have withdrawn his invitation simply because his body is covered with tattoos, regardless of their content. This doesn’t just betoken but positively screams affiliation with a culture that’s not merely different from ours but aggressively hostile to it. A creature like Nikitin doesn’t belong in classical music any more than rap lyrics would belong in a Shakespeare sonnet. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day and then carve thee up, thou bitch’ somehow doesn’t ring possible.

Nikitin himself dismisses the Nazi tattoo as a youthful indiscretion. As a young lad, said the 38-year-old singer, he belonged to a heavy-metal band. It was then that he indulged in a bit of body art, and now his tattoos play no role in his life.

He’s lying through his teeth, as any Russophone can find out for himself by looking up Nikitin’s interviews on Russian television. For he still runs a heavy-metal band, performing naked to the waist, his tattooed torso for all to see. The multi-talented musician plays the drums as he sings unmusical songs with his own frankly cretinous lyrics. These suggest that the feelings that inspired the swastika are still bubbling somewhere in the far recesses of what passes for Nikitin’s mind.

His big hit is called Warrior. We must all be warriors at heart, preaches the song. Presumably even those of us who have supposedly devoted their lives to classical music, if opera falls into that category. One can see why Wagner is close to Nikitin’s heart. So fine, we must all be warriors, but must we also all wear brown shirts? Or should we be content with psychedelic T-shirts, battle fatigues and army boots that Nikitin usually wears in the after hours?

‘How do you make the transition from classical singing to heavy metal?’ asked the sympathetic interviewer. ‘No transition is necessary,’ answered Nikitin, this time truthfully. For the likes of him indeed there’s no gap to bridge. Our own Nigel Kennedy or Freddie Kemp could have given the same answer. This explains the general level of our musical performances – the present crop of performers have mastered the physical aspect of their art, after a fashion, while remaining deaf to its spiritual content.

Actually, as far as our polymath is concerned, there is a difference. Heavy metal opens up all sorts of new possibilities for self-expression. ‘We’ve already said everything that could be said through classical music,’ he explains. ‘I can say a lot through this new sound.’ He certainly can. About the same things he says through his swastika. ‘I’m a mystic,’ adds Nikitin. So was Wagner. So was Hitler. So was Himmler. Pagan mysticism is the soul of Nazism, just as concentration camps are its body.

A singer, drummer and poet, Nikitin is also a painter. In his interviews he proudly displays his canvas depicting a desert scorched by the sun. ‘This is how the earth will look in a million years,’ explains the musician cum artist cum mystic cum philosopher, cum prophet, ‘when our tiny sun explodes into a huge one, making life on earth extinct.’ With him and his lot around, the prospect isn’t all that frightening.

‘Everything belongs to us,’ bellows Nikitin, banging his drums. I’m afraid he may be right. Run for the hills.

 

 

Tony wants to be back, Vince wants to lead the LibDems, Dave wants to hang on and Nick wants to be a European Commissioner. And we, having realised we’ll never be governed, just want to be entertained.

Take Tony, for example. He clearly thinks he ought to be where the Milibandits are now, and the way back is paved with statesman-like appearances. A real statesman, unlike all those Milibandits, is above petty vanities. He’s man enough to admit he was wrong once or twice, a little dark lining on an otherwise silver cloud.

Keeping that in mind, yesterday Tony accepted a teensy-weensy part of the blame for the current state of the economy. That’s awfully big of him, considering that he inherited a healthy economy (one of the few times in history when that was the case) and then in a couple of short years managed to run it into the ground. Moreover, he did it in such a way that no subsequent government can possibly dig it back up.

So where did it go wrong, Tony? Well, you see, explained the come-back kid, we underestimated the extent to which the economy was global. Oh well, that’s all right then. An easy mistake to make. Back in 1997 it was easy to confuse Britain with Japan circa 1800. The country showed every sign of living in isolation from the world, running a totally self-sustained economy and describing anyone foreign as gaijin.

And then, shock, horror, who could’ve thunk, turns out the British economy is integrated with others. It’s like those dominoes – when one falls, they all do. A hurricane sweeps through the world, rendering every government helpless. It doesn’t really matter who’s in power or what policies he’s implementing. Force majeure happens. So it wasn’t really, like really, Tony’s fault. But hey, he’s a statesman, isn’t he? He’s not like those Milibandits who’ve usurped his crown. He happened to be in power at the time, he was the captain of the ship, and even if the ship was torpedoed by an enemy U-boat, the captain still has to be man enough to accept some of the blame.

