Friday 20 December 2019

We the people

I was the Rev Giles Fraser's Facebook friend till I couldn't stand his crazy leftism and that of his friends. He has always been loony left, a huge admirer of Tony Benn and originally of Corbyn, but he voted Tory this time. He said
"It wasn’t the referendum debate that changed me. It was the establishment’s reaction upon losing it."
I was interested to learn that he voted Tory in 1983 because he thought a victory by Mrs Thatcher would enable a left-wing victory afterwards. This is the mirror image of the view of Paul Gottfried that voting Democrat, for example for Mayor De Blasio of New York, hastens a palao-conservative backlash. Giles Fraser and his left wing chums were wrong in 1983. Paul Gottfried is wrong now?

Wednesday 18 December 2019

If women ruled the world

BBC report: 'If women ran every country in the world there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes, former US President Barack Obama has said. Speaking in Singapore, he said women aren't perfect, but are "indisputably better" than men.'

Madeline Albright, whom Bill Clinton appointed Secretary of State because she was a woman, disagrees. She said people who think the world would be better if it were run by women have forgotten what it was like at school.


Every nation has the government she deserves and England deserves Boris

'Every nation has the government she deserves.' 
Joseph de Maistre's famous aphorism applies to the UK today, as it does to Romania and the United States and Russia and every country in the world.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the 109 new Tory MPs at a party on the chilly Commons terrace Monday evening. The 1922 Committee had to send out for an extra 50 bottles of wine. Victory is sweet and sweeter because of the lamentations from the left.

I liked this truth uttered by Graeme Archer.

Corbyn's party finally achieved its ambition to empower and politicise the working-class.

Sunday 15 December 2019

The last word belongs to Dan Hodge

(((Dan Hodges)))@DPJHodges

We’ve spent about a billion hours debating Brexit. But in the end it all boils down to one simple fact. If you offer people a choic
e in a referendum, you then have to do what they say. That’s it.

The genius of Boris, Brexit as a mental health issue, the embourgeoisement of Labour and the return of Disraeli

This is from an article by Charles Moore, the former doyen of the Young Fogeys and now best known for having been Boris's boss, who knew the good and bad in him.
"When I was his editor on this paper, he often drove me to distraction with his lateness and unreliability. But I also formed the view that he is one of the very few people I have ever met who can be described as a genius. For all his defects and peccadilloes, Boris is the man.
It was clear to me long ago that he is a genius and there have been few of those at No 10.

Gladstone and Disraeli are the obvious ones, and the Pitts. Churchill perhaps.
"Yesterday morning, parents of children at a school in London received an email which began: “Sometimes, things happen in the wider world, in the country ... that can be difficult to understand.” It went on to explain that while it was good for children to talk to “trusted adults” about “things that worry us”, it was important that “we won’t talk about negative events to other children”. Although the email did not say so, the “negative event” here referred to was the result of Thursday’s general election."
I find this absolutely incredible, though I know schools in New York sent similar emails out when Mr Trump won. 

There is a long article in Metro explaining that Brexit is apparently responsible for an epidemic of psychological disorders among Remainiacs. I post the link here in the hope that it might be useful, gentle reader, should you or someone you know be suffering.

The 2019 election is a pivot, like the ones of 1945, 1979 and 1997. But the biggest pivot, at least since 1945, was the 2016 referendum, whose result the last Parliament refused to implement. As Charles Moore has been repeating, since the 2008 financial crisis everything is different. Everything is now even more different.

Saturday 14 December 2019

Bloodlines

I see more and more, what non Europeans always see, that we are each of us not individuals so much as bloodlines.

A Famous Victory

Image may contain: 4 people, people smiling, people standing and outdoor


The most significant elections in modern British history are 1906, 1918, 1931, 1945, 1997 and 2017. 

I would not put Mrs Thatcher's three landslide victories in the same category, nor the 1957 or 1966 elections, the Khaki election of 1900 or the National Government's landslide victory in 1935. 

The 1979 election was a big turning point because of what Mrs Thatcher did with her victory, not because of the election result itself. Though it is what Boris does with his victory that is what matters.

1935, incidentally, was the last time when Labour won fewer seats than on Thursday.

