Supporting Brexit is now the love that dare not say its name

When I was a undergraduate from a humble background brought into contact for the first time with the upper classes and fascinated by them, I used to love the Tatler. I haven't read it for decades but it seems it is still fun. At least this article is, about how to make sure you don't go to bed with a person who voted Leave.

How times have changed.

Because now there is NOTHING more important on the dating scene than how someone voted in the EU referendum. A new app called Hater allows people to match up according to what they can't stand. Its data shows that a staggering 88 per cent of users matched up according to their mutual loathing for Leave or Remain. Single people need this kind of technology, because it is a biological fact that you cannot tell whether someone is a Remainer or a Leaver by looking at them, or even by having sex with them. They smell the same, feel the same, taste the same - it's just their brains that are different.

That England, that was wont to conquer others, hath made a shameful conquest of itself

I am so old that I remember when Glenda Jackson was a very famous actress. She chucked in acting to become an uninspired and uninspiring left wing Labour backbench MP. That second career ended years ago. Now her son Dan Hodges is famous as a political writer. 

He's a good writer, a Blairite who was David Cameron's favourite political pundit, which tells you how close Mr Cameron and Mr Blair were, and a huge advocate of Third World immigration into the UK. 

Dan Hodges keeps changing parties and recently became a Tory from loathing of the antisemitism of the Labour Party. This too tells you how close the centrists in the two big parties are. He was always a convinced Remainer, until today it seems.

He writes today in the Mail On Sunday:

It's time to end this one way or another. I've written about the dangers of a No Deal Brexit. I believe they are real, not some Project Fear construct. But we cannot continue with this paralysis.

There is nothing MPs will learn about Brexit in nine months, or nine weeks, or nine days that they do not know today. The time for more excuses, extensions and procedural sophistry is at an end.

Many MPs think that, by blocking all other avenues, voters will opt to stay, rather than risk No Deal. But they are dangerously deluded. If forced to choose between No Brexit or No Deal, most people will opt for No Deal. And I know this because I'm one of them.

The transformation of France

From a piece in The American Conservative in 2017:

"Because the [French] government does not publish statistics about race, some curious researchers have looked at the number of newborn babies screened for markers for sickle-cell anemia, a test given if both parents are of African, North African, or Sicilian origin. The figure has risen from 25 percent in 2005 to 39 percent in 2015. In the Greater Paris region it has risen from 54 percent to 73 percent. "

Seen today in the papers

'I prefer the tried and tested recipes… like coming together to seek out the common ground and never losing sight of the bigger picture.'

H.M. the Queen talking to the Sandringham Women's Union, understood as referring to the political crisis over Brexit.

'Our founders believed in national sovereignty. This is why it is so astounding that most Irish people have no sympathy for the impulse behind Brexit.'

Quotations

"I know that there are young people, the sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement from their schooldays. They may perhaps have nothing to retract from their past lives; they could publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed around them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not repudiate it, for it is proof that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups – assuming one is a painter – extracted something that transcends them."
Marcel Proust

The MAGA hat and the digital lynching of blameless boys

I was completely baffled by the appalling treatment dished out, even by their Catholic bishop, to those admirable young men who marched against abortion recently at Washington D.C., because I didn't notice the MAGA hat that the allegedly smirking young man wore. For this he was accused of racism.

Actually it looked like a polite, nervous smile to me but it was directed at a tiresome American Indian who came up to him banging a drum.

On knowing further and better particulars the boys were largely cleared, even by liberals who had attacked them without pausing for evidence, except in the eyes of some very bigoted liberals.

Hatred is a grave sin, inhuman but part of human nature. We normally repress the urge to hate, but hatred is fun and we feel good hating people when we think it justified: hating people who torture animals and hating the few surviving Nazi concentration camp guards. For half of America, and most opinion formers, people wearing  MAGA hats are the moral equivalent of the latter.

America has been here before of course in the 1960s and early 1970s. But now the liberals are in power and anxious not to cede it.

Anti racists tend to hate just as pacifists are often full of anger.

Vegetarians are sometimes bloodthirsty and murderous. 

Conservatives rarely hate. Racists (there are lots in Romania) usually hate much less than anti racists hate them.

Anti-racists tend to hate fascists but, as Douglas Murray said, the supply of fascists falls far short of the demand. This is because fascism was defeated and became very unfashionable by 1945. 

Racists too are pretty few these days in the Western world and while plentiful are becoming rarer in Eastern Europe. I do not mean by racists people who dislike or regret immigration. I mean people who dislike other people because of their race.

Yes, Mr. Trump has deliberately created this atmosphere in which hatred flourishes, but morbid anti-racism and identity politics brought him to power and he greatly benefits from it. I hope he puts this anger that he has stirred up to productive purposes.

The treatment handed out by the American elite to the boys was very bad indeed and symptomatic of an elite with very false values but still I admire American politics for being so 18th century and vituperative. Much better that than consensual European politicians sitting in semi-circular chambers arguing over things already decided by panjandrums in the EU.

The Covington story is great fun, especially as the baddies had their fox shot. It might slightly impede the descent of America into unreason, when Donald Trump plays it for all it is worth.

But it's terribly depressing too.

I hate to speak ill of a Catholic bishop. Protestant bishops are fair game. But fun aside, the villains are the boys' school and their bishop. They had a duty of care to the boys and yet roundly attacked them, on no evidence but a photograph of a boy in a MAGA hat smiling at someone who wasn't white.  What betrayal.