‘In respect of the economy, yes, of course, everybody who was in power in the period bears a certain responsibility.’ There, Tony put it into a nutshell. Nobody does spivocracy as well as Tony, not even Dave, though he’s trying. It would be sheer ingratitude and churlishness if we didn’t return Tony to his old house at Number 10.

Meanwhile, Tony is beefing up his foreign-policy credentials, for a Number 10 spivocrat can’t live by economy alone. He has been a resounding success as a Middle East envoy for the ‘Big Four’: the UN, the US, the EU and Russia. How resounding a success? Just follow the news: Tony has been doing his best, just as he did domestically. It’s not his fault that yet another hurricane blew through his bailiwick – those Muslim ingrates insist on murdering one another, even though Tony told them not to. What’s a great statesman to do with that lot? Perhaps he’ll accept a particle of responsibility in a few years. Yes, that’s a good idea.

In the meantime, Tony is going to buck the trend of Labour staying out of power for a long time after losing it. ‘I think it is possible in these circumstances to re-write that traditional script,’ he said, adding ‘I know those people who are leading the Labour Party at the moment are desperate to do their best for the country.’ By inference, their best isn’t good enough. It’ll take Tony to get Labour back in power.

I do hope Ed is listening. If I were him, I’d start digging up some dirt on Tony before it’s too late. Perhaps some odd things Tony did at university, when he looked more like a girl than a boy. Or else something naughty Cherie might have done.

Like securing the Olympics for London. Remember, we were in competition with France, we lost and got the Games. Hold on, that’s not naughty at all. Tony says, proudly, ‘my wife played a really big part in this.’ That’s indeed something to be proud of: selling to a nation going bust the idea of wasting £2.5 billion on a tasteless and utterly corrupt extravaganza, knowing full well that the real price tag will be five times as much. This bears every hallmark of a grandiose Blairite project, Millennium Dome writ large. So the spouses did this together? What a family.

Nick hasn’t been idle either: he’s ready to form a coalition with Labour that’ll presumably be led into the next election by Tony (unless Ed has by then dug up enough dirt to bury him). Except that it won’t be Nick forming a coalition with Tony but rather Vince, the only man in history whose age is going in reverse. Born in 1943, Vince was too old to lead the LibDems in the 2010 election. He’ll be much younger in 2015, a sprightly youngster ready to fill the vacancy formed by Nick’s impending elevation to EU Commissioner. A smart career move, Nick: the money’s better, and responsibility is nonexistent.

Mind you, by that time Labour may well be in a position to win the election outright. Having achieved the improbable task of failing to beat cleanly the worst government in British history, Dave has set out to prove that worst can get worse. He’ll be a sitting duck by 2015, easy pickings for Tony.

Aren’t you proud to be governed by this lot? I know I am.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hardly ever post more than one blog a day, but news from Syria is coming in hard and fast, and I just couldn’t resist.

It became known within the last hour that, provided he gets away with his life, Assad can always retrain as a stand-up comedian. WikiLeak has just published 2.5 million e-mails exchanged by Syrian leaders. Apparently, 538 of them came from Assad personally, and most of those were jokes.

These first appeared in the French on-line magazine Owni.fr under the title of Assad’s Dirty Jokes. Well, dirty they aren’t, not by today’s lax standards. But, judging by most of them, if the Syrian leader is indeed planning a second career in stand-up comedy, he’ll probably have to work only the smaller clubs.

Here’s a small sample:

‘I always hold my wife by the hand when we walk in the street. If I let her go, she’ll run into a shop.’

‘What would you give your wife is she climbed Mount Everest? A gentle push.’

‘I’m not scared of terrorism. I’ve been married for two years.’

‘Bush: We’re going to start a Third World War and kill 140 million people, including Angelina Jolie. The public: But why Angelina Jolie? Bush, turning to Obama: You see, didn’t I tell you nobody would give a damn about the 140 million?’

I don’t know about this, Bashar. Frankie Boyle can do better than this on a bad day, and he only cracks jokes about Jordan.

