The referendum

I smiled when I read that various Western leaders have described the referendum in the Crimea as 'illegal'.What does the properly elected Ukrainian Head of State say? Given the fact that he is currently in Russia I expect he says 'yes' to it, making it ....er....not illegal.

Of course Britain is allowing a referendum on whether Scotland should remain in the UK, even though the Scots are not ethnically different from their countrymen, do not speak a different language and have much deeper ties to the Union than Crimea has to Ukraine.

And I saw the European Union had condemned it, too. I think President Putin will be giggling here. He will remember that Ireland, having had a referendum, was sent back to the polls twice, because it got the wrong answer, and that when France and Holland voted in referenda against the new constitution, it was changed into a treaty, so there wouldn't be another vote.

Putin hasn't tried any of that in Crimea, he's too honest.

This has been hypocrisy taken to a shocking extent, and we're as bad as the rest of them.

Oxfam

I remember going on a sponsored walk for Oxfam - it must have been a good forty years ago - and I have donated modestly in the years since.

You feel safe giving to Oxfam: its proper name is or was the Oxford Campaign for Famine Relief and you know exactly what it does.

No you don't.

There was a recent case with an actress Scarlett Johanssen who as well as being an Ambassador for Oxfam was in an advert for Sodastream, which is made in ISRAEL. Oxfam had decided to enter the Arab / Israeli dispute on the side of the Palestinian Arabs (I don't know whether Hamas or Fatah) and in the ensuing row Ms Johanssen, to her credit, severed all ties with Oxfam.

Note that Oxfam's involvement in the West Bank was nothing to do with famine relief. It was purely political, the managers taking the money donated by honest folk for the relief of hunger and applying it towards their own political aims. It doesn't matter which side you take yourself, this diversion of funds should outrage you.

Now we read that Oxfam has decided to give its views on the gap between rich and poor - not in Africa, where it is extreme and identifiable as a cause of hunger, but in Britain. It has announced, pompously, that the five richest families in Britain have wealth equivalent to that of the poorest 20%. This is not a complaint that the poorest 20% are suffering from famine (they're not) just that they have perceived a sin (rich people tend to be rich and poor people tend to be poor). They have got involved, as in their Middle East caper, with politics, pure and simple, and using your money to do it.

Personally I shall never donate to Oxfam again.

Tony Benn

Tony Benn has died aged 88, denying a bed in an NHS hospital to someone, unlike him, who couldn't afford to go private.

You will find three sorts of obituaries of him: those from a dwindling few who think he was often right; some from the right of the political spectrum who think he was wrong about everything but one of those originals who spoke his mind which is a good thing (like Stalin, I suppose). The third, and there is a particularly ghastly version of this by Mary Wakefield in the Spectator, falls for his innate charm. Wakefield, whom he clearly twisted round his little finger, thought his philosophy was a belief in the inherent goodness of man.

There's clearly quite a lot that needs to be put right here.

In the '60s and '70s my father, the son of working class parents, was, like a lot of managers then, trying to understand what was going on with the working man, whom he had begun by regarding as his own type. In fact the British worker was the same, it was just that a new politics had entered the workplace and disruption, largely for disruption's sake, was its aim. It was the era of lightning strikes, intimidation and bullying, and Benn pushed this programme as hard as he could.

Benn, by contrast, the son of a cabinet minister, wealthy publisher and viscount, had never had any understanding of the working man and didn't until the day he died: there was a leitmotif of patronisation, which even came out in Mary Wakefield's panegyric where he described a couple of his visits to poor areas (Get me, I'm hanging out with the sans culottes). For Benn, the British workers were Karl Marx's useful idiots, catalysts he could put to use in his political melting pot. Most of them, those who weren't his acolytes, hated him.

And he uses in his act the familiar socialist props. He explained to Wakefield, as if to a child, that Hitler and Mussolini nationalised the banks. He doesn't say that he has been trying all these years to put into practice the policies of Hitler and Mussolini, or, of course, that his policies would leave the British Citizen with as much freedom as the Germans and Italians in the 1930s. He must have looked so cuddly as he was saying it.

Benn opposed the European Union, which you may think a good thing, but he did so because he thought it might stop him from imposing an even worse system on us.

Tony Benn was almost an exclusively bad thing for Britain, and worse because he dressed up his illiberal beliefs as daring candour.

De mortuis.... of the dead let us speak nothing but the truth.

I yield to no one....

It seems that the Boy Band One Direction are encouraging their fans - which consist largely of randy 14 year old girls - to write to the Chancellor of the Exchequer demanding he maintain foreign aid and and tighten up on tax avoidance.

Now, I am all in favour of getting kids involved in politics and naturally yield to no one in my admiration for One Direction's .... I think espièglerie is the word .... but this is a tricky one. Doubtless Harry Stiles and the other children have a firm grasp of macroeconomics but in Italy, for example, the new Prime Minister, a trendy leftie, has just realised that the way to get more jobs for people is to cut taxes. But if you publicly encourage tax cuts you lose that smug, one world fair trade image which is so important in the music business: look at Bono.

Probably best to stick to the day job, lads.

 

Francis's First

Tomorrow, 13th March, will be the first anniversary of the accession to the throne of St. Peter of
Francis I (although he doesn't much like thrones).

Will he be conservative or liberal, good or bad? Will he allow contraception, women priests?

Find out in my article in The Commentator. It's Free!

De mortuis....

It only happened this morning, but I am already heartily fed up with being told what a wonderful, warm
person the late trade union leader Bob Crow was.

He was, by contrast, an unpleasant, drunken shit who insisted on living in state-subsidised accommodation despite earning £140,000 a year, blocking other more needy people from getting a home.

He had no taste for democracy and was too extreme even for the Labour Party.

Nobody who couldn't get into work or visit their family because of some unnecessary strike he had called, nobody who paid extra for a train ticket because he insisted on overpaid and unnecessary staff on the trains, none of these people think he was a friendly, cuddly chap whose heart was in the right place.

Let us start speaking the truth about these people. His family might miss him but the rest of us don't.

How far we've come

Russia is a country run on different moral and philosophical lines to a western country. We knew that.

President Putin is a nasty piece of work and his tough guy image doesn't just extend to being photographed without his shirt. We knew that, too.

Even the British Foreign Office, which in my view should have been closed down years ago in the public interest, knew these things.

Then the West began to covet Ukraine.You may wonder why: it is an enormous country with some rustbucket industries, subsistence farming and a Russian pipeline running through it. The reasons are that America and NATO wanted to put one over on Putin, whilst the European Union wanted to see its bureaucratic kleptocracy extend eastwards. There would be Ukrainian ministries, with commissioners, under-commissioners, chefs de cabinet and largesse to be distributed to the grateful cossacks. That's the sort of stuff Eurocrats like.

John McCain, the failed presidential candidate who brought Sarah Palin to our TV screens, has been in Kiev stirring up trouble, as has John Kerry, Secretary of State and our own William Hague.

As the mob got violent the EU brokered a peace deal, which the mob ignored. Baroness Ashton completely misunderstood what was going on. They overthrew the Ukrainian President who asked Moscow to intervene. Moscow did not 'invade' - they didn't have to since they had thousands of troops and scores of planes already there, perfectly legally.

David Cameron and Others are now mouthing absurdities about sanctions, and not going to the paralympics, as if anyone cared.

It just goes to show how far we have descended, that senior political figures have connived in the overthrow of a democratically elected government and then tried to blame the outcome on someone else.

The winner is....

After the Oscars ceremony the Italian papers were ecstatic. 'The Oscar goes to Sorrentino', 'Italy wins!', such that you might have thought that Matthew McConaughy, Kate Blanchett and the rest didn't exist.

It was of course for best foreign picture but they were mevertheless delighted. All, except for the Berlusconi Family paper, Il Giornale, which led with 'The Oscar goes to Berlusconi' reminding us what none of the other papers had mentioned, that it was Silvio's production company which made the whole thing possible.

Poor Silvio! No one even wanted to mention him. It was the truth that dared not speak its name.

P.I.E. (2)

There has been an interesting and, for me, pleasing development in the case of the Paedophile Information Exchange and the National Council for Civil Liberties.

We have now settled down to the expectation of something new every day, which suggests seriously bad management by the Labour Party. Tony Blair's old supremos Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell would never have let it get this far.