One of the two bishops who condemned the boys without evidence finally yesterday made the boys an apology, but he still shamefully leaves me suspecting that he thinks that supporting Donald Trump is a sin. I wonder how many Americans and how many Americans in holy orders do think this. 

1. The American Episcopalian Church has moved far to the left since the 1960s and so has the Catholic Church in America.

Leading Swedish newspaper: "By 2050, more than 30 percent of Sweden's population could be Muslims"

Expressen ("The Express"), one of two nationwide evening newspapers in Sweden, reported this week:

By 2050, more than 30 percent of Sweden's population could be Muslims if immigration is high - while the proportion will be 11 percent at "zero" immigration.
This is according to a new study from the well-known American research center Pew .
The data can become political explosives in the infected immigration debate - and several Swedish researchers say that the study does not take into account that Muslims give birth to fewer children when they move to Europe.

It is likely that migrants will adapt to Swedish conditions when it comes to birthrates, says Ann-Zofie Duvander, professor of demography.

In comparison, a poll in France in 2016 said 25.5% of 15 year olds identified as Muslim. Such polls are very rare in France.

Man investigated for retweeting a poem about transgender people

My wonderfully feisty friend Joani Walsh has an important news story in the Telegraph today about a man investigated by the British police for retweeting on Twitter a poem (wrongly called a limerick) about sex-change people. The police found his place of work and the company directors informed him of the investigation. 

The policeman involved had been on a course about transgender shortly before. 

Sir Ivan Rogers makes a good point about Norway and Switzerland

'Whatever one thinks of the Norwegian or Swiss models, to characterise Norway and Switzerland as countries which, despite their sovereign votes not to join the EU, in some way failed to make good a genuine “escape” from European political integration, is patently absurd.
'One can, by all means, argue that neither model is appropriate to the UK, and that we can do better.
'Then set out what you think is better in what you propose, and demonstrate why you have reason to think it is negotiable. With a bloc that, understandably, will think we are a much larger partner, but also a much more sizeable future competitor, than either of those, and will therefore prosecute its own interests very carefully. But one cannot argue that Norwegian/ Swiss type models are “not Brexit at all”.Sir Ivan Rogers, former British Ambassador to the European Union until he stormed off in a huge huff.'

Quotations

"None of our English girls can play Cleopatra".

Kenneth Tynan.

I often think of this remark in Romania because most Romanian women, given acting lessons, could play her. It seems this remark hurt Vivienne Leigh very much and almost drove her to a nervous breakdown.

Barnier's game

Owen Paterson MP

✔@OwenPaterson

Revealing words from Michel Barnier in 2016, quoted in @LePoint. "I would have succeeded in my task if, in the end, the deal is so hard on the British that they’ll prefer staying in the EU.” https://w.lpnt.fr/2275148t

The most fascinating moment in British history since the decision not to negotiate with Hitler in 1940

The solution to Brexit is not simple but the starting point is accepting a hard border with Southern Ireland. 

Sinn Fein/IRA will not start murdering people because of the border (which is not mentioned in the Good Friday Agreement). In any case, we cannot let IRA decide the future of Britain. Though this is what people in Parliament and in the media repeatedly argue that we should do.

Both the UK and Eire have said they will not have customs inspectors at the border, but it is it is not in the power of Eire to decide this. It is for the EU to decide how Eire controls her part of the EU border. 

And the EU has no choice either. The EU must insist on customs being levied at the border. That is what a customs union means. And a customs union is the essence of the EU ('the Common Market'). 

The good news, however, is that this can be done using electronic means.

Monet, Belloc and Trump, Muslims, No Deal, Dr Johnson on gluttonous women

Claude Monet: To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.

George Will in the National Review, two years ago today, likened Trump to the water beetle described by Hilaire Belloc:

He flabbergasts the Human Race

By gliding on the water’s face

With ease, celerity and grace;

But if he ever stopped to think

Of how he did it, he would sink.

This seemed very true when I read it. I love Belloc quotations.  Belloc serves you well as a child and at all ages.

Would a hard Brexit be the latest chapter in Ireland's tearful history?

This was written by Dr Jennifer Cassidy, who describes herself on Twitter as: Irish. Politics Lecturer @UniofOxford. Former Diplomat. PhD Digital Diplomacy (Oxon). Books Gender and Diplomacy, @UN Consultant, TED Speaker.

You invaded us.
You conquered us.
You divided us.
You robbed usof our language,
our heritage, our land.
You starved us.
You starved us.
You starved us.
You shot us.
You imprisoned us.
You killed us.
We made peace.
We trusted you.
We trusted you.
#HardBorder 🇮🇪

We did not starve the Irish and they would have conquered us had they had the means.