A curious point: 68,000 of the intercepted e-mails are in Russian. If you’re surprised, you shouldn’t be: most Syrian leaders, especially of the military variety, were trained in Russia. Obviously humour wasn’t one of the subjects on the curriculum, though colloquial Russian clearly was.

Interestingly, even though Assad’s wife is British (well, British-born), she has, as the rumour has it, already escaped not to London but to Moscow. It must be the weather – or else her vague suspicion that she’d be more warmly welcomed by Putin than Dave.

I’m certain that no collusion exists between the two nuclear powers, and they haven’t surreptitiously joined forces to blow up the world. But one can be forgiven for getting that impression.

Ever since the first Iraq war, America has been plunging headlong into every conflict going, or starting them if there weren’t any on offer. The pretexts for their involvement varied: protection of oppressed minorities, elimination of weapons of mass destruction, restoring order, preventing genocide – above all, making sure that democracy reigns everywhere, including countries where it’s not schoolchildren but adulterers who get stoned.

Now even though the intellectual level of America’s foreign-policy crowd can make one reassess Mike Tyson’s mental power, even they can’t seriously believe their own slogans. Surely they must see that every regime they’ve ever conspired to unseat, from Diem’s onwards, has been replaced by something much worse.

The removal of the Shah of Iran, in which they, as a minimum, acquiesced, ought to have tipped them off. The Shah could under no circumstances be compared to Archangel Gabriel or even to Mother Teresa. He was undeniably a nasty bit of work, but two things he wasn’t: a) an Islamist, b) a threat to world peace. Just as undeniably, the regime that replaced him was, and still is, both.

America is like an octogenarian, to whom anyone under 50 looks the same age. Either you’re a Jeffersonian democrat or you’re evil, and no gradations of wickedness are supposed to exist. But they do: Pahlevi is better than Khomeini, Mubarak is better than the Brotherhood, and even the indisputably evil Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad are better than the crazed Islamist regimes that have replaced them already or will do so soon.

It’s as if America had undertaken to mobilise the forces of Islam under the green banner of jihad. Thus her exercise in laser-guided democracy over Yugoslavia created a Muslim republic, Kosovo, smack in the middle of what historically has been Europe’s most troublesome region. America’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan has set up a triumph of Taliban fanatics who hate the West and are doctrinally committed to annihilating the West’s sole ally in the region. Her air support for the ‘Arab Spring’ may yet lead to a nuclear winter, what with the secular regimes in North Africa returning to the ethos so eloquently enunciated by Nasser.

And yet, with frankly idiotic obduracy, America is now pressing ahead in Syria, supporting the Islamist rebels morally and assuring them of her laser-guided democratic backup should this become necessary. If those responsible for the US foreign policy actually believe in the wisdom of their actions, they are fools. If they don’t, they are knaves. Can’t think of a third possibility.

And where is Russia while all this is going on? Same place it has been for a century: trying to fish in troubled waters, playing – if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor – both ends against the middle. The Russians’ perennial assumption is that what’s bad for the West is good for them, and vice versa.

Thus, while supporting the 1990 UN sanctions against Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait, the government of the West’s best friend Gorbachev was egging Hussein on, assuring him of unwavering support. That triggered off Hussein’s brazen adventure and America’s predictable reaction. The Russians wanted the Americans to get bogged down in the region, and American democracy fiends were only too happy to oblige. Now, 22 years later, they’re still there.

The same trick worked in Serbia. While publicly rebuking Milosevic for his violence, privately Yeltsyn encouraged him, hoping that the US would get mired in a protracted guerrilla war with born-again Chetniks. However, as the Americans are technologically more advanced than the Nazis were, that particular hope was frustrated. Yet after the US pitched in with a couple of laser-guided democratic raids, the Russians got their second-best wish: a deeply criminalised Muslim republic was created in the Balkans, and the situation there can now be destabilised at the drop of a bomb.

All this explains Putin’s continuing support of Assad. The real reasons for the Russian veto in the UN Security Council has little to do with their naval base in Syria, or the billions in the on-going armament contracts with Assad’s regime. What they are after is another major pool of troubled waters, for neither Syria nor Iraq can possible remain whole without America’s direct involvement.