There has been an interesting defence of the NCCL by Brendan O'Neill in the internet magazine spiked , which is written by what appears to be a group of left-wing libertarians, if such a thing can exist. O'Neill says that NCCL was right to affiliate with P.I.E. because people shouldn't be censored from expressing their views, whether one agrees with them or not.

To a large extent, as a Libertarian, I agree with this. I have had enough cases where my views have failed to see the light of day because they were 'inappropriate'. You may remember Rod Liddle being told, when he wanted to put a Eurosceptic on a panel show, 'You don't understand, Rod, these people are simply mad'.

But the NCCL appear to have gone further than merely allowing P.I.E. to spread its opinions. They seem to have actually campaigned for them, which is quite, quite different. The new development is Patricia Hewitt, former Labour cabinet minister and then head of NCCL, replying to a letter from a schoolmaster.

That schoolmaster was my old tutor at St Paul's, Philip McGuinness. Philip was fortunate to have gone through life with a strict set of values as to what was right and what was wrong. He wasn't everyone's cup of tea, and certainly not every schoolboy's, but in later life I rather envied him, as I envy those who have no doubts about religion, one way or the other. I have always been wracked with doubt, on almost every subject under the sun.

Philip wrote to Patricia Hewitt:
"I cannot help but think that you do not support civil liberties at all. Your aim is questionable in the extreme. Are you aiming for the destruction of society, for the enslavement of the individual, for the destruction of family life? Is your object to shatter prospective individual happiness at an early age?
....Your title is a shame and a masquerade. There must be some very twisted minds and pernicious malcontents behind your organisation if this is the sort of thing you advocate".

Hewitt had written in a press release

"NCCL proposes that the age of consent should be lowered to 14, with special provision for situations where the partners are close in age, or where consent of a child over ten can be proved."

Her reply to McGuinness suggests that the police should not get involved if there has been consent and the press release suggests that consent could be given at 10 years old..

She and the NCCL seem not just to be giving a platform to P.I.E. but campaigning for it.

P.I.E

I am quite enjoying the row about Harriet Harman and the Paedophiles, but only, I should stress, from the point of view of mischief. I don't believe for a moment that she, her husband Jack Dromey or her then boss Patricia Hewitt are paedophiles.

Perhaps I should start by declaring a possible connection: Ms Harman was at St Paul's Girls School at
around the time I was at the boys' school. Contact in those days was limited to a joint discotheque and it is possible that a shy, blushing Harriet allowed me to lead her to the floor to bust a few moves among the collected prefects and swots.

Under the circumstances I shall make no further comment on this matter.

I remember the Paedophile Information Exchange, though. They had a nice sounding chap as their spokesman who said that some people wanted relations with adults of the opposite sex, some with people of the same sex, some with all kinds of kinky stuff, whilst they simply wanted to be allowed sex with a consenting child. One's first thought was that this seemed perfectly reasonable. It certainly sounded reasonable. It was only one's second thought that was 'Wait a minute! This is not normal, this is a disgusting breach of trust with a minor whom we deem unable to give his or her consent.'

So I can quite understand the assorted loony lefties in the National Council for Civil Liberties (it's just called 'Liberty' these days) thinking 'Well, we believe in fighting against persecution on the grounds of sexual preference, so obviously we should support these people who are being banned by the Government.'

In other words they couldn't see beyond their narrow world view: they put the Liberty part before the Civil part. P.I.E. became affiliated to the NCCL and Ms Harman helped it campaign for lower sentences for people in possession of child pornography. The NCCL's evidence to Parliament in 1976 said that a sexual experience with an adult caused no lasting damage to a child.

Ms Harman ought to go a fair bit further with her explanation of all this, but in the end she just needs to say 'I was a barking mad leftie at the time but hope I am more sensible now.'

But I fear the public is unforgiving and perhaps she should consider spending more time with her family.

Ukraine

Stupidity, I fear: blinkered stupidity seems to be the cause of the Realpolitik game being played out in this benighted country.

The Ukraine did not make a success of its independence from the Soviet Union. By 1993 it had the world record inflation and whilst things have got better it is still a lot poorer than it should be. It has an aircraft plant, some light industry, incredibly a space programme and the rental income from a pipeline which supplies Russian gas to Europe. It is also heavily dependent on this pipeline for its own energy needs.

Because of its own incompetence and poor governance, Ukraine needs money.

The country is bordered by Moldova, Roumania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus and Russia. Money could come either from the EU or from Russia.

Money has strings attached.

Now we come to internal Ukrainian politics. Because of the country's history, the west of the country, formerly part of the Habsburgs' Austria-Hungary, tends to be more European whilst the east, much of which is Russian speaking, tends to be more Russian. Underneath it all they are as corrupt and incompetent as each other.

In 2004 the presidential Election run-off was between two Viktors: Yushchenko (European) and Yanukovych (Russian). The result was declared in favour of the Russian but no one believed it and thus started the Orange Revolution which eventually got Yushchenko into power. Five years later he
was ousted (fairly, they say) by Yanukovych who managed to get Prime Minister and Abba lookalike Yulia Timoschenko thrown in prison for corruption.

The second Orange Revolution which unlike the first has not been bloodless has seen off Yanukovych again and what is tantamount to a mob has taken over. A peace deal had been brokered by Europe but the pro-Europe mob has gone miles further than what was agreed. One gets the strong impression that the European negotiators got taken for a ride. Most of the people killed have been police and legitimate government officials. Naturally Russia is fairly peeved.

Back to the money. The Russians over the years have kept Ukraine afloat (if poor) with billions in loans and subsidised energy. The EU hasn't offered much (less than €1 billion). The Russians insist on having a Russia-friendly administration and Ukraine belonging to a customs union with other former-Soviet satellites.

Europe insists on Ukraine joining the whole panoply of regulation, political integration and currency union, but not yet: Ukraine would have to go through a candidate phase.

When I say Europe has offered this: we haven't been consulted. This new status for Ukraine has been offered by unaccountable bureaucrats who, unlike President Putin have not been elected and would recoil with horror at having to be. In the end Ukraine cannot join the EU unless the 29 member countries agree and they would be wise not to agree. It is a bottomless pit for our money for very little in return except putting one over on Russia.

What will happen? Likely as not Putin will draw off the Eastern parts into new satellites while the western parts cosy up to Brussels. They will find it curiously similar to their previous masters the Austro-Hungarian Empire: inefficient, corrupt, undemocratic and bearing an inflated sense of its own importance.

You may think that a country has to be truly desperate to see its future in the EU. Ukraine is. Poor people.

The Campaign for Fair fines

'Abbey Clancy slapped with a parking ticket after blocking off pavement while running errands.'

What knowledge of gossip I have comes from the Daily Mail, which I find a mystical journey through the lives of people I have never heard of but whom the Mail seems to find important. It is a judgmental newspaper but getting a parking ticket is not nearly as bad in its eyes as wearing unsuitable lipstick (someone called Jessie J) or having cellulite (almost everyone from Kate Moss...er...down).

I can enlighten you here a little. Ms Clancy has recently won a reality TV show, which must be important, and she is married to a Premier League footballer, which is very important. And when it says she was 'slapped' with a parking ticket it does not mean that some concerned citizen, appalled by the triviality of her lifestyle, struck her in the mazzard with an Administrative Penalty Notice. It means she received such a ticket, probably in the usual way.

Phew! I bet you're breathless. But there's a point here.

As a TV star, married to a sportsman who is on tens of thousands of pounds a week, she can easily afford the fine. In fact she'll probably spend more on getting her staff to handle it and perhaps run it past a lawyer (a defence under the Persecution of Celebrities Act?).

So this young woman will effectively have broken the law for free, blocking a pavement, perhaps making disabled people step into the road, while she ran 'errands' (does she moonlight as a message boy?). A person on the average wage, by contrast, would have found the fine a huge encumbrance, possibly needing time to pay.

We desperately need a fairer system. If the fine is £150, that would represent perhaps half the weekly disposable income of a poor person after property costs, food etc.

Ms Clancy's husband makes £40,000 a week and if we add in her earnings and subtract tax and costs (she doesn't look as if she eats much) they must have at least £40,000 a week to spend.

So the fine should be £20,000.

That would be fair.

Global..er..change

I really am just a sceptic, not a disbeliever or apostate or whatever term is currently in use for those who don't toe the line on the climate, but I do think we should remember this.

