George H

This blog's sympathy to George H Bush, the President who succeeded Reagan, who, at the age of 91, has had a bad fall and broken a bone in his neck.

At the risk of seeming to write his obituary early, he will be remembered for two things. The first was that, whilst mouthing genuine English words, he appeared to be speaking quite a different language. He it was who coined 'the f-word' for saying f***, and said he wasn't good at 'the vision thing', a curious construction for the quality for which he was in fact being paid.

The second thing for which he will be remembered, and this should be a case study for all US voters, was that he was the only President in modern times who was qualified for the job: he had been US representative in China, Ambassador to the UN and head of the CIA.

And yet he was a disaster as President.

Lacked the economics-thing, perhaps.

Euclid

Qn. What do the following people have in common: Joerg Haider, Yanis Varoufakis, Silvio Berlusconi, George Papandreou?

A. They have all been forced out of democratically elected positions by the unelected European Union.

The latest is Varoufakis. It seems odd that in the middle of all its troubles and after a successful referendum, Greece is changing finance minister, but Merkel and Hollande didn't like him and the EU doesn't give a stuff what electors want.

Varoufakis used to lecture at the University of East Anglia, which makes you wonder what kind of stuff we are putting into the heads of the next generation of leaders.

The new man is Euclid Tsakolotos who was educated at St.Paul's and Oxford, like Chancellor George Osborne and, dare I say it, your humble blogger.

The difference is that Euclid is a Marxist. What Mrs. Merkel will make of that Karl only knows.

Simony

Apparently for the christening of the royal princess, as, apparently for her brother, water from the River Jordan will be flown in.

Apart from the effect of wasteful air travel on the environment, something the child's grandfather makes such a fuss about when he isn't indulging in it himself, there is the aspect of the law.

Water from the Jordan is a lucrative racket indulged on both sides of the river. So Her Majesty, head of the Church, together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, are guilty of conspiring in this crime, which is called simony.

Besides, doesn't the benefit of baptism come from the blessing, rather than the origin or chemical treatment of the water?

Parliament

There are stories that sorting out the structural problems of the Palace of Westminster might cost £7 billion.

It is perfectly obvious the country can't afford this but don't worry. They will just have to cut their coat according to the available cloth, and make the sort of decisions ordinary people have to make all the time.

Here are some options. First, sponsorship.

History records The Long Parliament and The Rump Parliament, now we can have the Nike parliament, or perhaps get a few hundred million from McDonalds, particularly tempting with a Prime Minister called Cameron.

An alternative might be to move the whole thing to Bradford or Swansea where property is, rightly, cheap. Bradford being a muslim area, alcohol is frowned on so naturally there would be no bars.

There would also be the incalculable benefit of MPs learning how the rest of the country lives.

War again?

I remember back to the start of the Iraq war. Tony Blair had persuaded large numbers of his own party to back a war but needed cross party support. The man who could have put a stop to it was Ian Duncan Smith, then leader of the Tory Party, but instead of giving a considered judgment he made a speech to the effect 'if there's a fight  we want to be part of it.'


The British Foreign Secretary, a rather unmemorable person named Hammond, has been making similar noises about ISIS. There are too many public figures with this mindset, particularly in the Tory Party, mainly men with a military background, or who would like you to think they had a military background. They are often quoted by the newspapers who love to shake their fists at a perceived enemy then relish mourning our dead as they are brought back.


ISIS have killed what, 50 westerners? including the 30 slaughtered the other day in Tunisia. And they have killed a good 20,000 in the Middle East.


This is a Middle Eastern war. ISIS don't want to invade Hampshire they want to conquer Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern and North African countries, following the route taken by Mohammed and his troops in the 8th century.


ISIS must be fought by other Muslims, by Saudi, Qatar, Egypt and the others to whom it is a threat - Tunisia should join too, having just lost its tourism industry. What would we do, joining a war? Invade Syria? On which side? The gung ho in parliament wanted us to fight Assad not so long ago; now, presumably, they want us to join him against a new load of Muslim butchers.


Let's leave them to it.

Alive!

A HA!

I have been trying to get into this blog for some time using one of these tablet things. Harsh words were spoken about Google and its spawn but it turned out I had changed password and forgotten.

Reason for the tablet is I am recovering from an operation. Currently in what they call rehab (nothing to do with booze) and in excellent hands.

More soon

Andy Fraser

This blog says farewell to Andy Fraser, the best heavy bassist in the world. He joined Free at 15, having already played for John Mayall.