Both countries are artificial, and relatively recent, concoctions made up of disparate tribal, religious and ethnic groups. Violent break-ups, possibly setting the whole region aflame, are extremely likely, as is America’s further involvement for generations to come. US troops may be going home, but two American carrier groups in the Gulf can unleash hell, otherwise known as laser-guided democracy, at a moment’s notice.

In the same vein, Putin’s Russia is arming Ahmadinejad’s Iran, as it had armed Assad’s Syria. Sooner or later, either the Israelis or the Americans, or most likely both, will have to take out Iran’s nuclear capability. But Russia’s air-to-ground missile systems are already in place to make sure there will a cost attached. Nor is it impossible to imagine that, should the attack happen after Iran has produced a nuclear warhead, such a warhead could be launched at Israel, Enemy Number 1 of any Islamist regime.

You’ll remember that, when the Americans attacked Iraq in 1990, Saddam’s first response was to launch missile attacks on Israeli cities. Mercifully, all he had at his disposal was the Scud (SS1 in Soviet nomenclature), designed by von Braun’s Germans for the Russians in the late 1940s. Iran, on the other hand, is armed with several thousand short- and medium-range mobile missiles. In particular, the Shahab-3/3B with a range of up to 2,100 kilometres is seen by experts as a serious strategic threat.

Add to this Assad’s formidable arsenal of chemical weapons likely to end up in the hands of Hezbollah within days, and the situation could not be much more fraught with disaster. The handle is being turned, the jaws of the vise are about to close. Let’s hope we don’t get caught in the middle.

Grownups expect little children to believe in Father Christmas. Yet confidently holding the same expectation with teenagers should give grounds for concern. Someone there is stupid: the children if the parents’ expectation is justified; the parents themselves if it isn’t.

Dave’s recent pronouncements extrapolate the same logic onto foreign trade, with us cast in the role of children who are either little or retarded. First HMG proudly announces that in the last three months, for the first time since the 70s, 51 percent of our exports have gone outside the EU. According to our triumphant spivocrats, this bears testimony to their sage and tireless toil in the service of the British economy.

Leading the way are the exports of Rolls Royce and Bentley motorcars, with Scotch whisky, especially single malts, also doing well. Upon hearing this news we’re supposed to rejoice and toss our hats up in the air. Well, I hope you’ll forgive me if mine stays perched on my pate.

First, Rolls Royce and Bentleys are no longer British cars in any other than the purely sentimental sense. The company that makes them is jointly owned by Volkswagen and BMW, meaning that, whatever the cars’ final destination, all the profits go to Germany.

True enough, British workers at Goodwood and Crew keep themselves fed and clothed by tightening the bolts at the Rolls and Bentley assembly lines. Yet their relationship with their German owners is exactly that of colonial fruit pickers and, say, Del Monte Foods. This sort of thing was envisaged by the leaders of the Third Reich – Europe providing the coupons for the Germans to clip. So the Fourth Reich is being built on a solid historical foundation.

Our spivocrats do acrobatic contortions patting themselves on the back, but it’s not their wise policy that has shifted some of Rolls and Bentley exports to Asia and America. In case they haven’t noticed, Europe is going through what can only politely be called a recession. Among other things, this means that fewer people there can nowadays afford Rolls Royce and Bentley cars, which tend to be jolly expensive. It takes championship-calibre sleight of hand to offer any other explanation.

The same goes for single malts that typically cost around £30 a bottle at the low end. This is undeniably an indigenous British product, and so it’ll remain until Scotland has declared her increased dependence on the EU, otherwise known as her independence from Britain. Yet here too our spivocrats should suspend their self-congratulations.

Generally speaking, economic disasters are good for distilleries, for people try to drown their sorrows in booze. What kind of booze is a different matter, and it stands to reason that a newly impoverished Italian would rather spend a tenner on cheap grappa than five times as much on Lagavulin. The newly enriched Chinese, on the other hand, can’t get enough of the stuff, even though they can’t handle it.

But let’s pretend for a second that our intellectual age got frozen at a distant point in the past. Good little children, we’re prepared to believe what our elders are telling us: it’s thanks to their sagacity that our exports are becoming less Eurocentric. Now what?