I borrowed this argument from the Irish American theologian and heresiarch, John

Douglas Murray on populism

This is a very interesting interview with Douglas Murray, the most interesting and important intellectual in Great Britain on Donald Trump, Brexit and populism. Mr Murray is our equivalent of France's Michel Houellebecq, but without the obscenity.  I quote:

There is no one elite in America or Britain, but certainly a part of one elite and a part of the public are genuinely shocked, public are genuinely shocked, because there was a presumed direction of travel we were all meant to be going in: greater multilateralism, weaker borders, a more porous, interconnected world, and so on. The only job left was to progress through ever more minute remaining rights issues and then arrive at our destination. But then the public came along — twice in a few months — and threw the biggest spanner available to them into this machine. A lot of people still cannot believe the public could do this, and I understand their shock. This was the first time in their adult lives that they were told No, and it destabilizes
everything for them because it suggests we may not be going to the place they thought we were heading. If the Brexit vote had gone the other way, I would have moped around for a day or two and then gone about my normal life. It would never have occurred to me — or to most Leave voters I know — to rage for years, purge from my personal life anyone who voted Remain, and smear the majority of my countrymen with the most hurtful epithets I could come up with.

Seen in a book review on Amazon.com

“Why is it that present day Europeans are expected to take collective responsibility for past Western colonialism, but Muslims don't take collective responsibility for Muslim colonialism and get upset if there is any suggestion that they should take collective responsibility for present day Islamic terrorism.”


[The answer is because teachers and academics have taught two generations to despise Western civilisation and admire its enemies.]

How long can Sweden and the whole of Europe ignore the voters?

I translated this very eloquent and shocking article in the Swedish press by Paulina Neuding using Google Translate, which does a very good job - a far, far better job with English than with Romanian. Paulina Neuding also writes for Quillette.




For a number of years, voters have asked the parties the same question, in different forms: What should one as a voter do to prevent a more liberal migration policy? For as many years, the answer has been more liberal migration.

It was just over ten years ago, in August 2008, and Margot Wallström, then Vice Chairman of the European Commission, was invited to the BBC's flagship Newsnight to be interviewed on the EU's new foundations. The treaty had been voted down in a referendum in Ireland without being seen as a hindrance to EU leadership. The new legislation would be pushed through, the question being just how it would do so technically.

Consequently, a number of times the presenter repeated the same question to Commissioner Wallström:

Can you explain what voters have to do for the treaty not to go through? What must voters do to kill the treaty?

After having questioned the question in various forms, Wallström finally suggested that the voters would "leave to the leaders to discuss what to do a situation like this" and emphasized that these leaders "invested a lot of political capital" in the project.

Michel Houellebecq says the EU is murdering Europe and I realise suddenly that he is right

Houellebecq is a very important figure of our times. He has suggested restoring Catholicism as the state religion of France, to assist Muslim assimilation and still he got the Légion d'Honneur.

I just read an article in Foreign Policy by an annoyingly PC American professor about him, which I recommend - Houellebecq's words shine out from the professor's like diamonds gleaming in mud.

Houellebecq declared he was less interested in the decline of the West than in its murder. By bringing its member states under a single set of laws, the EU “assassinated” them, Houellebecq concluded....

“We in Europe have neither a common language, nor common values, nor common interests, that, in a word, Europe doesn’t exist, and that it will never constitute a people … simply because it doesn’t want to constitute a people.”


The European Union “is just a dumb idea that has gradually turned into a bad dream, from which we shall eventually wake up.”

Quotations

“You can’t go back and change the beginning. But you can start where you are and change the ending.”

C.S. Lewis

“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”

Milan Kundera

Class warfare lies behind populism

Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the “New Class,” noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the goodies....

But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change....

"While no-deal remains a serious risk"

"While no-deal remains a serious risk, having observed the events at Westminster over the last seven days, it's now my judgment that the more likely outcome is a paralysis in parliament that risks there being no Brexit."

Theresa May, 20 minutes ago.


"While no-deal remains a serious risk"? For two and a half years she has robotically repeated that no deal is better than a bad deal.

The sandal wearers and fruit juice drinkers are about to be swept from power

For years the white working-class have had their lives lampooned and been smeared with a multitude of ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’ by politicians and journalists who, simultaneously, champion open borders because they believe Europe owes it to the third world. They don’t understand that the misery and poverty they think exists only in Africa and the Middle East is also found closer to home. The victims of globalisation are everywhere.

What France (and the rest of Europe) is witnessing is not a populist revolt but a politically incorrect one. People have had enough of being mocked and marginalised by what George Orwell described as ‘a dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.’

The difference between now and 1936, when Orwell wrote that pungent depiction, is that then the ‘dreary tribe’ had no influence. They were swept into cultural power in the 1960s but they are in the process of being swept back out in the second decade of the 21st Century. This will be hard to bear for progressives after a half-century of hegemony. The silent majority has found its voice and it demands it be listened to. A failure to do so will have dire consequences for Europe.

From a post you should definitely read called 'The yellow vests are at the vanguard of a politically incorrect uprising' by Gavin Mortimer in the Spectator

A sort of synchronicity - before I came here my two funniest stories concerned Romania

The funniest line in literature is spoken by Thora Hird in Alan Bennett's 'Me, I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf'. She is his mam who has descended on him unannounced in the poly where he lectures because she was 

'making some purchases in the vicinity.' 

He loses his temper with her in the canteen and she retreats behind the Daily Mirror, then says: 

'I see the President of Romania's mother has died.'

(Pause.)

 'Always trouble for someone.'

I saw that play when I was 20 and the line has always stayed with me. A friend whom I hadn't seen for ten years until last month reminded me of it. 

Oddly enough the second funniest piece of writing I know, the obituary of Denisa, Lady Newborough, also concerns a Romanian and Romanians were a very obscure nation in England in the 1980s. These things have a meaning, though we cannot understand it.