It was not long ago, when the left of centre doom mongers were calling it global warming, that they - George Monbiot, Prince Charles and the rest - were saying that the rivers would run dry and that swathes of Britain and Europe would be desert. Even as recently as November 2013 the Met Office, which is stuffed with these fools, was predicting  a particularly dry winter.

Then they decided, in the face of evidence many of them still don't accept (are you listening, HRH?), that absent any global warming since 1998 they should call it climate change.

So now, when half of the country is submerged, they say 'See, proves what we were saying all along'.

I do not assert that everything is the diametric opposite to what Prince Charles says (although that would be a more accurate forecasting method), I am saying that anyone who uncritically believes what these people say needs his head examined.

The Commentator

See my thoughts on Italy in The Commentator.

The Commentator is great political journalism and it's free.

Tony Benn

On a personal level I wish Tony Benn well. He has brightened political life for 50 years, since the days when he tried, successfully, to renounce his viscountcy.

He has been wrong about almost everything he has ever uttered, and proven to be so (I exclude renouncing the peerage).

Now, aged 88, he is seriously ill in hospital. He could easily have afforded to go to a private hospital but instead has gone into an NHS one, blocking a bed which could be used by someone more needy.

Surplus to requirements

It appears that a giraffe in Denmark called Marius has been killed by his keepers. There are European laws about animal collections in individual countries, and Marius was deemed to be surplus to requirements.

This is something which should concern us all.

It has certainly put the wind up me. For years, because of my political views, the European Union has described me as 'mad', 'unhinged', a 'swivel eyed extremist' and someone displaying 'disturbing nationalism'.

It seems only a matter of time before Brussels decides, in the interests of the human race as a whole, that I, like Marius, am surplus to requirements, and that, given with the danger that I might breed, I should be put down humanely.

Too late for Marius of course, but my solution is to go into hiding. This post is being sent, not from my usual haunt in Rome, but from a secret location in the basement of the Berlaymont building in Brussels.

Just in case they decide to bomb.

I yield to no one

George Clooney, an American actor who serves as the Cary Grant de nos jours, has decided that Britain should give the Elgin Marbles, more correctly known as the Parthenon frieze, back to Greece. He came to this conclusion at the Berlin film festival.

Now, I yield to no one in my admiration for Mr Clooney as..er..an advertiser of coffee, but suggest that on subjects on which he is not qualified to speak, or indeed knows nothing, he might be better advised to remain silent.

Nor do I want to hear Miley Cyrus on stem cell therapy.

Just smile at the cameras and keep the lips zipped, George.

Nexit

Stop me if I've told you this before, but several years ago, around the time of the EU Constitution fiasco, I was lecturing on the EU to some Erasmus students in Rome (Erasmus is the system whereby students can pursue their studies in another European country).

One of them, a young Dutchman, said there was really no need to put the matter to a referendum in his country since everyone was in favour - no opposition whatsoever. A few weeks later the Dutch voted 'No' to the constitution and it had to be foisted on them by calling it a Constitutional Treaty, which didn't require a referendum.

Nevertheless, Holland is one of the founder members of the European project and has traditionally been seen as one of the keenest. Things are changing, however. Economic growth in the Netherlands is tiny, the country has lost its AAA rating and there is concern about immigration and unemployment.

Geert Wilders's right-wing Freedom Party is likely, according to the opinion polls, to be the largest party in the European elections in May. Wilders is anti-EU as well as anti-immigrant and this time will enter the elections armed with a study by Capital Economics to the effect that if Holland left the EU (a concept known as Nexit, but of course it would be Hexit if you call the country Holland and Dexit if you are referring to the Dutch) it would by 2035 have a national income 10% higher than if it stayed in.

Whilst in the past talk has been only of the British leaving the EU (Brexit) or the Danes (another Dexit) this time there are strong anti-EU voices from Marine LePen's Front National in France (Frexit), Greece (Grexit) and for all I know one of the countries beginning with S.

Of course victory in the European elections does not mean victory in the national ones as the British UKIP can attest. But one of the interesting things is the effect this is having on the more mainstream parties. In the Netherlands Prime Minister Rutter, in order to fend Wilders off, is making noises about repatriating powers from the EU. The comical figure of François Hollande was in England last week pleading with Mr Cameron not to go for a Treaty change since he knows he'd never get it past his own electorate. Mrs Merkel, who is on less shaky ground electorally, is inclined to bend a little with the Eurosceptic wind and not rule out repatriation of powers.

One of the winners of this new mood could be David Cameron, who is pressing, not for Brexit but for reform of the EU. Movements by governing parties to make concessions to Euroscepticism could play right into his hands.

My own guess is that Cameron won't succeed in reforming the EU, certainly by his 2017 deadline and that we are past the point of no return.

Still, everything to play for.

Scotland

The referendum on Scottish Independence is this year and the papers have got into several flaps about it. What astonishes me is that everyone seems to have made their mind up.

I confess that if I had a vote I should find it very difficult. Scotland has the critical mass to manage its own affairs, with a population around that of Denmark, which doesn't have any hydrocarbons, just a lot of contented pigs and sensible people, which latter resource the Scots may be lacking. But if I were voting principally with my heart I should vote for Independence: the Scots are different to the English, and whatever vicissitudes the new state might undergo, it would be something new, a concentration of Scottishness.

Against that I am quite sure that Scotland will not be able to manage its own affairs with the politicians it currently has. At a time when public expenditure needs to be tightly controlled, Scotland has a choice between the socialist spendthrift Scottish National Party and the socialist spendthrift Scottish Labour Party. Individually or collectively these two are capable of turning the new nation into a basket case. Still, cometh the hour, cometh the man (or woman) and it may well be a leader will emerge who has the courage and intellectual consistency to take the country forward. I see no such person at the moment.

So if I were voting principally with my head I should vote against independence. But of course I don't have a vote, and I don't really object to that. We didn't offer the Scots a vote on joining the UK.

What I do object to is the latest proposal that the Scots and the rest of the UK (RoUK) should have a currency union. I really ought to have a vote on this: after all Britain has kept out of currency union with the rest of the EU madhouse and is generally against the principle. It would carry constitutional implications, forcing RoUK, for example, to bail out Scottish banks if they got into trouble again.

I really think I would need a vote on this: we couldn't just let RoUK politicians give in and commit us to such dangerous uncertainty.

And it really wouldn't be good for Scotland, either. It would find itself, like Italy and Spain, with a grossly overvalued currency, damaging exports and jobs. Of course that would still be the case if it simply adopted sterling as its currency, without the formal currency union, although it wouldn't affect us too much.

The Scottish National Party celebrates its 80th anniversary this year, and you would have thought it would have given just a little consideration to this important point. Scotland needs its own currency, to float up or down according to the economic management of the country (likely to be disastrous, see above) and of course the oil price.

The opinion polls are still pointing towards a vote against independence, though the Nationalists seem to be gaining ground. If they have conducted this debate honestly, and discussed all relevant matters with the people, then good luck to them.

Website

I should have mentioned there is a new website. I hope to improve it as time goes on but it is the best I can do at the moment.

It is www.timhedges.eu and you can send messages to me at the address shown on the site.

Foxy Knoxy

I have written a very short piece in The Commentator about the Knox / Sollecito verdict and will be writing more when we receive the official reasoning from the judges.

I just thought I'd offer this interesting little quote from the President of the Court: 'There is no prevalent motive. Until 8.15 in the evening Amanda was supposed to go to work in Lumumba's pub and Raffaele was supposed to go to the station to collect a friend's suitcase. Then the situation changed. The episode was born in an evening when nobody had anything to do any longer ....if Amanda had gone to work probably the crime would never have happened.'

There seems to be a mindset that because these two people were young and modern that they would not act rationally: they took drugs, they had the sort of sex you don't have, so they would think nothing of killing her flatmate. I should have thought the prosecution were on dangerous ground reaching this conclusion without a motive. It would mean they were relying on circumstantial evidence.

But....as I say in the article, I rather want them not to be guilty. I don't know.

Renaissance

Happy New Year to everyone.

This blog will reopen at the end of January

Tim

Suspension

For much of this year I have not been able to devote as much time as I should have liked to this blog and I feel it would be best to suspend it while I pursue a couple of other projects.

Thanks to everyone who has read it. I hope to be back in the New Year

Tim

Monkey business

The Rev. Paul Flowers, head of the ethical Co-op Bank, has been caught buying crystal meth and cocaine.