How does this tally with their assurances that, unless we’re ruled by a Fourth Reich gauleiter, we’ll starve? Surely, the glad tidings suggest that a new trend is under way? Perhaps we don’t depend on the EU all that much after all, Dave? Perhaps we can even leave it, or at least be allowed to decide whether we want to or not? Ask such questions again and you’ll be grounded for a month, you naughty brat.

‘Britain’s interest – trading a vast share of our GDP – is to be in those [EU] markets,’ says Dave. ‘Not just buying, selling, investing, receiving investment, but also helping to write the rules. If we were outside, we wouldn’t be able to do that.’

That’s arrant nonsense. The rules of foreign trade have always been established by enforceable mutual interests, not by clueless bureaucrats getting together to decide how much they can claim in tax-free income, expenses and pensions.

It’s in the EU’s interests to do business with us because they enjoy a positive trade balance with the UK. This means that a lot of their jobs depend on trade with Britain, and they wouldn’t want to jeopardise those, particularly at a time like this. And should they, in a fit of pique, decide to do so anyway, we’d have a full arsenal of retaliatory weapons at our disposal: protectionism begets protectionism, sanctions beget sanctions. That’s how the real world works, Dave.

At the same time as they come up with such lame arguments, Dave and his jolly friends, increasingly detested by their own party, are dropping vague hints at some future referendum. Considering that at least a third of the Tory parliamentary party, and twice as big a proportion at the grass roots, are in open rebellion on the issue, Dave’s motivation is clear. But, while he and Hague are mouthing 100-quid ‘re’ words like ‘realignment’, ‘reassessment’ and ‘repatriation of powers’, their underlings put in their own penny’s worth.

The other day Europe Minister David Lidington wrote, or rather published, an article in Le Monde in which he unequivocally ruled out a referendum on Europe now or in the future. The choice of the publication is curious for a so-called Tory: first, Le Monde is French and second, it’s considerably to the left even of The Guardian. But the stratagem is transparent: Dave makes reassuring noises to mollify the real Tories, while his junior ministers tell the EU to ignore such noises. It’s just our domestic politics, Angie and François, don’t worry. Otherwise, it’s business as usual.

How stupid do they think we are? How stupid do we think they are? Or rather how corrupt, how self-serving, how dishonest? You know the answers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A friend of mine recently overheard a fascinating exchange on a London bus. A misbehaving little boy got a light smack from his mother, a working-class woman by the sound of her. Such brutality offended a middle-aged woman, German by the sound of her.

‘In Germany, ve don’t smack children,’ she said. ‘In England,’ replied the woman, ‘we don’t gas Jews.’ End of conversation.

This exchange shows that cultural differences within the presumably monolithic EU still exist. And though the English and the Germans may be ethnic cousins, they might as well be from different planets culturally and behaviourally.

Tact, for example, used to be an English virtue, though this, along with other English virtues, is being wiped out. The Germans, on the other hand, have never been known for their tact, as recent developments prove yet again.

One such development is a long article in Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine, poking fun at our preparations for the Olympics. The article is full of heavy-handed humour, typical of a nation that regards defecation as ipso facto hilarious. But that aside, the infuriating thing is that the article is absolutely right in its criticism, particularly in the part that deals with the Olympic security provisions.

‘Almost twice as many soldiers as Britain has in Afghanistan, a helicopter carrier and special forces units armed to the teeth will make the city look like it’s under siege,’ says the article. This statement doesn’t quite live up to the Germans’ reputation for precision, for the size of the force on the security detail will be a mere 75% greater than our contingent in Afghanistan. But this is nit-picking: the point is absolutely valid, and much fun can be had.

But it’s the Germans’ tact we’re talking about, not their factual accuracy, and it’s in this area that the article is amiss. The words ‘teapot’, ‘kettle’ and ‘black’ spring to mind when one recalls that the second time the Germans organised the Games, in 1972, nine Israeli athletes were kidnapped in the Olympic village and murdered. Something along those lines may still happen in London, though we all pray it won’t. But one way or the other, it’s not up to the Germans to exercise their world-renowned humour at the expense of our Olympic security.

Admittedly, the first time they organised the Olympics, the security was alles in ordnung. But then at that time, in 1936, the Germans had that special way of ensuring docility. Though indisputably effective, this came at some cost to liberty and the life expectancy of a certain ethnic group, something to which that English woman alluded in her conflict with the German tourist.