Leaving with no deal won't happen - Britain will probably be a neutered vassal state

The European Union complains that the Government doesn’t know where it wants to end up. Closely aligned to the EU or more distant? Norway or Canada? It is absolutely right.
Cabinet members are united on one point, however. All now hope that May’s deal passes Parliament, if not next week, then later. And, collectively, they will carry on hoping – as authority drains away from them to Dominic Grieve, Steve Baker, and the Opposition, among whose numbers we of naturally include the Speaker. This Cabinet is firewood.

(Paul Goodman on Thursday, in Conservative Woman.)


It looks increasingly obvious that there is no possibility of Britain leaving the EU without a deal, something that makes me very sad indeed. 

I think the deal will probably mean vassal status though, if we had the same deal as Norway and – crucially - abandoned the backstop, this would not be so.

The whole thing has the look of a plot against Brexit. The Prime Minister does not revise her plan which has no chance of passing the House in its present form this week. The EU refuses to consider any changes and tries to hide its delight at the Carthaginian terms it has negotiated. The British press is full of stories about the horrors that would accompany leaving without a deal. Diabetics would die. There would be no mars bars. Soldiers would stand ready in dozens of places to enforce order against an infuriated mob. The Bank of England promises calamity as it did during the referendum campaign if Leave won.

Austin Mitchell on Prime Ministers

Austin Mitchell was a veteran and much liked Labour backbench MP until he left politics in 2015. He always opposed membership of the EEC/EC/EU. These passages are from his memoirs.

Being top dog is debilitating. It drains prime ministers, destroys the gloss and leaves them running on empty.
Labour’s Harold Wilson, the only one who recognised this, confessed that, towards the end, only brandy made the job bearable.
As for Margaret Thatcher, though I opposed almost everything she stood for, she got top marks from me for her cynicism about the Common Market.

Dominic Cummings in 2014 explained why we have to leave the European Union

Dominic Cummings, who ran the successful Vote Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum and was the subject of a recent TV film, explained in this passage from his blog, back in 2014, why we have to leave the European Union. 

One of the things that is most striking is how much of a Cabinet Minister’s box is filled with EU papers. Here the process is simpler than for Clegg’s appalling Home Affairs Committee, where at least there can be disagreements about policy. In order to continue the pretence that Cabinet Government exists, all these EU papers are circulated in the red boxes. Nominally, these are ‘for approval’. They have a little form attached for the Secretary of State to tick. However, because they are EU papers, this ‘approval’ process is pure Potemkin village. If a Cabinet Minister replies saying — ‘I do not approve, this EU rule is stupid and will cost a fortune’ — then someone from the Cabinet Office calls their Private Office and says, ‘Did your Minister get pissed last night, he appears to have withheld approval on this EU regulation.’ If the
Private Office replies saying ‘No, the minister actually thinks this is barmy and he is withholding consent’, then Llewellyn calls them to say ‘ahem, old boy, the PM would prefer it if you lie doggo on this one’. In the very rare cases where a Minister is so infuriated that he ignores Llewellyn, then Heywood calls to explain to them that they have no choice but to approve, so please tick your box and send in your form, pronto. Game over. 

It’s the sort of thing you read in history books about how a capital city operated just before the regime collapsed.

 Let's hope we do leave the EU and in a satisfactory way (no deal is by now my preference).

Yet more quotations

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.

W. H. Auden

Life is, I am sure, made of poetry. 

Jorge Luis Borges


The theologians say the soul has no sex but I wonder, I very much wonder. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.

Ruth Reichl

Today on the net: things look bad except for America

Things are so much more exciting than they were when I was growing up during the Cold War. Things look bad in England, Europe and the world in general, and especially in the Catholic Church, but there are some signs of hope everywhere. Hope, of course, can be deceptive.

I wouldn’t get too excited about the prospect of no-deal if I were you. It may be what you want. It may be what I want. It may have the most credible arguments in its defence of any of the current positions on offer. Indeed, it may seem to be becoming more plausible by the day. But the people who are now joining forces in their determination to stop it are very likely to be invincible. In fact, a lot of the talk about the imminence of no-deal is being orchestrated by them. Paradoxically, the more feasible the Unthinkable Outcome appears, the more acceptable the once Unthinkable Strategies of resistance become.

..The EU not giving an inch is, of course, part of the plan. The Conspiracy party’s wish (which is to say, Parliament’s wish as it is presently construed by Speaker Bercow) is precisely to see Mrs May’s “deal” go down – whereupon the nightmare prospect of no-deal will rear its terrible head thus making it absolutely imperative to extend Article 50. That is the real prize. Put the whole thing off. Slam on the brakes. Reverse the legally prescribed process. We need to re-think this business from the ground up. That will take time. Lots of time. Maybe forever.
Janet Daley in today's Daily Telegraph

Every nation has the government it deserves and other remarks of Joseph De Maistre

Every nation has the government it deserves.

The more one examines the apparently most active personages in the Revolution, the more one finds in them something passive and mechanical. We cannot repeat too often, that men do not lead the Revolution; it is the revolution that uses men. They are right when they say it goes all alone. This phrase means that never has the Divinity shown itself so clearly in any human event. If the vilest instruments are employed, punishment is for the sake of regeneration.


No nation can give itself liberty if it is not already free.