The radio sternly reminded us that he had been receiving £130,000 a year from his Co-op members.

What? how much was Bob Diamond on at Barclays? £8 million?

If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

Double standards

There's been a frightful amount of nonsense about David Cameron gong to Sri Lanka for the Commonwealth Conference. The Prime Ministers of Australia and Canada have stayed away.

Sri Lanka has a poor record on what I suppose we must call 'human rights' and there is little or no freedom of the press.

Awful? Cameron has just been to China, for Heaven's sake, which has a far worse record, stretched over a longer period and inflicted on vastly more people. When he was brown nosing the corrupt, undemocratic cabal which lead that benighted country, did anyone say he ought to have stayed away?

Sri Lanka at least has proper elections.

Happy Birthday

It is Prince Charles' 65th birthday today, and he will spend it at the Commonwealth Conference. This event is no less ridiculous than it always was, but given renewed importance as we desperately search for someone other than the bankrupt EU to buy our exports.

It is telling that at the age most people retire, we are still waiting to see if Charles will live long enough to get the job. This blog hopes he does.

New flag

The BBC reports that a misprinted Union Flag was flying near the Cenotaph in Manchester
yesterday.

I think it looks rather good. We need a new design if Scotland leaves the UK and this could be it.

Camus

Today would have been the 100th birthday of Nobel Prize winning novelist and philosopher Albert Camus. In fact he died in a car crash in 1960.

Whilst most commentators attach the 'Philosophy of the Absurd' to him, he was rather one of the great humanists, a socialist like his one-time friend Sartre, but who argued with Soviet Russia's Labour camps and the enforced starvation in the Ukraine. His argument with Sartre over whether the philosophy of socialism was worth the appalling suffering was one of the great philosophical duels of he 20th century. His analysis of the Manichean undesirability of two Powers, the USA and Russia, in many ways defined the Cold War.

He was only 46 when he died.

Spanish practices

It is reported that 87.8% of Spanish voters have little or no trust in Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

What helps him sleep at night is that 91.3% have little or no trust in his opponent Afredo Perez Rubalcaba.

Sharia money

David Cameron has announced that the Government would issue Sukuk bonds, that is to say debt instruments which comply with Islamic Sharia Law. Interestingly, the number of sukuk issued has fallen dramatically of late, after an influential Imam pronounced many of them invalid. You have to get the terms just right.

What interests me is what happens if there is a dispute: does the UK Government have to submit to foreign religious courts?

That would be an interesting development.

Get away....

The delightfully named Soren Bo Sondergaard, a Danish MEP, has written in a report that some of the EU funds designated for rebuilding the city of l'Aquila after the earthquake in 2009 may have gone to companies with ties to organised crime.

Imagine, Soren! (or is it Bo?). Corruption! In Italy!

Even more surprisingly, Brussels has denied it, not believing that such a thing could happen.

It really does make you wonder.

Lies, damned lies....

The CBI has put out a paper saying the benefit to the UK of being in Europe is between 4% and 5% of UK GDP, or between £62 billion and £78 billion.

So that's it, then. Nice and precise, these are the guys who know, question answered.

Unfortunately it's drivel.

The figure was taken from a digest of other figures which are themselves dubious: many decided on what the answer was and set out to prove it.The CBI itself has always been vigorously in favour of the European ideal and not so long ago was telling us we would be tragically left behind if we didn't join the euro. We're not hearing too much of that any more.

And there is no analysis of what would happen if we left: the savings in the contributions we make, the elimination of swathes of bureaucracy, just the stale, idiot assumption that Europeans would no longer buy our goods even though we bought plenty of theirs.

Much of what you read about the European debate is rubbish, but if it comes from the CBI, assume it's 100% wrong.

Calabria

A short holiday in Calabria, one of Italy's wildest regions.

There are some places well worth seeing, though they are far apart.

We managed to avoid getting the car stolen, and were not pickpocketed or mugged.

Then we got back to civilised Rome and found someone had burgled our flat.

Lou Reed

There was cool, there was very cool, and then there was Lou Reed, who has died, much too young

RIP

Patronising

As I write, it is supposed to be a sensible hour of the morning - 7.30 - but it is 6.30 because the State has decided it should be.

I am not a revolutionary but I could wish, if the people were one day to rise against their masters, that this patronising, bullying measure would be one of the reasons. The State fondly believes that we - you - cannot be trusted to get up a bit earlier in summer and a bit later in winter. It clings to the idea that we cannot organise a Parent-Teacher Association to set the school hours according to the seasons, and that farmers are as stupid as their cows.

To confirm them in this belief they put out all kinds of drivel and lies about improving tourism and road safety which even the most witless of our citizens can surely see through.

Once again, notwithstanding the massive importance of the person making the declaration, the earth will continue to go round the sun in the way it always has, and the same Prime Mover which gave us the planets and the stars has also gifted us - and the animals in the forest - the ability to get up at the right time.

Leave us alone.

Bugged

Angela Merkel, Germany's Chancellor, says that it is 'really not on' (congratulations to the translators) for America to bug her personal telephone.

Well. We are not talking about Burkina Faso here. Germany has some of the best electronics companies in the world and if they couldn't protect the Chancellor's 'phone, something has gone badly wrong.

My guess is that this is mock outrage, and that in fact Mutti ('Mummy' as she is called) has given the head of the Foreign Service a roasting he won't forget.

But his job is safe because to fire him would be an admission of incompetence

This stuff is for the proletariat.

Colour coordinating

It appears that a family in Ireland has had their child taken away because it was White and blonde. The family were .... um ....not white, or rather not very White: they were Roma.

What on earth is going on here? It is not as if the police were looking for a specific child and suspected this might be it. They were going round a Roma camp and saw a child which looked out of place. Do they have colour charts? If the parents are approximately No. 14 on your chart (Roma Brown) the child should be between numbers 8 and 13; if it is 7 (White including mild suntan) or less you can take it away.

Is this what is going on? Is this how we live? If so, it isn't working. The whitey child turned out to be the offspring of the browny parents and the police were left ..er.. red faced.

Boy George

We have to remember that in the absence of a fixed retirement age for the monarch (something which would be welcomed by this blog), Prince George is not going to be king until around 2075. He will be a very different monarch for a very different, modern, age, an age where, perhaps, in Andy Warhol's words, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

It seems a mistake, therefore, that he didn't sell pictures of his christening to Hello! magazine.

The breadline

This blog sends its commiseraitons to Veronica Lario, former wife of Silvio Berlusconi.

Her alimony cheque has been more than halved. Now she is going to have to live on €1.4 million.

Per month.

Energy prices

There seems to be a reluctance to face reality in Britain over the cost of energy. For years we have been told that the price would go up and up, and now it has, it is somehow a disaster. And not only a disaster but a fiddle. 'We are being cheated', they cry, and it is, of course, the horrid big companies doing the cheating. Trust me, when it comes to fuel prices, big companies are good; you don't want to be buying your energy from some tiny local supplier down the road, like a corner shop. That would cost far more.

Then someone introduced the idea of 'fuel poverty', where people were deemed to be fuel poor if they spent more than 10% of their income on fuel. Instead of pointing out that this is a complete nonsense - some people live in large houses in cold, exposed areas, some live snugly in city flats; some need to be warm, others don't - the BBC and several newspapers have been treating this bogus concept as if it were important..

Next we had David Cameron's wizard scheme to tell the horrid companies to put everyone on the 'best' tariff, thereby reducing the number of different tariffs available and reducing consumer choice which is what keeps energy prices down.

Then we had the astonishing economic illiteracy of Ed Miliband, announcing a price freeze if he won the election. Of course it is quite easy for the Government to announce a price freeze, simply by reducing fuel taxes by the amount the market price had risen. But this wasn't Mili's idea: he wanted to ban the horrid energy companies from increasing prices, even if their cost of fuel goes up. Of course what would happen is they would put up prices on election day, particularly if it looked as if the country were daft enough to vote for Miliband, and they'd put them up again at the end of the freeze period.

After all this swaggering incompetence, all it needed was for some senior political figure to keep the 'debate' going and attack those horrid companies. Step forward Sir John Major, Prime Minister, astonishingly, for more than six years. Now, this was a fairly inglorious moment in our history (remember the Cones Hotline? Back to Basics? Edwina Curry?) and you would have thought that having been such a risible disaster in power he would have had the decency to keep his mouth shut after he had been found out. But no, the man with the blue underpants wants a windfall tax on the horrid companies.