In another recent lapse of tact, a judge in Cologne ruled against circumcision, suggesting that the baby’s right to ‘physical integrity’ trumps any demands imposed by religion. Assorted hacks instantly jumped on the bandwagon, yelping about ‘male genital mutilation’ and how it imposes unwarranted suffering on neonatal boys. Those who disagreed mentioned that most newborn boys are routinely circumcised in the USA, where the procedure is believed to confer hygienic and medical benefits. Americans argue on the basis of clinical evidence that this practice reduces the risk of venereal diseases, such as AIDS (which, according to some pressure groups, isn’t a venereal disease at all, but rather a dastardly plot by the conservative establishment to hurt homosexuals along with, on the rebound, patients in need of blood transfusion and all those excessively gregarious people who like to put themselves about).

Not being a doctor, I’m not going to argue the case on medical advisability, pro or con. Nor am I going to suggest that no religious ritual should ever be banned. Some, such as female genital mutilation, are clearly beyond the pale, as it were. Yet equating male and female circumcision betokens an ideology-induced madness – the female variety is closer to male castration than circumcision, which after all doesn’t ruin the man’s sex life and even enhances it, or so they say.

Still, though I find the case against ritual male circumcision to be terminally weak, I’m prepared to accept that some judges may take a different view. But, considering that this ritual is essential to the religion half of whose exponents were murdered by Germans in my parents’ generation, it’s unbelievably tactless for a German judge to make such a case.

But then we all know that tact isn’t the most salient of German national traits. One wonders if the Germans know it. 

 

 

Poor Anton wasn’t the only Ferdinand to have endured abuse last season. After that unfortunate incident involving John Terry, every time his elder brother Rio touched the ball in an away game he heard thunderous chants of ‘Anton is a c…’.

Shared misfortune tends to bring families even closer together, and the other day Rio tweeted a counterattack. Upset with his, now presumably former, friend Ashley Cole, who had acted as character witness in Terry’s defence, Rio enthusiastically endorsed someone else’s description of Cole as ‘choc ice’.

For those of you who aren’t up on racial invective, ‘choc ice’ or ‘Bounty’ means black on the outside, white on the inside, what in America used to be called ‘Uncle Tom’. Since all people are exactly the same colour on the inside, the putdown clearly has nothing to do with anything biological. The implication is that skin colour must impose a certain mentality and behaviour, and, if it doesn’t, the offender must be rebuked.

In other words, negritude isn’t always, and never merely, just a chromatic, physical incidental. It’s a metaphysical concept, a sort of noblesse that obliges. One could even go so far as to suggest that, in today’s mostly colour-blind West, it’s practically nothing but that.

For example, it’s hard not to notice that blacks tend to vote in overwhelming numbers, as a rule around 90%, for the leftmost candidate on offer. The assumption is that they are leftwing because they are black. In fact, if we accept that being black is mostly a state of mind, the reverse seems to be true: they are black because they are leftwing.

Going another step farther, perhaps negritude may be defined the same way as Jewishness: one is if one believes oneself to be, and, this side of Hitler, if one doesn’t one isn’t. This point was emphasised by Sasha Baron Cohen in his brilliant send-up of the gangsta Ali G. Mr Baron Cohen, who is and looks Jewish, had no trouble being accepted as a black by numerous interviewees. No blackface or other makeup was required: all he had to do was walk the walk and talk the talk for otherwise sensible people to ignore the evidence before their eyes.

As far as I can tell, and I may well be wrong, things are different in France. Here someone like Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, who, like the Ferdinand brothers, is half-white, is never described as a black tennis player. He is French, and so is his colleague Gaël Monfils who’s 100% black. Moreover, all Francophone footballers born in Africa, such as Didier Drogba, are also regarded as French – even if they moved to France as grown-ups and actually play for their African motherland.

So why can’t the Ferdinands, and they are typical, see themselves, and be seen, as human beings first, British second, English third, Londoners fourth, Peckham lads fifth – and black a very distant sixth? It’s not a question that can be answered concisely, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be answered.