In the very painful, dying days of Theresa May premiership (how far away the recent past seems) those close to her (though vno-one ever was close to her) talked of 'Gordon Brown Day', the day she overtook him in length of time as Prime Minister. Prime Ministers care very much about such things. She outlasted him by two months and beat the Duke of Wellington too, though not Jim Callaghan.

Boris overtook George Canning on 20 November, so he would not have been the shortest serving Prime Minister had he lost the election. (Lord Bath's two days does not count, as he was trying and failing to form a government). But he would have been a footnote to history had a Labour SNP government been formed yesterday. 


Instead he has made history. Even if he, God forbid, were killed today he would be an important and heroic, not a pathetic historical figure. As it is he is, whatever else he is, an undoubted genius - as his former boss Charles Moore said today.

Few geniuses have become British Prime Minister. Let's think. Churchill, Lloyd George, Salisbury, Gladstone, Disraeli, Palmerston and the Pitts. Not Margaret Thatcher or Asquith. Anyone else?

Yesterday's result means the Conservative share of the vote has risen for each of the last six elections and for the first time, at least since 1832, the governing party’s share of the vote has risen four times in succession.

Everyone who knows tells us that it will take ten years for Labour to return to office and everyone is probably right, though each voter possesses free will. There is no reason why the Liberal Democrats should not win an outright victory next time, but they won't.

The Tories won a huge majority - their first since 1987 - and it's the first time since 2005-2010 when the government has a comfortable majority, of the sort that is rare in Europe but used to be normal in the UK.



The most repellent party of all, the misnamed Liberal Democrats, did badly. So did the DUP. More Catholic Nationalist MPs were elected in Northern Ireland this time than Protestant Unionists, because of demographics. The SNP won a lot of seats but will not be granted their wish to have another referendum.

Brexit will happen within seven weeks. Really. 

Boris, if not World King, has a free hand with the next and much more complex stage of the Brexit talks, after we leave, and free hand to shape foreign and economic policy. 

He will want to do so in a way that avoids people imagining his is a continuation of David Cameron's or Theresa May's ministries. He would like to be to them what New Labour was to Old Labour, but this is impossible because he, like them, is a left-wing One Nation Conservative, a Macmillanite except on Europe.

Immigration policy, of course, was the policy of the Macmillan government which has had much the most lasting impact on Britain. I expect Boris's immigration policy to continue allowing sixty thousand or more immigrants from Africa and Asia to settle each year in the UK , but to admit fewer from the EU.

Do the British public still care any more about immigration? Of course they do and will do more and more, until it becomes almost the only issue. Boris will be opportunistic enough to take note at some point, but he is instinctively pro-immigration, like most of the Tory leadership and like big business. 

Theresa May was the only British politician who saw the importance of restricting immigration, but did not succeed in doing much about it in nine years as Home Secretary and then Prime Minister.

Will the union with Scotland be weakened by the election result? No, I think secession will be much less likely after Brexit. 

Former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne agrees with me that there will not be a second referendum on Scottish independence. 

“I don’t think he will ever concede another referendum on Scottish independence. I don’t think any Conservative leader who went through the experience of 2014 would want to repeat that … I think he will withstand any amount of pressure from Holyrood and Nicola Sturgeon … for the very simple reason that he might lose. No one wants to be the prime minister who loses the union.”

Strange that such obvious things are not clear to everyone. 

And will Northern Ireland end up leaving? That is impossible to tell. 

Few in Great Britain would care if the Six Counties left the UK, though the Powellites and right would care.

Jeremy Corbyn has said he will resign by next autumn, but is the Corbynite, semi-Marxist hard left finished? 

Mr Corbyn asked the party for a period of reflection, which is a good idea, though he himself has not reflected much, or at least not had a new idea, since 1968. Polls show it was Jeremy Corbyn's leadership much more than Brexit that pushed Labour voters into voting Tory.

Mr Corbyn is not an antisemite but sees Israel as imperialist and racist. This outlook can easily seem like antisemitism and very easily like anti-white racism. If the Labour Party looks as if it favours non-whites above whites it is doomed to lose the working classes and doomed to lose elections, unless the working classes die away or are replaced.

Donald Trump, who is greatly disliked by most British people, though he has some admirers, tweeted



“Congratulations to Boris Johnson on his great WIN! Britain and the United States will now be free to strike a massive new Trade Deal after BREXIT. This deal has the potential to be far bigger and more lucrative than any deal that could be made with the E.U. Celebrate Boris!”