Quotations

Bob Kostic‏ @causticbob
I settled down to watch this programme about transgender marriage the other night, but was disappointed that it focused on scenery instead. I phoned the BBC to complain. Turns out that the Hebrides are Scottish islands.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune. William James

Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary use words. St Francis of Assisi 

My dears, apart from Anatole France and Albert Schweitzer, there is no man interested in anything but sex.
Barbara Amiel, Lady Black, quoted in Tom Bowyer's 'Conrad and Lady Black'

Sucess

Life dooms you to success. To enough success to prevent you trying something else.

'No Deal' seems doomed - a prolonged punishment beating for Britain is impending

A couple of days ago Kenneth Clarke and everyone else was saying they simply could not see what would happen about Brexit. They really had no idea.  Note that very clever experienced politicians, commentators and academics do not know what will happen in the future, even though, once it happens, it seems by a trick of perspective to have been predestined.

Today I feel I can see what will happen and it is the worst of all options: the one Mrs May proposes, which is not a deal but puts us completely at the mercy of an EU that has proved its hostile intentions towards us.  'No deal' is not the calamity people fear. It would be a liberation and would respect the referendum result, which Mrs. May's proposal would not, but the politicians and establishment will not permit it. 

Here are some things I read today.

It is not often that Donald Trump and the EU Commission’s Secretary General, Martin Selmayr, agree. But on the Withdrawal Agreement, they are as one. It looked “like a great deal for the EU” to Trump, and Selmayr confirmed to the Passauer Neue Presse in December that the EU had “negotiated hard and achieved their aims.” 

Frenchmen in exile

Unromantic places where famous Frenchmen were exiled: Zola lived briefly in Upper Norwood, Verlaine in Bournemouth and Napoleon III in Chiselhurst. Esterhazy - the real traitor and villain in the Dreyfus Affair - shaved off his moustache and fled to England where he published anti-Semitic journalism under the name of Jean de Voilemont and lived in Harpenden, which was then a village.

Dominic Cummings explains why Leave won the Brexit referendum

Dominic Cummings, organiser of the Vote Leave campaign, is said to be the hero (or villain, if you prefer) who won the Brexit referendum for Leave. I think the British people are the heroes (or villains, if you prefer) but he certainly played a large part in the result, as did Nigel Farage, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. 

In this speech in 2017 Mr. Cummings identifies three reasons why feeling in the UK had swung against the EU in the fifteen years since he organised a campaign against the UK adopting the euro.

“Essentially I found that people didn’t know more about the EU in 2016 than they did 15 years earlier. However, three things had changed in the world during that time: the first was immigration – the scale of immigration and the fact that the EU was now blamed for immigration problems.

"The other big thing was the financial crisis in 2008. It undermined confidence in government, in Whitehall, in big business, in the banks and also in the European Union.

“The third big factor was the euro.”

Anna Soubry and the n-word: it's not disgraceful, it's free speech

One Lucy Mangan, in The Guardian reviewing Brexit: The Uncivil War, the Channel Four TV film about the Brexit referendum, condemns it as superficial and irresponsible for being balanced and not coming down on the side of Remain. 

Move along. Nothing to see here. 

Nothing to say really. Stupid woman is no longer a permitted phrase, even in the case of someone who is (a) stupid and (b) a woman. Especially not in such a case.

Miss Mangan interested me when she said she understood why the writer made Dominic Cummings the protagonist. He organised the 'official' Leave campaign and is played by Benedict Cumberbatch.

You can see why he was catnip to a dramatist otherwise looking out at a sea of grey suits and wondering how to get inside the heads of shapeshifters like Cameron or Gove (as Gertrude Stein famously said of her old home, torn down to make way for something new – “there is no there there”) or persuade viewers that Boris Johnson is real enough to be a protagonist in anything other than the rolling Boris Johnson show that is his life.

This reminds me of a conversation between Harold Nicolson and J. M. Keynes, in which the former asked 

What do you think Lloyd George is like when he is alone in a room?

to which the other replied

In today's Daily Telegraph

The result with the best chance of helping Labour win the next general election is probably a very bad Brexit. That is what Mrs May’s deal is offering. If he can, therefore, Mr Corbyn will find a way to let her have it.

Charles Moore 

We escaped membership of the euro by the skin of our teeth. We now need to grit those teeth to escape fully and finally from the very entity that conceived of the euro monstrosity in the first place. In case you were in any doubt, Mrs May’s capitulation of a “deal” would bring not a full and final escape, but rather a further entrapment.

Roger Bootle

Christopher Booker's curious story in today's Sunday Telegraph

My friend Greg Lance-Watkins recalled how, in 1967, as a young officer cadet at Sandhurst, he boarded a packed train from London to Inverness, on which the only unoccupied seat was in the dining car. Seeing his uniform, the chap in the seat opposite invited him to sit down, and Greg recognised him as the former prime minister Alec Douglas-Home.

A question

How would British, European or American interests be endangered if Russia and Iran controlled Syria or Iraq?

Latvia and Lithuania, disappearing nations

In 2000, Latvia’s population stood at 2.38 million. At the start of 2018, it was 1.95 million, a decrease of 18.2%. Lithuania registered a 17.5% decrease over the same period. In Estonia the population has fallen by a more modest 15% since 1990.

Sweden is falling into the sea

Give up your grenades and walk free: Sweden's explosives amnesty gets under way

Between today and early next year, anyone in possession of hand grenades or illegal pyrotechnical equipment can hand them over to police without risking punishment.

