Until July 5 we're enjoying a blessed holiday from Westminster prodnosing - no Covid-era gaggles of MPs in meeting rooms giggling 'Whatever can we make them do next?' Actually, for some of that time they had interim arrangements that let them WFH. Insofar as they worked at all - nono, that's not fair: many are grafters; but here is an extract from ...
In 1997 the Tories used a now infamous poster caricaturing Tony Blair as having a demon's eyes. This was so over-the-top that it probably backfired. Yet two years later I was asking friends if they thought Blair was mad. They looked at me as though I was; though perhaps they see things differently now. He was the reason that for the first time in m...
President Biden has said he will not use his power to pardon his son Hunter if the latter is convicted in his gun trial. This may be a purely hypothetical scenario in any case, given what appears to be the political-partisan capture of much of the US justice system. Hunter might be as likely to secure an acquittal in Delaware, which elected Biden p...
Many people feel that the political system isn't working for the people; that the major parties agree with each other too much and against our interests. But is 'direct democracy' the answer? It was practised in ancient Athens, where all the voters (free men) could be accommodated in the assembly and hear the arguments. They were a small, homogeneo...
Saturday's Grand National was predicted to see £300 million collectively staked by over 10 million punters. Per capita that is less than a cheap ticket to a Premier League Football match - and the winner I Am Maximus came in at 7/1, very nice for those who got it right. But that merely is the tip of the ...
'Big crash coming' says Jimmy Dore, introducing his guest Paul Stone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zBEofwgshI&t=20s They agree that the economy is being mismanaged, because interest rates are too high and the debt is ballooning. The problem is that everything depends on facts and interpretation, and about the only fact that is unchallengeab...
We should be suspicious of anything that tries to wrap itself in the Union Flag. Do you remember the episode of Yes, Minister in which the government blackmailed Eurocrats into renaming our 'Emulsified High-Fat Offal Tube' as the 'British Sausage'? Similarly in 2014 the coalition government sought to define 'British Values'. These were designed to ...
Brum is bust, but the problem is not that the council is 'socialist'; the problem is that the national government is not 'conservative.' When did the soi-disant Conservative Party last show a deep interest in the security and welfare of the nation as a whole? For example, it's estimated that the UK's spending on defence for Ukraine totals £4.6 bill...
On Tuesday night BBC4 screened a 1980 episode of 'Yes, Minister' about the dangers to personal privacy of a governmental national database. Things have certainly moved on since then - we surrender our DPA rights almost every time we shop or go online. But the information asymmetry between officialdom and the citizen is still a live issue over four ...
The danger of suppressing information and alternative views in matters of public interest is that it will likely lead to costly and lethal policy errors. Alastair Campbell says it is a shame that the UK does not jail politicians for misleading Parliament. Can he have forgotten that Blair assured the Commons that he knew - rather than was personally...
Donald Trump is to 'surrender' to a court in Atlanta on Thursday to face thirteen charges. As a Brit I have no dog in this fight, and DJT is definitely a Marmite person, but I am not alone in viewing the whole affair as at least partly party-politically motivated, employing a spray-and-pray tactic in the hope that at least one bullet will hit its t...
I have been following a select group of (mostly American) financial commentators since 2007, before the Global Financial Crisis. Their tone is even more sombre now. Charles Hugh Smith posted 'I Have a Very Bad Feeling About This' a few days ago, following it with 'No, Central Banks Won't Save Us This Time.' He has been warning for years that we sho...
A friend once gave me a spray can of 'bullshit repellent.' The cover showed a man in an Edwardian swimming costume chesting back prime surfer quality waves of the stuff. There's so much of it now. Bookmaker Paddy Power has just released a promo video linking to the Women's World Cup (htp: PJW), insulting white men as misogynist gammons uninterested...
Everything is proof we should have not left the EU and that climate change will kill us all. If the UK has an economic boom and Arctic weather, those are sure signs that a bust will follow and our trees will burst into flame. We are in a time like the periodic madnesses that seized Europe in the Middle Ages - Norman Cohn's 'The Pursuit Of The Mille...
The inflation rate was over 11 per cent last Autumn; in the mid-Seventies it surpassed 25 per cent. You would want to be protected against this rotting of your money, especially if you were a pensioner. Last month I explained how the Government's choice and operation of inflation indices for State benefits doesn't work. Now I want to show how, even...
Why do bad men do bad things? Because they are mad, that is the modern explanation. But 'mad' is just English for 'I don't understand.' It's become common wisdom that all religious belief from Animism to Zoroastrianism is wrong, loopy and solely responsible for mankind's atrocities; but it's the irrationality and inhumanity of worldly wisemen that ...
The tax on alcohol has been raised by 10.1%; the reasons given are 'wider UK tax and public health objectives.' It's mostly to do with the money: last year the Treasury raised £12.4 billion from alcohol duties. This compares with around £8 billion in the US, which has 5 times our population. Clearly the UK Government needs the cash and depends on d...
If you want more money off the poor you'll have to give it to them first. Even the Conservatives took some account of this when they first proposed a Community Charge. Here is how they announced it in their 1987 General Election manifesto: 'We will legislate in the first Session of the new Parliament to abolish the unfair domestic rating system and...
Strikers are all evil, of course. I know because I was a teacher in 1987 and the newspapers made it clear how wicked and greedy we all were; a change from the cheery contempt everybody has for our profession. Now it's overpaid railway workers and horrid grasping doctors. Nobody in the public sector should be allowed to withhold their labour or othe...
I agree with George Monbiot when he says 'Overwhelmingly, the risk of climate change is due to moving billions of tons of carbon from deep underground into the atmosphere.'Over time, if we keep doing this, the chemical makeup of our atmosphere will change enough to induce meaningful climate change.' So sorry, that was an error on my behalf. That wa...