Boris is the hero - all his decisions, from resigning as Foreign Secretary onwards, have been vindicated (except the prorogation, but the Supreme Court was a very wild card). 


Equally a hero is Dominic Cummings, at whom Twitter sneered ('classic Dom'). He is not stepping down. This makes me happy. He is to Boris what Steve Bannon was to Donald Trump, the clever strategist and court intellectual.

But in fact luck plays a huge part in history. As Stephen Tall writes in the Spectator,
"If Boris Johnson had gone for his Plan A – a snap election in September threatening no-deal – I think the result would have been very different. Plenty of suburban Remain-leaning Conservative seats would have seriously been in play for the Lib Dems. But the double act of Hilary Benn and Dominic Grieve thwarted the Prime Minister, who was instead forced to the negotiating table. The rest, as they say, is history."
The Lib Dems' schoolmarmish leader Mrs 'Jo' Swinson lost her seat and made a mendacious and demagogic speech about nationalism and racism. Sky News caught Nicola Sturgeon punching the air when she learnt Miss Swinson had lost. Watch here.

All the Labour turncoats lost their seats. They blew their big chance to form a centre party - partly because former deputy Labour Leader Tom Wilson begged many moderate MPs not to leave. He has now left Parliament to become a gym instructor.

All the Tory renegades who joined the Lib Dems lost their seats: Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve, David Gauke, Philip Lee, Stephen Dorrell, the exceptionally stupid Heidi Allen and Antoinette Sandbach (crazy name, crazy gal). 

I am delighted that Amber Rudd, who wanted to make it an offence punishable by 15 years inside to read extremist material on the internet, did not stand again. Ken Clarke said she was Prime Minister material, so England dodged a bullet. 

But independent of whether one likes the Tory rebels or not, it means the Tories are now united on Brexit and united behind their leader. What is important is that Boris purged his party of irreconcilables. It is his party now.

Friday 13 December 2019

Thank God


Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.

The exit poll shows the British Tories winning an 86 seat majority and Labour doing worse than under Michael Foot in 1983.


Blyth Valley, Eddie Milne's old seat, solid Labour mining seat, has a Tory MP. He thanked 'Boris' in his acceptance speech.


A constituency-by-constituency exit poll suggests Jo Swinson has lost her seat but Dominic Raab has held his. Trill it!

I wonder what Theresa May is thinking now.

Thursday 12 December 2019

Waiting for the British election result

'When you win, everything you did was an act of genius and when you lose, everything you did was the work of a fool.' (Ed Miliband) 

So it will be with Boris and Corbyn after tonight. Nothing is inevitable until it happens but once it happens people think it inevitable. We need a philosopher to explain how causation works.

Now, with an hour to go before the British polls close and we know the result of the exit poll, I want to say that Boris let the country down by not getting Brexit through Parliament before calling his election. I think he could have done and he should have tried.


In 2015 and 2017 the exit poll results astonished everyone and turned out to be pretty accurate. What will they say this time?

It's a bit like the scenes with the witches in Macbeth.

Sunday 8 December 2019

I have been compared to Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham!

This is a nice compliment from Kathy Gyngell,the Editor of Conservative Woman, a good website where I have started sending some of my articles. 

She has awarded me her weekly prize, for my account of last weekend in Paris, in preference to other writers including James Delingpole.
'The prize goes to Paul Wood for his quite wonderfully written essay on France’s migrant revolution, which in my opinion had its way paved by those earlier soixante-huitards student revolutionaries. His evocative comparison of the past Paris with the Paris he has just revisited in its new Muslim incarnation took me back to those past geniuses, Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, that so few today have the education, let alone the ability, to reproduce. Do read and appreciate.'

Saturday 7 December 2019

There is not much diversity in British academia

This week's Times Higher Education survey of the voting preferences of British university lecturers: 


54% Labour 
23% Lib Dem 
8% Conservative

Over half want Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister and they are forming the more intelligent half of the British people of the future. This is the Jeremy Corbyn who backed Sinn Fein IRA and who responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall by running an article in the newsletter he edited headlined 
'No cheers here for a united capitalist Germany'.

Pius XII was not Hitler's Pope

A recent article in the Catholic Herald explains the large part Pope Pius XII played in saving the lives of Jews in the Second World War.