He had suffered a lot of illness, and died of AIDS. RIP

Political summary

The general election campaign seems to have begun in earnest at the beginning of January. Now, in mid-March, there are still seven weeks to go. For me it is one of the cases against fixed term parliaments: usually one of the big parties, maybe both, have a reason to string it out, diluting the message, so instead of a concentrated campaign you get months of meaningless guff, intended to nudge you rather than persuade you into voting one way or another.

There has been a lot of nonsense talked about debates. To the uninitiated it must seem as if televised debates are part of our constitution, mentioned in the Magna Carta, perhaps. In fact in our long democratic history we have only once had such debates, and that was last time. It is part of the American system because they only ever have two parties.

Debates never help the ruling party, since they can only show up other parties to a better effect. The only reason we had a debate last time was that Gordon Brown was so unpopular he had nothing to lose. In the end Nick Clegg did well. causing a surge in his party's popularity just in time for the election, only for it to decline immediately afterwards. The debate caused a completely misleading result.

Will there be debates this time? A debate with 5 or 6 parties would be an irrelevance but would harm Cameron less, preventing major challengers from hammering home their main points. 'Empty-Chairing' Mr. Cameron would not help anyone. He would go off and do something Prime Ministerial, like addressing Congress or coming up with a peace plan for the Middle East, and the debates would look like the squabbling of the also-rans.

Several polls are putting the main parties neck and neck, and I must say I find this astonishing if you look at the personnel involved. Milliband and Balls were, respectively, an adviser to the Treasury and Special Adviser to the Chancellor. These are the people who were saying 'Come on, Gordon, borrow a bit more. We can buy the votes of a few more special interest groups and our grandchildren can repay the debt'. It is surprising that the Labour Party even condones them.

But it all goes back to Cameron. In 2010 he missed a glaring open goal, failing to beat the hugely failed Gordon Brown. Now, against these two clowns, he has still failed to seal the deal with the British people.

In my view people find Cameron insincere. He could change opinions at the drop of a hat, being pro-Green, then referring to 'all this green crap'. He has been pro Europe and anti-Europe, pro-austerity ad anti-austerity.

Cameron is not what the French call an 'homme sérieux'. The Tories need a proper leader, not a chameleon.

Luvvie Fascism

One has interesting discussions with tailors. sometimes, but I really cannot imagine discussing In Vitro Fertilisation with one. Such, however, is the basis of a luvvie spat between Elton John and Dolce & Gabbana.

I suppose most of my clothes these days are made in Bangladeshi sweatshops but these people have never seen fit to express their views on this or any other important topic.

For myself I expect it makes me a bit of a dinosaur but I think it rather odd that two men in a relationship should want a baby.

What I think unpleasant, thogh, is people trying to force their opinions on others, boycotting Dolce & Gabbana's clothes because they don't hold the 'correct' opinins. It has a whiff of fascism.

Ciggies

I knew someone who affected Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, once. They were expensive and tasted like old socks, but they came in different colours.

Which got me thinking about the new plain packaging. All the manufacturers have to do is have their own colouring on the cigarette itself: gold for B & H, blue and white for Rothmans, red and white for Marlboro etc.

Which reminds me that if I don't give in to temptation, 1st April will mark 30 years since I have had a cigarette.

Jeremy Clarkson

Top Gear used to be owned jointly by the BBC and Jeremy Clarkson and a colleague. The BBC bought Clarkson out last year at a cost of millions.

The reason for the high cost is that Top Gear is very valuable property. It airs in more than a hundred countries and has made more than £100 million for the BBC. I heard there was even someone employed to copy Clarkson's verbal mannerisms into Pharsee, for the Iranian market.

Top Gear is nothing without Clarkson and he has a massive following worldwide. which does not include the politically correct lefties who run the BBC. The fans, amongst whom I count myself, don't much mind if Clarkson calls someone a darkie or (as is rumoured to be the current case) throws a punch at a producer.

We certainly don't want the show cancelled because the PC Lefties don't like him. We like the show; we don't much like them, an we deplore the flagrant waste of money that getting rid of Clarkson would represent.

The euro

I see that the euro has fallen to €1.40/£, which, interestingly, was the rate it was launched at in 1999 (bank accounts only).

I predicted at the time that it would last no longer than 15 years, so it has done better than I supposed, but I don't think anyone would call it a success.

Whose army?