Michael Wharton's 1970s satirical fantasy is now our daily reality

As Ruth Dudley Edwards told me, it is no longer possible to write satire. She knows because she has written a series of satirical novels and has had to give up.

I didn't really find Michael Wharton - or Peter Simple - as funny as many did when I read him in the Daily Telegraph before going to school, but he was a prophet.

Quotations

I’m prepared to vote for anyone provided we propose to exit the European Union and Nato.
Michel Houllebecq

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
Francis Bacon


I told him that I was still very much of a swine, and people did bother me. He said that people must not bother me. One must look at other people as one looks at a peculiar type of monkey!
'Jung, My Mother and I: The Analytic Diaries of Catharine Rush Cabot'

... a peculiar frame of mind ... has arisen throughout the Western world since the second world war, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political élites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognised: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people—intellectuals especially—tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it, and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers.
Sir Roger Scruton

No deal is the least bad deal but I do not think it will happen

'If the EU has – for whatever reasons - decided that it’s time to treat Britain like the captive in a Stephen King novel, isn’t it best to tiptoe away when we still have the chance? Mrs May’s proposed transition deal and the accompanying backstop would, as the Attorney General has established, be indefinite. We’d have to accept the EU’s trade terms, or leave Northern Ireland behind. And if we think Brexit looks like a mess now, just wait until we have been through two more years of these talks - but this time, having given away the money.
'This, I suspect, is why the Cabinet is now coming around to the idea of leaving the EU without a trade agreement: the no-deal option.The World Trade Organisation rules we would default to keep tariffs pretty low. To Brussels, payment of tariffs might be punishment enough. Before too long, we could soon be in talks about upgrading to a Canada-style free trade deal - but, crucially, on our terms. We can offer scholarships, generous immigration quotas and, in general, start rebuilding relations with Europe and skip the two years (or more) of punishment beatings masquerading as trade talks.
'And the scale of the no-deal disruption? It’s hard to tell because of hysteria, claim and counter-claim. Border chaos is not inevitable if, as French officials have said, fewer than one in a hundred trucks would have to be checked at Calais. Common sense arrangements on aircraft, driving licenses and even expat pensioners have already been agreed. In its list of disaster scenarios, the Irish government this week considers the possibility that British companies thrive under no-deal, especially if the pound becomes more competitive, posing a risk to Irish rivals. Its “highest priority” is not building a hard border, and we would not build one either. Technology would do the work.'

I agree with Fraser Nelson, who wrote the above, that leaving the EU with no deal is the least bad option. I could however live with Norway, for a time, though not Norway plus. I fear though that Mrs May's deal which is not a deal at all will win. She has persistence. Along with vindictiveness and a wish to boss the country around it is her salient characteristic.

Satire died

Ruth Dudley Edwards, who has written many detective stories that are really satires, told me the other night it is impossible to write satire any more. Reading this story about someone saying that the new actor to play James Bond should be transgender made me feel that she is not exaggerating but part of me thinks that he is joking.

Quotations

“Arguing with a woman is like reading the Software License Agreement. In the end, you ignore everything and click I agree.”


Eyden I., "Kiss Friendzone Goodbye"


"The artist is not a freak or an oracle or a genius. In fact, the artist is at the epicenter of normality. Poets are wounded in the same ways as everyone else, but with one particular distinction--they are not wounded to the point of speechlessness. Instead, they are wounded into speech. Their job, unlike the roles assigned to most of us, is not to conceal or to disguise their woundedness, but make it glaringly evident. Poets are useful to the culture precisely to the extent that their experience is representative--representative, and murderously frank."


Tony Hoagland's essay, "The Poet As Wounded Citizen" in the December issue of The Writer's Chronicle.

Ain't no drone

The Gatwick drone, which stopped flights from Gatwick airport for days, is as real as the St. Osyth lion or the woman hitchhiker with hair on the back of her hands and an axe in her handbag to whom my mother's hairdresser's customer gave a lift, a putative transgender murderer/ess. That story briefly excited the Metropolitan Police until they found out that the axe lady had been reported accepting lifts up and soen the country for years.




But the drone has given bad people ideas.

Former British Ambassador to the EU takes apart Mrs May's Brexit 'deal'

The hard part is obviously still to come whether something like Mrs May's plan goes ahead or even if it doesn't. The deal settles little.

Sir Ivan Rogers made a lengthy, highly intelligent (of course) and very depressing speech at Liverpool University (full transcript here) at the weekend, which deserves close reading.

He resigned as British ambassador to the European Union in January 2017, after what were said to be innumerable threats to do so going back before the referendum. Before serving Mrs May he was private secretary to Kenneth Clark and a close adviser to Messrs. Blair and Brown. He is undoubtedly a Remainer, as almost all senior civil servants are.

He it was who helped David Cameron conduct what Nick Clegg’s wife called the "Mickey mouse negotiation" with the EU, before the referendum campaign started. It was extremely unsuccessful but later Mrs Merkel offered to make more concessions because she was belatedly afraid that Britain would vote to leave. This suggests that the negotiations could have been much more successful. His advice, after the referendum, that it could take a decade for the EU to agree and ratify a comprehensive trade deal with Britain was leaked. It seems he may have been right.

Camille Paglia on Donald Trump in interview in the Spectator

Has Trump governed erratically?