The untrue idea that he ignored their plight is the fault of The Deputy, a play produced in 1963 by a previously unknown German, Rolf Hochhuth, which blamed Pius XII for the Holocaust. 


We know from the memoirs of Ion Mihai Pacepa, the Romanian Securitate general who defected in 1978, that the KGB had supplied Hochhuth with false information and his play was rewritten by Erwin Piscator, a famous producer and communist agent of influence. 

The Soviets’ aim was to derail the improving relations, after the Second Vatican Council, between the Church and Judaism.

The dangers of diversity

A Free Left Blog is written by Ben Cobley, a Labour supporter or former Labour supporter and the author of 'The Tribe: the liberal-left and the system of diversity', which criticises the British state's diversity ideology. I quote from it here partly to bookmark the blog for myself and for you and also to quote a good article on immigration, that in turns quotes 'development economist' Paul Collier on Radio 4 in 2013:
“Some diversity is good. It gives the society more innovation, gives it more variety. But if you have too much diversity, trust starts to erode; cooperation erodes; generosity erodes. And so there is a right amount of diversity. I can’t tell you how much the right amount is, but that’s what every society’s got to antagonise about.”
I'd have thought that was a truism but in England among the people who rule England, from the schoolmasters upwards, it is not.

Ben Cobley writes well about the diversity ideology here. He says the power of identity

Why is there more intellectual freedom in Bucharest than Cambridge?

Several people sent me this Spectator article recently about how much more intellectual freedom there is here in Romania than at my university, Cambridge. The writer, a Romanian student at Cambridge, tells how he wanted to speak to a political society about 
‘The classical liberal case against the EU’ –and was asked not to do so.

‘The problem is… we’re looking for something a bit more mainstream.’ Mainstream? But this is broadly the view of 52 per cent of the UK population! ‘Right. It’s just that we had a pro-Brexit speaker once and it all got a bit uncomfortable, a bit… controversial.’ Controversial ideas? At a university? Whatever next?

Hitler, the new human rights religion and the fall of the West

The history of the Western world after 1945 is essentially a meditation on Nazism and Hitler.

The history of Eastern Europe is not. It is a meditation on the nation, freedom, Marxism, Christianity, what Unamuno called the tragic sense of life, on many things but not on Nazism or Hitler.

This is why a highly intelligent Romanian woman from an old boyar family recently complained to me, "I am tired of hearing about the Holocaust. It was 70 years ago."

The reaction against Nazism after 1945 is the theme of Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West by R.R. Reno, Editor of the wonderful First Things Magazine. I have so many books I must read and this is another for my list.

He writes,

"The violence that traumatized the West between 1914 and 1945 evoked a powerful, American-led response that was anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist. These anti imperatives define the postwar era."

The book talks about an Open Society orthodoxy. It views what is now called neo-liberalism and the free market reforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as part of the same 'restless utopianism' as the current movement to give transgender people rights.

Values now define Western countries, not blood, religion, or history. Freedom of contract, by the way, is not a value that is respected. Anti-racism, anti-discrimination and diversity rule.

Some people conclude, according to Mr. Reno, that

“after Auschwitz, the West does not deserve to endure. They welcome the mass immigration that will fundamentally change the society that produced so many decades off catastrophe. The change should be welcomed as a blessed deliverance from a cursed inheritance. He cites President George H.W. Bush, speaking to the United Nations on October 1,1990:

“I see a world of open borders, open trade, and, most importantly, open minds.”
You see, gentle reader, where Brexit and Donald Trump come from, even though Brexit is about returning from protectionism to free trade. By ‘return of the strong gods’ is meant not Thor or Odin but love of one's people.



Mr Reno shows that the elites in the West seek to dissolve the the strong beliefs and powerful loyalties they think fueled the conflicts that convulsed the twentieth century. In fact mass immigration and the ethnic mosaics it has created are what will fuel war. The Islamist atrocities are a start.


Mr Reno talks about the social benefits of religion but the churches are abasing themselves before non-Christian idols and replacing metaphysics with materialistic projects like ameliorating climate change and engineering more mass migration.


Christianity in Western Europe by 1945 was strongly coloured by liberalism and found Auschwitz a tremendous stumbling block to faith. How could an omnipotent God have permitted the murder of the Jews? This is one of the reasons for the retreat from traditional Christianity to the 'Christianity and water' preached in churches nowadays and the loss of belief everywhere.