One wouldn't have thought this needed saying, but it obviously does. Energy is a fairly long term business, and the investors need to be fairly sure about future prices and returns. If the government suddenly intervenes with a new, unexpected tax they grow nervous and don't invest because there is an atmosphere of uncertainty. They invest somewhere where the government is more sensible.

Going back to the Miliband Plan, there are a few things people should know. The first is that part of the taxation regime is arbitrarily imposed 'green' taxes. These were popular with the previous government and several were introduced by Ed Miliband when he was Energy Secretary. They were very popular with David Cameron, who also fell for the Global Warming twaddle, although less so now that it has been disproved (the IPCC say Britain is due to get colder). The green taxes amount to around 15% of fuel bills, all based on some fashionable bogus science. They tried to cover up the additional cost by making it illegal for companies to mention them on the bills they send out.

The next thing people should know is that the Miliband freeze could well make things much worse. As stated, the companies will put up their prices to cover the uncertainty, but 2015-17  will be a period of stable or falling energy prices, as the Americans release their vast reserves of shale gas on to the world markets. At best, the Mili-freeze is unlikely to have any impact.

As to the claims that there is no competition, there are six large energy suppliers and I believe this is enough to permit competition to flourish.

I am not, here, appealing for lower energy prices or lower profits. I am appealing for some common sense to be spoken on this subject.

The monkey and the manager

Having suggested we ignore bogus racism in football, I was cheered to learn that the England Manager, Roy Hodgson, made a joke to the players during the half-time interval, concerning an astronaut and a monkey.

In the joke the monkey is given a number of tasks to perform in the spaceship and the astronaut asks what there was for hm to do. The reply from ground control is 'feed the monkey'.

In Hodgson's example, the monkey was a player of mixed race with the exotic name of Andros Townshend, who, it was hoped by the racism lobby, would be outraged. But he wasn't.

No one seems to have noticed, except perhaps Mr Townshend, that in a comparison with the joke, it is better to be the monkey than the astronaut.

Footballists

What are we to do about racism in football? It is almost a standard question for one of those TV or radio shows where famous people are asked questions by a hand-picked freethinking audience.

You always get the same sort of answer: the VIP loathes racism, there is no place for it in our modern way of life, da-di-da. This is intended more to boost the credentials of the respondent than inform us.

We need to have a good look at this because the nonsense is reaching crescendo level.

Is it difficult for a black man to get a job playing football? No, there are lots of them.

Are they paid less than their white counterparts? No.

Do they, as used to happen in Apartheid South Africa, have to use a different changing room to the whites? No

It is in the crowds that the racism is spotted - people making monkey noises and so on. It is in us, the people, not 'Football'.

And 'Racist' isn't the only '-ist' levelled as an accusation by the New Inquisition. There is a 'clubbist' or regionalist discrimination whereby, horror!, the fans of one team shout insults at the fans of another.

And, strangely enough, the world of football has been surprised to see the fans themselves resenting this interference. In England, fans of Tottenham Hotspur, traditionally called 'Yids' because of the high Jewish element in the area, don't resent it but carry banners calling themselves Yiddos or the Yid Army. In Naples, Italy, where there were cholera outbreaks at the beginning of the twentieth century and this is recalled by the chants of Rome and Milan fans, they now have banners saying 'we are the cholera sufferers'. Morbid, but the point is they don't want to be told what to sing or shout by the do-gooders.

Long may it continue.

The last minute

America has once again come to a deal on raising the borrowing ceiling from its present, scarcely credible, $16 trillion.

Nobody has come out of this well. Obama has looked as if he didn't understand the politics, and his refusal to back down has often looked mulishly stubborn. The Republicans have looked worse: they bleated and made proposals which were obviously not going to be acceptable and now they have lost.

The problem with leaving it until absolutely the last minute before cutting a deal is what you will do next time. Allow a default? Plunge the whole financial system into disarray?

America, and the rest of the world, deserves better than this, from both sides.

Pride and timidity

The man who adapted Pride and Prejudice for television tells us that the famous scene where Mr Darcy dives into the lake and emerges in a wet shirt was supposed to be filmed nude, but the actor, Colin Firth, refused because it would show his love handles.

Men will be silently cheered by the news, women may find it's just a bit too much information.

Shutdown

If it were Italy, and the Italian government were no longer able to function and to pay its staff, people (myself included) would say that the political class has shown itself unfit to govern.

As it is, it is America in this position. The problem is that the law does not permit the Government to borrow more than $16,699,000,000,000.

But it needs more. A lot more. Perhaps that is what we should be focussing on.

Silvio

The Senate committee has voted to evict Silvio Berlusconi after his conviction for tax fraud.

I have enjoyed Silvio's antics over twenty years but of course this is right: you can't be one of the legislators over the taxes of a country if you have been thieving from your fellow citizens.

See, incidentally, my article in The Commentator.

Ralph, Ed and the Mail

The row between Ed Miliband and the Daily Mail over the paper's treatment of his late father Ralph continues, in part because, idiotically, the Mail on Sunday sent an undercover reporter to a family memorial service.

More of the madness comes from Ed Miliband, who seemed to take the view that the Mail had no right to discuss his father, a view seemingly shared by David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

The nub of it all is that the Mail said Miliband père hated Britain. One of the questions to be answered is: did he?

Ralph Miliband was a Marxist academic, a man who campaigned in the middle of the twentieth century for a Communist Government. What Miliband wanted for Britain - a country to which he came as a refugee - was no monarchy, no army (except as a political tool) and no independent elections. Miliband certainly hated many or most of the institutions which made up Britain. From those days, I still remember the air raid sirens being tested, and publicity from the Government as to what to do in the event of a Russian attack. And of course it was to Russia that Miliband looked. If he had achieved his aims, Britain would have been subservient to Russia in a Worldwide communist movement.

So I think it is fair to argue that Miliband hated Britain: I'm not sure it is right, that's all. I for example have spent twenty-odd years campaigning against a particular bit of Britain's constitution: that it s a member of the European Union. I want upheaval in this respect. Am I the same? Do I hate Britain?

Here we delve into the subjective: my wanting to leave the EU would not cause any loss of democracy (quite the reverse) and would not kill anybody. Ralph (his first name was Adolphe, by the way) Miliband would have damaged everything a democrat might love about Britain. That is the difference. He hated democracy and Britain was and is a democracy.

Another thing to be considered is Miliband's statement that the Daily Mail should look at its core values. It fills me with horror that a man who wishes to be Prime Minister should speak in this way: I certainly don't want the executive looking at the values of a free press: it would no longer be free. And this is in itself justification of the Mail's story: if Miliband had said 'they can print what they like' it would have been fine. Now, however, he archly asserts that we must consider how newspapers are run.

Lastly, it is the hypocrisy: it has become normal in British politics for the left to comment on David Cameron's privileged upbringing: he was the son of a rather rarified family, his father being a wealthy stockbroker. Miliband himself has made comments about the 'rich boy', clearly implying that Cameron's upbringing has influenced his world-view. It must be equal for Miliband. He grew up also in a rarified atmosphere, the son of a prominent Marxist, and we are entitled to scrutinise that and wonder whether it has influenced his own politics (he has several times said in eulogies for his father that he had been influenced by him).

So the Daily Mail must keep publishing this stuff, whether you like to read it or whether you agree with it or not.

That is what we call a free press.

Barnet Conference

It is the UK party conference season, although I am sure you were hoping not to be reminded of it.

As usual no one can remember what they said. We are left with general impressions: Nick Clegg looking so confident that you knew there was something wrong, Ed Miliband longing for the days of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock and...George Osborne's hair.

What on earth is going on here. It looks like a cross between Jeremy Hunt and Caroline Lucas of the Green Party.

Clearly they have been going to the same hairdresser and someone should send in an urgent Freedom of Information Act request to find out where it is, although I urge the public to keep the protest within the realms of civil obedience.

I remember arriving in Edinburgh one cold morning badly in need of a haircut. There was one near the office but its prices were incredible: more than I paid in Hampstead or the City. A colleague pointed me towards a more traiditonal barber a few streets away who offered what was known as an Edinburgh Baldie.