Yes, that’s a fair description. It’s partly because as a non-politician he arrived in Washington without the battalion of allies, advisors, and party flacks that a senator or governor would normally accumulate on the long road to the White House. Trump’s administration is basically a one-man operation, with him relying on gut instinct and sometimes madcap improvisation. There’s often a gonzo humor to it — not that the US president should be slinging barbs at bottom-feeding celebrities or jackass journalists, much as they may deserve it. It’s like a picaresque novel starring a jaunty rogue who takes to Twitter like Tristram Shandy’s asterisk-strewn diary. Trump’s unpredictability might be giving the nation jitters, but it may have put North Korea, at least, on the back foot.

Most Democrats have wildly underestimated Trump from the get-go. I was certainly surprised at how easily he mowed down 17 other candidates in the GOP primaries. He represents widespread popular dissatisfaction with politics as usual. Both major US parties are in turmoil and metamorphosis, as their various factions war and realign. The mainstream media’s nonstop assault on Trump has certainly backfired by cementing his outsider status. He is basically a pragmatic deal-maker, indifferent to ideology. As with Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump rose because of decades of failure by the political establishment to address urgent systemic problems, including corruption at high levels. Democrats must hammer out their own image and agenda and stop self-destructively insulting half the electorate by treating Trump like Satan.

How Nick Clegg turned me into a Leave voter

From a great article in, of all unexpected places, The Financial Times, by Merryn Somerset Webb, who normally writes about personal finance.

In early 2015 I spent an hour interviewing Nick Clegg. He turned me into a Leave voter.

How? By telling me that we have to accept that we “can’t change the reality” that there are many things in the modern world that can’t be controlled even by national governments. A national government can have “only limited control” over global trade, international crime and climate change, for example. 

He couldn’t, he said, think of an area of public policy that was now not impinged upon by some kind of global decision-making body. This made Westminster something of “a fictional universe”, one in which people “seem to think that they have power” but which is actually a “19th century toytown” in which they do not. 

For Mr Clegg, the former Liberal Democrat leader, this shift of power from national governments was both inevitable and reasonable. For me, as a firm believer in both the value of the nation state and the importance of maintaining the primacy of democracy over technocratic we-know-bestery, it was neither.

Things people say

Just as a matter of curiosity, could any responsible government really give a categorical assurance that under no circumstances would there ever be a hard border with the next-door neighbour?

Ruth Dudley Edwards

From the beginning I’ve been a supporter of Macron and his desire to extend economic globalization. But here’s the problem: The West is experiencing a loss of relative status, due to diminished power and influence. Western societies, including France, are being transformed by immigration beyond what many of their native-born citizens had expected. The rising prominence of terror, migration and security issues have boosted some of the less salubrious sides of the right wing. Add to that mix wage stagnation and the increasingly common view — held by 91 percent in France — that today’s children will not have better lives than their parents. Finally, the decline of organized religion, especially pronounced in Western Europe, has created a spiritual vacuum and a crisis of meaning.

Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg Opinion today.

Until today, I’d assumed that those 117 Tory MPs attempted to vote her [Theresa May] out of her job because they didn’t support her. But maybe they were just trying to be kind.

Michael Deacon feeling sorry for Theresa May today in the Telegraph.

Stop caring about the Irish border - then the backstop no longer matters

Great Britain should not have used Article 50 or negotiated about our divorce bill but vetoed every EU measure we could veto till they gave us what they wanted. We should not have declined the EU presidency which we were due to take up in 2017 but used it to  freeze everything we could while until the EU came to heel. We might have droipped clear hints about leaving Nato too. 

The backstop is not the biggest problem with Mrs May's proposal. The bigger problem is that it  gives away £39 billion and then we have to rely on the EU granting us a trade deal, terms unknown, but certainly involving accepting a huge amount of EU regulations which we do not help write. 

Better alternatives: Norway (not Norway plus) temporarily or a managed or unmanaged hard Brexit.

The key to understanding is that the backstop is not needed if Mrs May forgets her stupid promise that there would be no hard border between Northern and Southern Ireland. Mrs May should have accepted the Canadian option, which she said in the House the day before yesterday she was offered by Donald Tusk - and let the Irish chips fall where they may. I am sure they will still let her do this. 

Forget the Irish border. It is not important. 

No-one will erect customs barriers along it and if they did so, which both both Eire and the UK promise they will not and which they will not need to do (because technology can solve the problem without customs officers), that would not in any way infringe the Good Friday Agreement. 

Theresa May, killer zombie, keeps moving forward

I was praying so hard that Tory MPs got rid of Theresa May, but like a killer zombie she seems dead but indestructible. She won by 200 votes to 117 in a secret ballot.

The election was called yesterday morning and was over by early evening. Her briefest of election campaigns was memorable for a big lie. She said a leadership election would take so long that Brexit would have to be postponed when she knew that, unlike the Great War whose centenary we just marked, it would be over by Christmas.

It would seem that most back-benchers voted against her, but no-one knows. Many of the cabinet may secretly have done so. She is now the self-confessedly temporary leader of an extremely divided minority Government.

Romania is the most religious country in Europe

The Pew Research Center revealed in a report published on Wednesday that Romania is the most religious nation in Europe, judged by four criteria: the importance people ascribe to religion in their lives, regular religious practice, prayer life, and certainty of belief.