A new secular religion of human rights is being born to replace traditional Christianity, with Auschwitz at its centre. It is, oddly enough, the force behind Extinction Rebellion as well as, more obviously, the transgender movement, single sex marriage, third wave feminism, mass immigration and the diversity ideology.

Friday 6 December 2019

Boris Johnson: 'To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia — fear of Islam — seems a natural reaction'

Delightfully, both Boris Johnson and his opponent Jeremy Corbyn have thought aloud for decades and said things which are much more interesting than anything party leaders normally say or want brought up in election campaigns.

Jeremy Corbyn's record abounds with demands to abolish MI5, leave Nato and give up nuclear weapons. I agree with him about Nato. 


He referred to 'our friends in Hezbollah' which gets many people worked up, though I am not quite sure why. He always sided with the Palestinians against Israel, which is what you would expect of a left-wing socialist. (Nowadays. It was different in 1948 when Stalin was the first world leader to recognise the Jewish state, which he probably assumed would be Communist.) 

Corbyn was right always to want the UK to leave the EEC/EC/EU and to want to avoid the second Iraq war and disastrous interventions in Libya and Syria. I wish Boris had been as wise.

The quotation below is from an article written by Boris three or four days after the massacre of people on the London tube by Muslim zealots in 2005. 


He makes some good points, though there is plenty in the Muslim critique of modern 'British values' that any conservative should agree with.
'To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia — fear of Islam — seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture — to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques — it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victim’s mother this week in a Dutch courtroom, he could not care for her, could not sympathise, because she was not a Muslim.

'World’s Finest Byzantine Icons At Risk After Erdogan Court Win'

Since a friend first took me to the Chorea Church/Museum I visit it every time I visit Constantinople. I stay next door, in the very charming Kuriye Hotel, and love to walk from there through the working class Fatih district. There I stumble across beautiful but largely forgotten mosques, completely forgotten churches and Roman pillars which stand ignored in busy streets. This is how travel should be, free of tourist kitsch, free of people from Idaho. 

I didn't know until I read a post on the blog of a Greek-American that the Chorea mosaics were the best Byzantine mosaics in the world. Nor did I know that Turkey’s highest administrative court ruled last month that the 1945 cabinet decision that made the mosque into a museum was unlawful because a mosque “cannot be used except for its essential function”. President Erdogan is expected to implement the court’s decision.

Will the Hagia Sofia be next?

In the nineteenth century Russians expected one day that High Mass would be celebrated in the Hagia Sofia. After the Ottoman Empire lost the First Balkan War it seemed possible one day, but it never happened. Now it is easy to imagine that it might become a mosque again.

The old landmarks are disappearing, or perhaps I should say they are re-emerging..

Thursday 5 December 2019

Evelyn Waugh might have invented mass murder at a conference on “reducing reoffending”

I was in Paris and busy when another Islamist atrocity partly on London Bridge took place in the middle of a British election, as happened in the last election. I am pleased that the parties did not suspend campaigning for a day or the BBC suspend political programmes,
as absurdly happened in 2017.

A young Cambridge man, 
Jack Merritt, was murdered foully, stabbed to death, and I offer my condolences to his loved ones. The killer, Khan, whom he had mentored, had hours earlier given a talk about reforming prisoners at an event Jack Merritt helped organise. He bravely tried to disarm him and died doing so.

He worked at the University of Cambridge’s criminology department. The event held at Fishmongers’ Hall in the City of London was called Learning Together and an attempt at “bringing students in Higher Education and Criminal Justice institutions together in transformative learning communities”.

The aim was to form connections that “make society more inclusive and safer by reducing reoffending”. Khan, however, wanted to reoffend. W
ith the mirthless sense of humour of a psychopath he used the occasion to go on what the tabloids call a killing spree. He stabbed to death another Cambridge graduate, Saskia Jones, and injured more people.
Mr Merritt’s grieving father David described his son, a Labour supporter, as “a beautiful spirit who always took the side of the underdog” and who believed deeply in the concept of prisoner rehabilitation.

On Twitter he said: ‘My son, Jack, who was killed in this attack, would not wish his death to be used as the pretext for more draconian sentences or for detaining people unnecessarily.” 