Perhaps a good start would be to comment on the nature of British society, where atomisation isn’t just accepted but actively promoted, encouraging people to stick to the margins. Britishness, steadily undermined by government policy for decades, no longer provides a sufficient sense of group identity for most people. It has to be replaced by tribal loyalties to one’s football team, political party, social class, the country of one’s ancestry – and race.

I once knew an advertising man on a six-digit salary plus bonuses who said he always voted Labour because he was ‘working class’. It wasn’t his mind or conscience that determined his vote, it was his tribe, in this instance defined in social terms. He was ready to dissolve his individuality in collective identity, and let the latter shape the former.

Walk through the streets of any British city, and you’ll see crowds of such downtrodden ‘working class’ lads casually tossing their Armani jackets on the back seat of their Mercs and Beemers [sic]. And, if you’re as lucky that day as I was a few years ago, you could even espy Anton Ferdinand laden with shopping bags from the best brands in Sloane Street.

Ali G wouldn’t be caught dead with clothes that don’t display logos in 80-point type; he unswervingly remained loyal to the values of his phoney race. Anton, however, was on that day clearly a traitor to the code he’s obligated to uphold, one imposed to him by a totally inconsequential biological quirk. Would Rio call him ‘choc ice’ too? All this is too silly for words.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To paraphrase Marx, history repeats itself first as a tragedy, then as a song. The one I have in mind contains these lyrics: ‘Once I built a railroad, made it run// Made it race against time// Once I built a railroad, now it’s done// Brother can you spare a dime?’

Applying the same sentiment to our situation and adjusting the language towards British usage, one finds the fit just about perfect. Thank you, Dave and George, for your bright idea to spend our money on another 800 miles of railways.

The song in question was written in 1931, quickly becoming a hit and the anthem of the Great Depression. And in 1933, America found a new leader at the helm. Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned on the promise to end the depression, and, unlike Dave and George, he actually meant what he said. As he was a socialist, it’s only natural that he took the socialist route to prosperity: giant construction projects financed out of the public purse. (FRD’s fellow socialist took over Germany the same year and adopted the same anti-depression measures – but we won’t push this parallel to any logical conclusion.)

In America, the impression was that  Roosevelt, waving the megalomaniac Tennessee Valley Authority in one hand and National Relief Administration in the other, rode in on his white steed and saved the day. Alas, that impression proved to be wrong.

After Roosevelt’s ill-advised measures ran out of steam, trouble came back in force. By 1938 unemployment was again nearing 20 percent, recession returned, and suddenly even the intellectually challenged realised that the depression had not really gone away. It had merely been camouflaged, and confirmation of this came from unexpected quarters.

Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary, admitted before the House Ways and Means Committee that the New Deal had failed: ‘We have tried spending money,’ he commiserated. ‘We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work… We have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!’

A little illustration can show that such an outcome was entirely predictable. Imagine, God forbid, that you find yourself out of a job. To solve the problem, you decide to pay yourself to build a new driveway and perhaps a conservatory. Even if you set your own remuneration at the minimum-wage level, sooner or later you’ll find that, as you become busier, you get poorer. Soon enough your money will run out, and you’ll have to counterfeit some more or go bust.

That’s precisely the situation in which both Roosevelt, with his Hoover Dam, and Hitler, with his autobahns, found themselves. Rather than reneging on his promises, Hitler found a more radical way of keeping the population occupied. And Roosevelt, overcoming a reluctant Congress and an even more reluctant populace, did everything he could to drag America into the war. That was the only realistic way to end the depression, once the cracks, papered over for a while by the giant public works, opened again.

It’s in this historical context that we must assess our government’s plan to spend £40 billion on infrastructure, including railways, roads, power stations and other such schemes. As most of the money is supposed to come out of our long-suffering pension funds, Dave and George possibly hope to achieve their three main goals in one go.

Goal 1: As history proves, this method of spending the country’s way out of trouble can work for a few years before backfiring spectacularly. What with the next election only 2.5 years away, Dave and George (or whoever has replaced him by then) may just find themselves back in power. What else can these selfless public servants possibly wish for?

Goal 2: By socialising even more of the economy, Dave and George (or whoever) will further increase the power of the state over the individual.

Goal 3: By depleting what’s left of our pension funds, they’ll make more of us dependent on the state (see Goal 2). Job done.