I have known this for a long time although, as Eugene Ionesco said, religion in Romania means something completely different from what it does in Catholic or Protestant countries. It is about the other world and about contemplative prayer. It is makes Romania to a Westerner so beautiful and strange.

According to the Pew Report, 64% of Romanians believe in God with absolute certainty and 50% say religion is very important in their lives. 50% also say they attend services at least monthly, but can this last be true?

Atheism usually hides a religion

Terry Eagleton reviewing 'Seven Types of Atheism' by John Gray. I think this is obvious nowadays. The whole review is here.

"Gray also believes that humanists are in bad faith. Most of them are atheists, but all they have done is substitute humanity for God. They thus remain in thrall to the very religious faith they reject. In fact, most supposedly secular thought in Gray’s view is repressed religion, from the liberalism of John Locke to the millenarian visions of the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. The popular belief that atheism and religion are opposites is, in his view, a mistake."

Croon it again: Daniel Cohn-Bendit is scandalised by French protesters

Daniel Cohn-Bendit - Danny the Red - is the man of 1968, the Parisian revolutionary, whose name everyone remembers. Even I do and I was only 6 at the time. He is now, like many far leftists, a Green Party politician. By a delicious irony that historians will relish, he has angrily condemned the Gilets Jaunes, the Yellow Jackets, as the people in the French countryside are known who are protesting against Macron's stinging taxes on diesel fuel. He said, accurately,

“I hear people from la France Insoumise [the hard left] talking about this being a great people’s revolt and how the people are speaking, but these are the same ordinary people who pushed Trump into power.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit's wonderful reaction symbolises everything about what is happening and will happen, not only in France but throughout Europe. 

The world in which we are living is the world dreamt of by the 68-ers: internationalist,

'The myth of xenophobic Britain. Take it from an immigrant: this is one of the most welcoming nations on Earth.'

A Russian British comedian who voted Remain explains how angry he is that British people think leave voters are xenophobes and explains why here in Spiked.

Routines where I ridicule the locals are often better received than jokes about Russia or my marriage. By contrast, a British comic who made fun of the locals in Russia would be the one in stitches, not the audience.

It Girl Becomes a Defender of the Catholic Faith

The New York Times has a lovely and inspiring story about the famous 1980s party girl Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis (b. 1960) and her best friend Princess Alessandra Borghese who in middle age have become fervent Catholics and love the Tridentine Mass. I mean no disrespect to either princess, who I am sure have been very chaste, but this slightly brings to mind the Baroness de Courtebiche in Gabriel Chevalier's novel Clochemerle, who at the age of 47 decided to forsake the boudoirs of fashionable Paris for the life of a devout Catholic landowner in her native village. 

Generalisations are always valuable

Generalisations are aphorisms. We need more of them. Gibbon, Macaulay, Addison, all good writers until our decadent modern age traded in them.

But today whenever Oscar Wilde (if he were not in prison for sex with young boys) were to make one of his wonderful remarks people would just reply, 'Oscar, you can't generalise'.

How to identify right-wing children in kindergartens and make them left-wing

Germany's biggest newspaper, Bild, reported that a 60-page guide Ene, Mene, Muh – And You’re Out! has been issued to help kindergarten teachers and parents deal with children who had expressed racist sentiments or appeared to be indoctrinated by neo-Nazi ideology. 

In a story entitled "Row over snooping manual," Bild suggested that it was an attempt to get children to identify “Nazi parents”.

Where Great Britain is now

Allister Heath in today's Daily Telegraph:

Both sides have been terrifyingly naïve. Brexiteers thought they understood the rules: you win the referendum, the government leaves the EU. They didn’t realize the game was rigged.

The anthropological rituals and language of democracy still exist, and have even been extended in recent years, but they are now largely a charade to camouflage a massive power grab by the bureaucracy.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on love of ones people

"Love for one’s people is as natural as love for one’s family. No one can be faulted for this love, only respected. After all, no matter how much the modern world whirls and jerks about, we still aim to keep intact our family, and we hold it in special regard, suffused with sympathy. A nation is a family, too, except an order of magnitude higher in numbers. It is bound by unique internal ties: a common language, a common cultural tradition, a shared historical memory, and a shared set of problems to resolve in the future. Why, then, should the self-preservation of a people be held a sin?”

I came across this quotation in this very interesting article from the Catholic magazine, Crisis.

Modernity

"The freedom to which modern man aspires is not that of the free man, but that of the slave on his day off." Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"A society in the grip of political correctness is on the look-out for the scapegoat, who will heal its divisions, by showing that it is he, not they, that is the cause of them." Sir Roger Scruton

Christianity and feminism

Can anyone who believes the biological differences between men and women are God-given and that wives should obey husbands, as Christians do, be feminist?

Quotations

"Tomorrow's world cannot exist without morals, without faith and memory. Cynicism, narrow interests and cowardice must not occupy our lives." King Michael of Romania

"A calm and humble life will bring more happiness than the pursuit of success and the constant restlessness that comes with it." Albert Einstein in a note that was sold last year at auction for $1,560,000.

"A study into the differences in maturity between genders revealed both men and women agree men remain 'immature' well into their late 30s and early 40s. But the average age at which women mature emerged as 32." Daily Telegraph, 10 June 2013

'The Labour Party is “led by people who regret the outcome of the Cold War”'. Headline for Daniel Hannan interview in The Backbencher.

December afternoon in Bucharest