Wednesday 4 December 2019

A savage indictment of Pope Francis by recent editor of the Catholic Herald

The decline (and fall?) of the Church concerns not just Catholics or even Christians. It involves the decline of Western civilisation, as economic and political analyst David Goldman recently said. He is an observant Orthodox Jew. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. 

For many years I was annoyed if people spoke of Catholic priests as child abusers and pederasts, wrongly thinking the numbers of guilty men were tiny. Most priests are good, selfless men, of course, but the numbers who are wicked are not tiny at all. 7% of priests in Australia, a Royal Commission was told, allegedly abused children between 1950 and 2010.

The Church is in as gravely corrupt a state as in the early 16th century, before Luther nailed his theses to the wall. The hierarchy and the College of Cardinals are riddled with depraved men and with men who protect the guilty. Damian Thompson, who was Editor of the Catholic Herald in London until he resigned recently, says the Pope has repeatedly protected guilty men and names lots of names. 

Meanwhile, he asks us to confess to 'ecological sins'.

Monday 2 December 2019

Paris in the wintertime


“For years, every year during the summer, he would go to Paris. It was automatic with his wife and his family. Hadn’t seen him in a while. And I said, ‘Jim, let me ask you a question: How’s Paris doing?’ ‘Paris? I don’t go there anymore. Paris is no longer Paris.” — Donald Trump, May 2017
I spent this weekend in Paris to celebrate my birthday with some friends. I hardly know the city and saw the Leonardo exhibition, walked around St Germain in the beautiful, very cold sunshine, ate four wonderful meals in exactly the kind of good, characterful restaurants you imagine, enjoyed the late 19th century Parisian atmosphere and succeeded in navigating the baffling Châtelet–Les Halles overland and underground railway hub to find the train to take me the ten minutes to Saint-Denis. Everything in French stations is endlessly difficult and I think this helps explain why England voted to leave the European Union.

In Saint-Denis stands the basilica where most of the French kings and queens are buried, from King Clovis I (481-511) and the Merovingian rois fainéants to King Louis XVIII, the last French king not to be deposed, who died in 1824.

A necropolis is an odd place to visit on one's birthday. I suppose, a sort of momento mori. 

Remember you must die, as a Roman celebrating a triumph was reminded by a slave sitting beside him. Not that I consider my life so far exactly a triumph. Still, as the Abbé Sièyes said when asked what he did during the French Revolution, I have survived.

But countries die, as well as men. 

Christianity and the Decline of the West

Catholic Mass attendance in Great Britain overtook Anglican attendance around the turn of the century. A bigger proportion of the population in Great Britain attends Catholic Mass than in France. 

But Catholicism in Great Britain is also in steep decline and many Mass goers in England are Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians and other foreigners, of course. Damian Thompson, until he recently resigned editor of the Catholic Herald, says that by mid-century mosque attendance will overtake church attendance in the UK.

Meanwhile, stranger and stranger things happen in Catholic churches. Catholicism, which, until the present Pope ascended the throne, seemed rock-like and unchanging now seems to change. 

Here is a quotation from a letter that Archbishop Vigano wrote yesterday to Alexander Tschugguel. He is the young man, 26, who, during the Amazon Synod, seized several “Pachamama” statues from a church in Rome and threw them into the Tiber. On Saturday

Quotations

Les Murray

'God is in the world as the poetry is in the poem.' 


St. Pius X in his motu proprio Fin Dalla Prima Nostra, articles I and III:

“Human society, as established by God, is composed of unequal elements, just as the different parts of the human body are unequal; to make them all equal is impossible, and would mean the destruction of human society” and, further, that “it follows that there are, according to the ordinance of God, in human society princes and subjects, masters and proletariat, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, nobles and plebeians, all of whom, united in the bonds of love, are to help one another to attain their last end in heaven, and their material and moral welfare here on earth.”



News item in The Tacoma News Tribune, April 11, 1953.

There'll Be No Escape in Future from Telephones


Mark R. Sullivan, San Francisco president and director of the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co., said in an address Thursday night:

The decline of Christianity is closely linked to the decline of the West

"Whenever I try to raise the topic of persecuted Christians in EU minister's meetings everybody says: 'Peter, better say 'religious minorities'. Well I WANT to say 'persecuted Christians'.." Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Sziijártó at the International Conference on Christian Persecution that took place recently in Budapest and was ignored by the press. 