The next two or three times I went to a hairdresser he said 'My God! What have they been doing to your hair?'It took about a year to grow it out, and so I fear it will be for these unfortunates.

Greece

The Golden Dawn Party has been declared illegal and most of its MPs have been arrested for belonging to an illegal organisation.

Golden Dawn parades itself as a neo-Nazi Group, with Nazi salutes and a swastika-like emblem. As with Hitler's party before he came to power they go in for a fair bit of Street violence and have been linked in the public mind with the death of a socialist rap artist, although there have been no convictions.

I cannot help feeling that the Greek Government are playing this wrong. These organisations crop up in times of economic malaise, usually trying to blame immigrants for the country's troubles. Such a one appeared in Britain in the 1930s and we have seen modest signs of them occasionally thereafter.

The trick is not to take them seriously, to ridicule their uniforms and salutes; they go away when times are better.

Instead, Greece has got martyrs. Golden Dawn scored 7% in the last elections, which is higher than one would wish but, given that no one will have them in a coalition, not electorally dangerous.

And yet 7% of Greeks will be outraged.

No good will come of this. Greece panicked when it should have giggled.

Italy update

The Head of Telecom Italia has resigned, now that the company is believed to be Spanish. The head of Intesa, Italy’s largest bank, has resigned. The finance Minister Fabrizio Saccomanni has threatened to resign.

The Ministers of Berlusconi’s PdL party have resigned from the Government.

Several senior members of PdL have resigned from the party over the resignation of the others.

Beppe Grillo says he will resign if an election brings back the centre left PD and the centre right PdL but several of his deputies are threatening to resign in order to maintain those two parties in power.

The markets are selling Italian debt.

Prime Minister Enrico Letta will offer himself for a vote of confidence on Wednesday and we shall see what happens.

The last time Italy had a government run by the head of the largest elected party was November 2011. His name was Berlusconi. Angela Merkel got rid of him; perhaps she has some ideas now.

But it will sort itself out. Life goes on as normal.

Remember that the word ‘fiasco’ is Italian.

Syria

Finally the UN has produced a unanimous resolution on the chemical weapons in Syria.

If you recall, firstly the West (America, Britain and France) wanted the right to bomb. Then Russian diplomacy took this off the table. Obama, Cameron and Hollande then insisted that the resolution permitted them to bomb if Assad didn't comply.

Now, it does not permit any attack at all (they would need to start again with anther resolution for that) and does not say which side used the weapons (because we don't know).

A victory, and a welcome one, For Messrs Putin and Lavrov.

Democracy

You may recall a couple of years ago the Irish budget appearing in the German newspapers before it had been discussed in the Irish parliament. I thought it outrageous but most Irish seemed to take the view that they were in trouble - and needing support - and you had to put up with some indignity.

Now this is standard practice for the eurozone. Within the next fortnight every eurozone country must send its 2014 budget for approval by the Commissioner, unelected Ollie Rehn. This week it was the turn of once proud, independent France.

Mr Rehn may 'request' changes.

This is just the latest example of how these people are prepared to override national democracy in pursuit of their goal of a Europe free from interference from its people, a Europe run by an unelected elite. We should be glad we are out of this, but we will not be out of the poisonous, undemocratic atmosphere until we leave the EU.

Global..er..

Finally the International Panel on Climate Change has produced its report.

It says that there has been no warming these 15 years, although several British 'scientists' (as these bogus professionals like to be known) tried to have that taken out of the report.

And Britain? The forecast is for it to get....colder. Far from the arid desert forecast for the Sussex Downs and cactus growing in Scotland, we are more likely to see frozen rivers.

I have asked before, but could we please now have the overdue apology from Prince Charles (plus an indication that he has made such a fool of himself he will retire into private life), Roger Harrabin of the BBC and the countless newspaper pundits who fell for this.

Nearly....

On the subject of the German elections, bad luck to the AfD perty, which wants Germany to leave the EU. It missed the threshold for parliamentary representation by 0.2%

Nobody thought it would do this well, and, as we have seen with UKIP, the more people think a party could do well, the more likely they are to vote for it.

Am I alone?

'Am I alone in recognising....' was how the typical eccentric's letter began, often to the Daily Telegraph and often, it is said, in green ink.

However there is an aspect of our political system which does not seem to me to receive any attention at all. Look at the papers today and you will see that in Germany Angela Merkel has won a decent victory, but not enough to govern on her own. 'Merkel in search of partners', they all say.

So who voted for that? Here we are, after the vote, and the people of Germany don't even know  who she is going to be making overtures to, what kind of a squalid compromise she is going to negotiate, not on behalf of the people, but on her own behalf, betraying their votes to hold on to power.

Of course in Gemany there are mitigating circumstances: their constitution was designed after the war, for very good reasons, to stop heavy majorities which could be misused. And at least the people knew pretty well that Merkel was going to win, and so any coalition would be shaped in her own image.

There is no such excuse in Britain, which does not have a proportional representation system. The trouble was caused by Mr Cameron's incompetence in missing the biggest open goal in political history. Having failed to win, he should then have governed as a minority administration but lack of courage and, I am told, excessive influence from Buckingham Palace, meant that he governs with a minority party, itslf riven between left and right, and that the policies of the Government have never been tested before the electorate. To describe this as democracy is a sham. No, it's a lie.

But we, the people, mysteriously, don't seem to mind.

The latest and best

No blogging for a bit - more later - due to other commitments. See my articles in The Commentator about UKIP and Berlusconi. The Commentator is free and excellent and only on the internet.

On this day

Today is the 12th anniversary of the attack on the twin Towers in America (I usually think of 9/11 as 9th November because of the different way they write dates); it is the 40th anniversary of Pinochet's coup in Chile and, but for the Grace of God, it would have been the first day of the American, British and French Attacks on Syria.

I'm keeping my head down

Diplomacy Doubles

The Russian team of Putin and Lavrov easily outclassed the Americans Obama and Kelly, the British Cameron and Hague and the French Hollande and whoever to register a remarkable victory.

In the last minute of play the Russians produced a staggering gambit whereby the Syrians hand over their chemical weapons to international control.

Now the Americans can't attack (the plan came out just as Obama was honing his speech to the American people suggesting he does just that), they have to give the Russian plan a go.

Of course the plan won't work - that's the beauty of it. 'International' must mean the UN, which would take a long time to gear up. The last time the UN was in Syria the team was shot at and they don't know who by; it was equally likely to be one side or another. Syria is undergoing a civil war and you can't just ask the protagonists to down weapons. And there will be confusion as regional approvals are not sought, inspectors turned away with a 'sorry, we didn't mean it' the week later (remember Saddam?), lost weaponry (now where did we put that Sarin gas?) and the 'discovery', true or false, that some are in the hands of the rebels, who haven't done a deal to hand them over.

The American and British peoples (Hollande wasn't going to bother to ask the French) are tired of war. Parliament refused Cameron permission to wage one. Then Hague hinted that if things changed there might be another vote. Things changed but not the way Hague wanted: if there were a vote now that there is a chance of mediation, it would go even more horribly against the Government. The Americans will pause.

And Putin will sit back, comforted that the war can continue as normal, just supplying a little more weaponry to make sure his side wins.

Gibraltar

Today is Gibraltar Day, where Gibraltarians celebrate the 1967 referendum to remain part of Britain.

Mr Cameron has said that he will never agree to any transfer od sovereignty without the consent of the Gibraltar people.

That's good. Let's leave it at that and let's hope for no sabre-rattling from either side.

The BBC and global warming

The BBC predicted that the Arctic would be ice free by 2013.

Today we learn that there is 60% more ice than at this time last year.

It's cooling, like the rest of the planet.

Doubtless the BBC team, I believe it is led by Roger Harrabin, will wish to apologise for causing an unnecessary scare tactic on the back of insufficient and inaccurate data it did not, in any case, understand.

Don't hold your breath, though.

Olympics again

Yes, the Olympics have raised their ugly, corrupt head again, this time to decide who will hold the games in 2020.

I could have sworn I heard the BBC announcer connect to our man in Istanbul, who said 'everywhere there are people waving flags, cheering...' and I assumed the games had been awarded to Turkey. But no, they went to Japan. Perhaps they were cheering because they wouldn't have to build useless stadia everywhere and take on mountains of debt.

Meanwhile Japanese professor Yasuo Hazaki suggests that hide-and-seek might be a good sport to include.