A mere £40 billion doesn’t sound like much compared with the trillion-pound debt our spivocrats have already saddled us with, but remember: that’s just a conservative (coalitional?) estimate, a point of departure for the moon. Anyone who follows HMG’s track record in tallying their actual and estimated bills will confidently multiply the estimate by at least four or five. For example, take the Olympics. Estimated cost: £2.5 billion. Actual cost: £11 billion so far and climbing. When we apply this sort of coefficient to the £40 billion, before long we’ll be talking serious money, and much of it will be counterfeited by the printing press.

All in all, Dave and George are treading a path well-trodden by others some 75 years ago. I don’t wish to be branded an alarmist, but we do remember exactly where that path led. Of course, Dave is a more benign leader than Hitler, and a less intelligent one than Roosevelt. For all we know, and this is only a very remote possibility, he may actually believe the twaddle spouted by his economic advisers. 

Query those chaps, and they’ll talk your ear off explaining their charts, graphs, models and paradigms. If we believe them, before long we’ll all be marching to the soup kitchens, singing, ‘Brother, can you paradigm?’

 

 

 

 

France celebrated her national holiday yesterday, 14 July. On this day the mob stormed the Bastille, razed it and erected on the site what Robbie Burns described metaphorically as The Tree of Liberty.

Heard ye o’ the tree o’ France,

I watna what’s the name o’t;

Around the tree the patriots dance,

Weel Europe kens the fame o’t.

It stands where ance the Bastille stood,

A prison built by kings, man,

When Superstition’s hellish brood

Kept France in leading-strings, man.

Considering that on that day, 223 years ago, the Bastille kept just seven prisoners ‘in leading-strings, man’, which fell somewhat short of all of France, the poem was a bit of an overstatement. But then no one ever accused Auld Robbie of being a serious political analyst. The amazing thing is that the general sentiment reflected in the poem has become received thinking on the subject.

Do let’s get the facts right. That day, 14 July, 1789, inaugurated the worst politically inspired violence Europe had ever known. When the ideas of the Enlightenment were put into practice, Frenchmen, and their Scottish champion, thought they were handed liberty on a platter. But upon closer examination this piece of proverbial chinaware was instead found to contain a pile of severed heads.

First, the ruling class had to be democratically brought down a peg. Then the merchants had to be democratically dispossessed. Then the clergy had to have their property democratically confiscated. Then the army officers had to be democratically cashiered (violent hatred of the last two groups was one of Robespierre’s less endearing characteristics). Then the farmers had to have their crops democratically requisitioned.

And then they, along with many others whose sole crime was that Robespierre and his cronies didn’t like them very much, all met under the democratic guillotine. The latter went into high gear and ran up a score never before even approached by any authoritarian state not listing universal brotherhood among its desiderata.

The only people set free in the process were the rabble: free to murder, rape and plunder. Soon, however, the newly elected tool of the people’s power had to conscript the mob into the National Guard, so as to gain some control over it, while trying to counterbalance the old army that inclined towards scepticism about the advent of liberty, equality and fraternity. Almost overnight the country’s armed forces swelled from 100,000 or so to three times that number, and France fell under military control, which sooner or later was bound to produce a Napoleon.

In short, the country went mad. First she exterminated her upper classes, then set out to conquer the world, losing two million men in that deranged attempt, then brought the royalty and aristocracy back only to send them packing again a few years later. At that point the madness went from its acute to its chronic stage, but it has never been cured. Just count on the fingers of both of hands the types of government France has had in the last 223 years, including her five republics, assemblies, directories, dictatorships, empires and monarchies, and tell me that’s not mad.

All those fits of insanity were set off on the day France celebrates so effusively. Not all of France though. Last night, we and our French friends raised a glass to the Bourbons, a gesture that’s becoming increasingly common in this utterly confused republic. Also, one can’t help noticing that people with any claim to aristocratic titles flaunt their lineage much more energetically than do their counterparts in Her Majesty’s realm.

But our quiet toast to the last sane government of France was drowned in the blasts of fireworks exploding over this normally sleepy Burgundian village. ‘Rockets blasting in air,’ I thought, in reference to another event inspired by the Enlightenment. Obviously, most Frenchmen felt they had something to celebrate. Poor sods.