"Finally, on hearing about the persecution of Christians, the greatest mistake Europeans can ever make is to say that this could never happen to them in their own country. Many
people share this delusion, even though Europe has been repeatedly struck by terrorism.

Wednesday 27 November 2019

The new fanatical religion of human rights

Toby Young writes well about fortieth anniversary of The Life of Brian, considered blasphemous by many, including my schoolboy self, in 1979. The song from it, 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life', sung on the crucifix, formed part of the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics. (I was invited to attend and foolishly turned the invitation down, damn!) That opening ceremony was a homage to an idea of Britain, shorn of its conservative aspects, that sophisticated, highly educated Londoners could admire. Presumably its mockery of religion is considered central to an idea of Britishness that the centre-left can respond to, along with immigration and the National Heath Service.

He says:
"Turns out, the Pythons were naive in thinking that mankind’s yearning for religious faith was an aspect of our nature we could outgrow. The ebbing away of the Christian tide has left a God-shaped hole in the Anglosphere and it has been filled with something more sinister — a constantly mutating moral absolutism. Its latest manifestation is Extinction Rebellion, but no doubt it will be something even more fanatical and millenarian in a few years’ time. These quasi-religious movements resemble Christianity in its fundamentalist, pre-Reformation period when believers were less willing to forgive heretics and sinners."
The whole article deserves to be read.

As I try to understand the madness of our times, the only explanation I can come up with is that we are living through a period of religious frenzy, the religion being the malign religion of human rights, to which is spliced the religion of climate change.

Monday 25 November 2019

Lam to the Slaughter

LAM TO THE SLAUGHTER?
HONG KONG Pro-democracy candidates have swept the board in elections to Hong Kong's local councils, winning 17 out of 18 councils in elections seen as a de facto referendum on Hong Kong's protest movement and the leadership of chief executive Carrie Lam.

Lam to the Slaughter is a great headline. The above is a quotation from a daily email I receive from the New Statesman, but I see on the net that several sources use it, including the Economist.

But it pales beside this one. When Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif looked likely to fall from power because his daughter submitted documents to the Supreme Court dated before January 31, 2007 and typed in Calibri, a font which only became available on that date, it occasioned the best headline I ever saw:

Saturday 23 November 2019

A Simple Guide to Ukrainegate, for people who are not interested in the subject

I don't imagine you are following the attempt to impeach Donald Trump too closely, gentle non-American reader. 

There seems little point, as the U.S. Senate will not vote to remove him from office.

So what's it all about and who is in the right?  

Obviously, at first sight, Hunter Biden appears in a bad light and so does Donald Trump.

This is what distinguishes the Ukrainian story from the Russian story, the allegation that Mr Trump was being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin and was a danger to American national security. 

It was pretty obvious from the start that that story had no substance. The people who appeared in a bad light in that story were the CIA, FBI and MI6.

Some people said that the investigation was an attempted coup by the deep state and other people reacted with irrational fury to the suggestion, but it was the administration trying to get rid of Donald Trump. The word 'coup' and the phrase 'deep state' are a case of de gustibus non disputandum.

Friday 22 November 2019

Boris is Just William

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Yesterday I quoted Henry explaining political parties to the Outlaws in Richmal Crompton's William, Prime Minister, a fine story. Today I recalled that my friend Ruth Dudley Edwards aptly compared Boris to William Brown when he (Boris I mean) became Prime Minister. 


I looked it up on the net and found a very good essay by her on the theme
Michael Deacon had also made the analogy last year, comparing Emily, Lady Nugee with one of the female battleaxes with whom William often battles. I quote from Ruth.

'Like so many others, I’ve spent all too much time recently weighing up the qualities and deficiencies of Boris Johnson and the pros and cons of having him as Prime Minister. That involved reading innumerable articles asking who the real Boris is. It made me little wiser. Much like Boris before the referendum, I dithered about whether we should take the risk.
'Which is why I was surprised last week at how joyful I felt when I watched him standing outside number 10. Illumination didn’t strike until the following day, when I heard that he had appointed Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove to implement revolution, and I realised that the real Boris is, of cours
e, the 11-year-old William Brown, of Just William fame, who is leading his gang, the Outlaws, to take on Brussels and win. I haven’t yet decided which of

Thursday 21 November 2019

Quotations for today

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. 
John Steinbeck


We like someone because. We love someone although. 
Henry de Montherlant


Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious. 
Paul Valéry

Wednesday 20 November 2019

Free speech in England is a memory

Former English policeman Harry Miller has taken the College of Policing and Humberside Police to court after he was contacted by the police in January, following a complaint over allegedly 'transphobic' tweets.