That's the stuff: games people actually want to play. Away with the  synchronised diving and dancing horses; hide-and-seek, hopscotch, skipping.

And cricket.

David Frost

David Frost has died of a heart attack aged 74, which is young.

He will be remembered, I hope, for the wonderful satire, which characterised the 1960s as much as the clothes and the music, and for the TV interviews, of so many people, which were lessons in the interviewer's craft.

I hope he will not be remembered for 'Through the Keyhole', a programme as crass and trivial as any you could find on TV.

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize winning poet, has died.

I've read a bit of his work and it struck me as banal, ineffective pay-per-word stuff, like someone who had never written poetry pretending to be a modern poet.

And I can't understand why, born in the United Kingdom to parents who were born in the United Kingdom, he wasn't British.

But he said he was Irish.

Greatly exaggerated

It seems that George H Bush, that is to say Bush père, not Dubya, has announced on Twitter the death of Nelson Mandela, even though he is still with us.

I can't work out which I think the sillier, the 41st President or the social medium itself.

Policy making

According to the Telegraph, Downing St admits that David Cameron's wife, Samantha, influences some of his decision making and she was behind getting him to attack Syria.

Good grief.

I mean, good ****ing grief. Is this what we have come to?

der, die, das

A new law in Germany enables you to register yourself as Male, Female or 'not telling'.

I suppose this may be normal for a nation where the words for knife, fork and spoon are three different genders, but it does seem odd. I think Germany must be the only nation where this is possible.

Useful Idiots

I don't have much time for Ed Miliband, and don't think he is the right man even for his own party, but there is no doubt he has played a blinder on the Syria debate.

First, he said that we should wait a couple of days for the UN Inspectors' report. Cameron had been ready to attack without seeing it. I don't know if you remember this with Iraq a decade ago, but there was never any time for the weapons inspectors; we had to go in now, now now, and Hans Blix was pulled out. I smelled a rat then and I smell one here.

So the debate, no longer being about authorising the Government to unleash tons of sophisticated ordnance on an already terrorised people, was about the principle of our fighting in Syria, and Miliband's Labour Party together with 39 coalition rebels voted it down.

There is much talk of this being a heavy defeat for Cameron, and Nick Robinson, the BBC politics editor, said it showed he was not on top of the foreign policy of his own party. In my opinion he will get over this fairly quickly.

What this has been about is Britain's place in the world. Many of us were getting fed up with the idea that we have to join every war. The spurious logic inflicted on us appears to be that we have to have a huge military because of our international role, and then, given we have a huge military, we have to use it. At the time of the Gulf War the Conservative Opposition, led by Ian Duncan Smith, followed unquestioningly the rather dodgy antics of Tony Blair, taking the attitude that 'if there's a fight, we're up for it'. And it's better if the whole thing is near some oil, have you noticed?

Many people don't want this. We never seem to use our superb military for humanitarian reasons; we didn't intervene in Rwanda, we didn't help Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, a former colony, we didn't stir a muscle when Mugabe was starving his own people in Zimbabwe, another former colony. But anything America decides is strategic and we're sharpening the blades on our bayonets.

Another thing I must mention is that it makes even less sense slavishly following Obama than it did Bush. Dubya genuinely liked and respected us. Obama hates Britain, and as discussed in these pages, has gone out of his way to show it. We would have been nothing more in this adventure than what Lenin called 'useful idiots'.

In my view it is not too much to say that the burden borne on British backs since colonial times has suddenly been lifted, and the British people can look forward this morning to a bright new future as an independently minded nation.

And, remarkably, it is largely due to Ed Miliband.

Nice work....

Steve Ballmer, the head of Microsoft, is going to retire.

When he announced the news, Microsoft shares shot up, making him instantly $1 billion richer, for promising not to work.

Syria again

All the signs are that David Cameron is about to embark on an insane military intervention in Syria without the approval of the United Nations.

Many MPs are demanding that Parliament be recalled and this is quite right. Cameron should be allowed to mobilize the military without consultation if the UK is threatened with attack, but that is not the case here.

The effect of a successful intervention in Syria would be to put into power a motley group of rebels some of whom, doubtless, are secular and sensible, others of whom are mad terrorists. Who will that help? The people of Syria? I don't think so.

Obviously every compassionate person will be very sorry that chemical weapons have been used. But that is no reason to compound the problem with Western missiles, which kill just as many people.

Let the MPs be recalled and let them put a stop to this nonsense.

Syria

Would you rather die by a chemical weapon or by a machine gun? For myself I'd just rather not die.

It is worth remembering that the business of chemical weapons use being some sort of red line is a construct of Obama who had been talking tough on Syria while unable to back it up.

Now that chemical weapons have been used, and we still don't know by which side, remember, he seems to want to do something. He has let it be known that he is repositioning his Mediterranean Fleet.

For Obama to attack Syria without United Nations' approval, which means without Russian approval, would be utter folly. And on which side would he intervene? This is a civil war between a murderous autocrat and some murderous islamists.

Sometimes it's better to remain silent.

Pulling the rug

Italian factory owner Fabrizio Pedroni sent his employees off on their annual holiday and quietly moved the entire operation to Poland. His business was being strangled by high salaries and low productivity. An employee on €12,000 a year in fact cost €30,000 due to social security and pensions provisions.

'If I had told the unions I intended to transfer production to Poland they would have had my property confiscated.' he said.

This is an all too common tale, which Italy needs to sort out if it is ever to emerge from the economic doldrums.

Incidentally the factory is called Firem.

Brave New World

The Snowden affair has been more interesting in the whereabouts of the leaker (who has now successfully sought asylum in Russia, a country which will have giggled at America's peccadilloes) and the more recent story of the Guardian journalist and his partner than in the actual details of the case.

It's probably worth remembering that Edward Snowden, a former operative for the American security services, revealed a comprehensive network of surveillance by the Americans and British (and others) covering private conversations over the phone, email and text.

I can't say I was very surprised about this. We knew years ago that GCHQ  would trawl the airwaves for key words. A computer technician used to send me emails finishing 'bomb, guns, explosion' and so on just to waste their time.

And I can't see that we can get along under the present islamist threat without doing something of this nature. It's not easy to put a limit on one's own rights but I believe I am entitled to know what they are looking at, but not entitled to know how they do it. As regards Mr Snowden, of course, he just released gobs of information without filtering it in accordance with these criteria (perhaps without being able to).

I have tremendous respect for the likes of Mr Snowden, and of course Bradley Manning who has been sentenced to 35 years for releasing fairly low-level information. I have no respect, however, for Mr Snowden's seeking asylum in Russia, as if it were some bastion of openness (glasnost, meaning openness, went out with Yeltsin, and there hadn't been much of it then). I rather think that these people should follow their consciousness if they believe this sort of stuff should be broadcast, but that they should accept the consequences of their actions, as Manning has done.

Then came the affair of the journalist and his partner. It emerged that the partner of a Guardian journalist who had released the Snowden stuff (the Guardian being the organ de choix for this sort of thing) was stopped at Heathrow en route from Berlin to Rio. The partner's name is Miranda, a nice name, although in this case it is the second name of a man rather than the first name of a woman.

Mr Miranda was questioned for nine hours under the Terrorism legislation and the Guardian screamed that this was attacking the innocent partner of a journalist in order to warn him off. If you had gone on holiday at that moment - to Russia, say - that is what you would have believed. However it then emerged that Mr Miranda was travelling on a ticket paid for by the Guardian, which insisted he wasn't a journalist. So what, then, was he? The Security Services thought that he might be in possession of classified information which he had couriered to a film maker in Berlin. It would be illegal to be in possession of such stuff, so they confiscated his laptop. Seems fair.

Then two things came to light. Firstly Miranda was not suspected of terrorism so they say he shouldn't be questioned under the terrorism legislation. There is espionage legislation, which wouldn't have allowed him to be questioned for quite so long. The second is that the police told senior figures in government they were doing this and the government told the CIA.

Funny name Miranda, although I repeat it is the man's surname. 'To be wondered at'.

I don't know if it is relevant, but Bradley Manning has decided to live as a woman, which presumably means he will be getting his own way all the time.

What do I think?

I want our security services intercepting things in order to protect me.

I want to know what they are allowed to intercept, what the rules are and I want to be satisfied that there is some oversight to make sure they don't overstep the mark.