The UK must not listen to declinists and defeatists. It is amazing how fast things can be turned around, and I've seen it in education, where the material we work with is often difficult. In the late Seventies I taught in an inner-city multiracial secondary school neighbouring Handsworth, where the first riots were to come three years later. The bu...
coThe economist Duncan Weldon has told the New Statesman's Will Dunn that 'Brexit is a "slow puncture" on the UK economy.' As former business editor of BBC's Newsnight and so presumably of the Left he received soft treatment by Dunn. Let us deflate his arguments a little. Clearly much of our difficulty with the EU post-Brexit is intentional on thei...
The news is full of political parties at the moment - the drinking and dancing kind. No sooner did Boris Johnson decide to jump Parliament before he was pushed than it transpired one of the Privileges Committee himself attended a jolly during lockdown. The Guardian's piece on Bernard Jenkin is uncharacteristically balanced, perhaps because of mixed...
Why do we ape America, but so badly? Let's start with our 'big brother': On Tuesday, an editor at Fox News (fascists!) subtitled a live feed 'WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.' The banner was taken down within seconds and the editor told to get his National Insurance card stamped or whatever they ...
Boris Johnson's letter of resignation wonders how Harriet Harman's panel could have come to its conclusion: I have received a letter from the Privileges Committee making it clear - much to my amazement - that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament. That sense of injustice is reminiscent of Sir Thomas Mor...
It's time to call it a day. I'm not the only one saying it - ask Dominic Cummings, for another. The Party is moribund and we need to put it out of our misery. As for the Labour Party, that died a long time ago. New Labour gave a new meaning to the word 'New': 'Not.' Now it is a soft-handed version of revolutionary Communism, dedicated to the overth...
When we came back off holiday our next door neighbours invited us to their son's wedding. The previous occupants had been Hindu refugees from Idi Amin's purges and when one of their sons got married the festivities were held at home. We looked in: the women were gathered in the front room, the men out back. We still exchange cards at Christmas. Thi...
The architect Robert Venturi said buildings were either Ducks (whose exteriors advertise their function) or Decorated Sheds, where the ornament is independent of the contents. This idea has wider applications: for example the British Constitution is a Decorated Shed, if you accept Walter Bagehot's separation of its parts into 'dignified' and 'effic...
The Jewish Museum in Thessaloniki is carefully guarded. The man who let us in the outer door asked where we were from; it may have been more than polite interest. The inner door was electronically operated by another watchman in a shadowy cubbyhole. The first room held stone fragments from the centuries-old 80-acre Jewish cemetery outside the city'...
The general public has little idea of how much debt hangs over our heads. Today, Laura Perrins warns us that government borrowing is now equivalent to 99.2% of GDP (i.e. a whole year's worth of national economic activity); but that is only the tip of the iceberg, because it is only looking at public sector borrowing. Unlike the UK, where valuable f...
In 2010 journalist Matt Taibbi shot to a new level of prominence with his 'vampire squid' label for Goldman Sachs '… relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.' Greece's Establishment has chosen to use that as a model. In a moment, we will look at the official scam known as 'Hercules'. As with the concentration of p...
From Our Man In Thessaloniki Greeks go to the polls on Sunday to elect their national legislature. Voting is compulsory, even for Greeks abroad (as so many are, since the economy crashed), but the obligation is not enforced and the turnout in 2019 was less than 58%. Foreigners who are permanently resident may also take part (something that our Sir ...
Yesterday (Thursday 11 May) was a wonderful demonstration of why we are blessed to have a sovereign Parliament. The Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch had informed the Press before telling Parliament about the decision to remove the deadline for abolishing hampering EU legislation. Coming to the House to explain, she began with an unfortunate turn of...
In 1969 the UK lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, a move echoed in the Family Law Reform Act 1969. Not everyone thought the change to the age of majority a good idea. Of the eleven members contributing to the Latey Report on Civil Law reform, two dissented: Geoffrey (later Baron) Howe QC and Mr John Stebbings, later President of the Law Society....
The requirement for ID in Thursday's local elections has caused upset - Richard Murphy calls it 'a reversal of the right to vote.' At least he (correctly) thinks it's important. So does the EU, which is why it is post-democratic by design: its Parliament is nothing more than a talking shop. Moreover, the individual's ballot is swamped by sheer numb...
When William of Normandy fell down on disembarking at Pevensey, getting his hands full of sand and mud, he showed them to his army and said it was a sign that he would seize the country. As he strode up the beach towards his horse and Hastings, we can be confident that the liberty and prosperity of the English middle class was not uppermost in his ...
Three years ago today (2nd May) my MP wanted to demonstrate her responsivity to her constituents, which makes a welcome difference from the types that have allegedly represented me in the past. Unfortunately, we have locally an equivalent to Theodore Roosevelt's 'hyphenated Americans': some people who wish to embroil us in foreign matters beca...
We're still cutting the Lilliputian threads, but if we can prevent Remainer sabotage we shall be able to say that we're fully out of the EU. But then, so is North Korea. Rather than define our destiny negatively as against the puppet-empire in Europe, what positive vision should we have of Britain and our future? We talk of ourselves as a democracy...
The EU has never quite decided on its mission statement and this has caused difficulties for itself and for us, even after our withdrawal. Its deepest roots lie in the desire to prevent a repeat of World War One. At the fateful Versailles peace conference in 1919 the French minister of commerce and industry, assisted by Jean Monnet, was seeking Eur...
As we approach the Coronation we can expect much malign and ill-informed comment from people who do not understand our political system. One reason for their ignorance will be the deplatforming of speakers who could put them right, such as the redoubtable David Starkey, shunned by the woke for their misrepresentation of an impatient and infelicitou...