The Americans are calling for increased defence expenditure in Europe. The fact is that they are tiring of defending an ungrateful but rich continent and would rather concentrate their efforts on the Middle East and the Far East.

The militarist lobby in the UK has interpreted this as a demand that Britain does not fall below the recommended 2% of GDP spent, although in fact Britain and France have been exemplary in maintaining their armed forces under difficult eonomic circumstances.

What America really meant was that Germany should come to the table. Its expenditure has been around half the requirement and its armed forces are in a terrible state of training and equipment. But the Germans prefer to let others defend them.

Britain should pull out of Germany as well.

In the middle of all this, up pops Jean Claude Juncker, head of the European Commission, to suggest that Europe, too, should have its own army.

Of course there has long been talk of a European Army and occasionally there are joint exercises, but it would be a nonsense without Britain's particiation, and fortunately we have refused so far. We should continue to refuse.

How would it work, Junckers's army? Would participation require unanimity so that Ireland, for example, which professes neutrality, could scupper any chance of it ever being used? Or would it be by qualified majority voting, which woud mean that several countries which were opposed to the Gulf War would have been forced to send soldiers?

Juncker wants this because an army is one of the trappings of nationhood. like a flag and an anthem, which he already has.

It is, however, an idea best avoided.

Out!

Apparently England's one-day cricket captain, Eoin Morgan, has refused to sing the national anthem.

In football, cricket and other sports England are brilliant on a day-to-day basis but rubbish at internationals. This is because they don't set much store by playing for their country, school having taught them that multi-culturalism is the important thing.

Mr Morgan should be told that if he doesn't sing the national anthem, and sing it lustily, not only will he not be captain, he won't be in the team.

Let 'em die

Also more tosh on Radio 4 about the number of pandas.

These creatures were carnivores which became too lazy to hunt and sat on their backsides eating bamboo. The bamboo doesn't have enough protein so they rarely have sex so they are going extinct.

Have no sympathy for pandas. They seem to want to go extinct and we should let them.

Je suis Spock

Incredibly I heard a discussion on BBC radio to the effect that the reason we liked Star Trek's Mr Spock was that he suffered racial confusion, not being quite human. It made him nicer.

For Heaven's sake, Mr Spock was a character in a TV science fiction. Let's try to get through the death of the actor who played him without resorting to drivel about modern self-awareness angst. He was a Vulcan with pointy ears.

No one is ever this nice to John Redwood.

La Barcaccia

Appalling scenes in Rome last week as Dutch football fans rioted and damaged a fountain.

Read about it in The Commentator - it's free!

Greece again

There has been a lot of talk about winning and losing, and very little about what is best for the people of Greece.

It seems Mr. Tsipras has given a fair bit more than Mrs Merkel but he went into the game with a very weak hand. The idea had been to unite the austerity-condemning governments of France, Spain and Italy into persuading the Germans to give way. Each of these has said publicly that austerity was not the solution but by the time it came to the crunch not one of them backed him. Tsipras must feel let down.

In the end, all Merkel had to do was make sure there was nothing Spain's extreme left party could seize on to upset the elections there later this year.

In fact the Greek people are not best served either by the German austerity plan or by the extreme left policies of Varufakis. Greece can never be competitive using the same money as the Germans.

Most people in Greece want to stay in the euro because they think it is stable money. What it means though is that instead of devaluing the currency when their inefficiencies catch up with them, they have to devalue internally - reducing wage rates to subsistence level.

Mr Tsipras will now have four months to hold an honest discussion with the Greek people. Do they want decades more of this, or would they like a drachma they can devalue, making tourism more attractive, exports cheaper?

It may be we haven't heard the end of this.

Greece

There's a lot of confusion in the press and the markets today to the effect that Greece will request an extension of its bailout, thus constituting something of a climbdown.

My information however is that it has merely requested an extension of the loan, not of the restrictions and targets that go with it, which would constitute the opposite.

Sometimes it is better to keep quiet than say the wrong thing.

ISIS

After the appalling killing of a Jordanian pilot, Jordan has joined seriously in the fight against Islamic State. Now with the murder of a number of Egyptian Copts, Egypt has joined.

This is as it should be: ISIS has killed remarkably few westerners but captured thousands of square miles of land in the middle east and slaughtered thousands of fellow muslims.

This is not our fight. We must make sure they have all the kit they need and let them get on with it.

The first thing which needs to happen is for Saudi and Qatar to find which of their citizens is shovelling money towards these madmen and stop it.