I want whistle blowers to tell me things I don't know in respect of the above, and I want them subsequently to defend themselves in the Court of Public Opinion. I shall be on their side.

I don't want British Police automatically to reach for the terrorist legislation because that is the law which gives them most freedom of movement. Some 140,000 cases have existed over the last two years and without any detailed knowledge that seems excessive. And I want the police disciplined if they misuse these laws.

The Guardian, which also put up a smokescreen about laptops being destroyed by Security Services (also untrue, in that they were destroyed by Guardian staff in order to avoid an expensive legal case) has gone down in my estimation.

Oh brave new world, that hath such people in it
                                      Miranda, The Tempest

Consult the omens

I fear I shall never completely understand Football but occasionally one gets little glimpses.

Before their match Shakhter Karagandy of Kazakhstan sacrificed a sheep, whilst their opponents, Glasgow Celtic, did not.

Shakhter 2 : Celtic 0

Joy in death

It is reported that Germany is concerned about British plans to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War.

I can't see that there is anything to celebrate in the outbreak of a war, even a war which we eventually won (at the cost of millions of lives).

Why don't we save up for a jolly great party in 2018, to celebrate the end of the conflict, or, better still, not celebrate it at all.

However, Cameron yields

What do you think about Russia? I think most people don't much like the idea. Many of us have grown up with warnings about what to do if they showered some of their many missiles on us. I don't like Putin, who seems a cross between a third world dictator and a Tsar, with enormous powers to wipe out opposition. And I didn't like the communism and don't like the aftermath. There's plenty more.

What the celebrity Stephen Fry (once described to me as 'a stupid person's view of what an intellectual is like') dislikes about Russia is the way they treat homosexuals, although it doesn't seem as bad as some Muslim countries that he never complains about. He wants us not to be allowed to enter the winter Olympics in Russia.

There's nothing wrong with this view or this prioritisation, except that Mr Fry is a celebrity and people, unaccountably, think his views important. For myself, I am not interested in Mr Fry's opinions, be they on Accounting standards, football or agriculture.

But David Cameron agreed to meet Mr Fry to discuss this, in a pub in the East End of London. This is naivety in the extreme. If I wanted to meet Mr Cameron in a pub, would he? Or you? Is his criterion, therefore, for meeting people to hear their views whether they are a celebrity? Is this the way we want government managed?

Cameron, or some very junior aide, should have told Fry that you don't get to exert personal influence on the Prime Minister just because you have been on the telly.

Footer

Oh dear. The football season has started, in the middle of August, if you please. Already we are seeing managers ashen faced with disappointment, men with impenetrable Scots accents celebrating their win, the whole lot united in taking themselves very seriously indeed.

For those who can't stand it, the fifth Ashes test starts on Wednesday, and there is still full five-day coverage on the BBC (even though the metropolitan trendy lefties in the Corporation have been trying to stop it for years). Listen to Aggers and Blowers and tell yourself that football is played in winter, and by some pretty silly people.

I yield to no one

I suppose it was inevitable that the test drilling in Sussex by a company involved in fracking would bring out a few 'C' list celebrities - the sort of people Joan Collins said would go to the opening of a root canal - but we are now treated with the views on drilling techniques of the designer Vivienne Westwood.

I yield to no one in my admiration for Ms Westwood's work in bringing modern fashion to the short sighted and colour blind, but she should stick at that. Neither she nor it would appear any of the other protesters know anything about this even though the BBC reports their uninformed opinions uncritically.

Egypt

Perhaps because of its size, Egypt seems to have replaced Syria in the consciousness of the West, even though the death toll in Syria is far greater and UN inspectors are going down there to investigate claims that both sides may have used chemical weapons.

Estimates of the Death toll in the latest violence in Cairo and Alexandria vary widely: the Muslim Brotherhood says thousands, the regime some 500. But it is clearly bad. The question before us is similar to that in Syria: what should we do?

The first thing is to call a spade a spade. Calling what is going on 'events' or 'regime change' is to ignore the facts. The elected government was rounded up by the military and replaced with one of their own. the military is funded at least in part by America so this is a Western-funded military coup.

That isn't to say that Mr Morsi hasn't deserved his fate. A coup can be justified if it is for the benefit of the people. Morsi lied in his electoral promises, fiddled the constitutional negotiations to suit his sharia based ideas, and put religious fervour ahead of the welfare of his people. Morsi was Egypt's first attempt at government after its Arab Spring, and it was a botched one.

What can happen now? The Army-backed government must present a new constitution to Egyptians, a secular one permitting all kinds of worship (10% of Egyptians are Christian) and it must conduct open elections on this. All we can do is tell them that we regard the present arrangement as transitional.

Discrimination

The American chat show hostess, Oprah Winfrey, says she wanted to look at handbags in a shop in
Zurich and the assistant refused to let her look at a particular one, sayng it was too expensive.

Naturally, she has claimed it was racial discrimination (she is black).

This is to misunderstand completely the nature of Switzerland. The assistant is probably trained to look at the way customers dress, and the girl probably thought Winfrey had previously confined her patronage to charity shops.

The only discrimination you find in Switzerland is against poor people.

They can't stand those.

Priceless Publicity

The other thing that has our lefty friends foaming at the mouth is a remark by UKIP MEP Godfrey
Bloom about foreign aid, to the effect that if you give money to 'Bongo Bongo Land' it ends up being spent on sunglasses, Ferraris and fighter jets.

Yesterday a particularly idiotic interview on the Today Programme conducted by Left-wing Jim Naughtie began with 'where is Bongo Bongo Land?' and later suggested that the British Aid Programme had helped eliminate an outbreak of polio in Sudan so it was OK.

Today the Guardian splutters away; Zoe Williams: 'Bigots like Bloom must not be tolerated'.

90% of listeners to the Today Programme, if not Readers of the Guardian Comment Pages, know exactly what is meant by Bongo Bongo Land: a third world country, quite possibly in sub-Saharan Africa. James Naughtie should try to get out more. It is not racist to suggest that, even with the excellent polio eradication programme, some of the money might have been creamed off by some princeling or warlord, nor that he might have enriched himself to the tune of a Ferrari and some sunglasses or indeed some military hardware to help his cause. That's what most people think happens to some (not all ) of the aid programme. And it is not racist to suggest that the aid programme should not be kept so high at a time of financial exigence.

I have met Godfrey Bloom a couple of times. He is blokey, the sort of person you would meet at the golf club, and I remember forming the impression that he was harmless, albeit not as amusing as he thought he was. What has happened here is the lefties taking themselves so seriously that they couldn't spot that Bloom was taking the Mickey, and getting some priceless publicity for his own party.

Predatory

Neil Wilson pleaded guilty to having sex with a child and owning images of child abuse. It is a story regrettably only too common.

But this one is different. During the course of the trial a barrister said the victim, a thirteen year old girl, was predatory and sexually experienced. The judge also described the victim as predatory and said there had been sex but that it had been instigated by her. He gave Wilson a suspended sentence.

Naturally the bien pensant left-wing media are up in arms.

Interestingly the barrister who said this was representing the prosecution. This hs been widely reported but not cmmented on. If a defence barrister thinks he has to attack the victim in order to help his client (this is not a defence, but can be mitigation) it may be regrettable but we cannot stop it, otherwise we are tampering with the law.

But why would the prosecution barrister say this? Unless he thought it, and felt it his duty to say it? And why would the judge repeat it? What if she was, in fact, at 13 years old, sexually experienced and predatory?

One doesn't like to think some things but they must, nevertheless, be thought.

Spain & Gibraltar

This year marked the three hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Utrecht, under which Spain permanently ceded Gibraltar to Britain (it was following the end of the War of Spanish Succession). At least they can't claim, like Argentina with the Falklands, that they never gave it up.

Now the Spanish are threatening to charge £85 for a border crossing. So a European country is charging for the movement of goods and people but only to one nation - The Portuguese and French get in free of charge.

If this is permitted surely it marks the end of the European Union. Surely?

Silvio

I outline the disaster for Silvio Berlusconi in The Commentator.

Any Citizen would surely think he has to disappear from politics. Any lover of the spectacle of Italian politics will miss him.

But he's not quite finished yet.

Nice work

The Birth of the Young Prince George has been registered and his mother has described her profession as 'Princess of the United Kingdom'.

Nice work if you can get it, but is she a princess? And if she is, why go by the lesser title of Duchess?

All very mysterious.