The court heard that the police told him that he had not committed a crime, but his post was being recorded as a "hate incident".

The counsel for the College of Policing said: 

"While the claimant now expressly disavows having any personal hostility or prejudice towards transgender people, his social media messages speak for themselves."
In one tweet, he said, Mr Miller posted: 
"I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don't mis-species me. F**kers."

Monday 18 November 2019

Jeremy Corbyn, unrepentant Marxist, may become British Prime Minister next month

Jeremy Corbyn, the Leader of the British Labour Party, who will very possibly be British Prime Minister before Christmas, marked the opening of the Berlin Wall and implicit end of Communism in East Germany, thirty years ago, by publishing in a newsletter he edited an article headlined 
No cheers here for a united capitalist Germany.
Mr Corbyn once called Cuba’s Fidel Castro a “champion of social justice” and marked the death of Hugo Chavez in 2013 by tweeting

Identity politics

'The divides that had driven politics hitherto, especially class and wealth, became less salient after the 1960s. Other, more “lifestyle” issues took their place. At first these were construed in terms of the individual, but eventually they came to be framed in terms of groups: first Jews, then African-Americans, then women, then gays. It was not merely that these groups sought equal rights. The real change was that they defined themselves as oppressed. This was a seismic shift.
'Identity politics is deeply and inexorably divisive. If the withholding of recognition is a form of oppression, then one way of achieving recognition is to show that I have been oppressed. The logic is as follows: the group to which I belong is a victim; it has been wronged; therefore we are entitled to special treatment. This gives rise to an endlessly proliferating list of the aggrieved. Each of their claims is surely true, but you cannot build a free society on the basis of these truths, just as you cannot heal trauma by endlessly attending to your wounds. A culture of victimhood sets group against group, each claiming that its pain, injury, oppression, humiliation, is greater than that of others.'
Lord Sacks, former British Chief Rabbi, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (2007) - here is a very interesting extract.


Actual slide at a conference for science teachers in the US state of Washington

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Sunday 17 November 2019

Brexit, democracy and the perils of diversity

'But even if the superior classes today – or indeed in the past – had shown themselves consistently capable of ruling in the interests of all rather than in their own, this would be a complete misunderstanding of democracy. Democracy is not a system for discovering the “right answer” to political issues: we can rarely if ever 
be sure what the right answer is. Democracy, rather, is a system for creating consent and solidarity by allowing all to have an equal vote. For making people feel that the way they are governed, though not perfect, is at least one in which they are fairly consulted and their voices listened to. So that, even if they do not get their own way, they accept the outcome without trying to sabotage or evade it.
'That is what we have come perilously close to losing. Next month we have the chance to regain it, with all the opportunities and risks that democracy entails.'
Dr Robert Tombs, in the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday


'Before I went into politics I spent a lot of time as a human rights lawyer and did international work across the globe. In many countries, as you can imagine, where there is quite a challenging human rights environment, there either wasn’t a vote at all – or if there was a vote it was ignored. That was really, really corrosive to democracy and I think it’s absolutely right that if we do have a referendum we abide by the result.'
Sir Keir Starmer, speaking to UCL students in February 2018 - this year he has persuaded Labour to make a second referendum party policy.


'Towards the end of her time in office in 1990, Margaret Thatcher became increasingly fed up with the European drive for integration. She started to say in public that there should be a referendum on the main issue then current – membership of what later became the

Thursday 14 November 2019

Dumbed down England

The British are very ignorant these days. I think it is because people are not interested in anything before the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.

I know an Englishman in Bucharest with a PhD in history who never heard of Carlyle and one with a PhD in Political Science who had not heard of Dr. Johnson.

When recently it looked as though Boris might beat George Canning's record of being the shortest serving English Prime Minister in history, Tim Shipman felt he had to explain to readers of the Times, who are or used to be the people who run the UK, who Canning was. 

He was a momentary PM who died shortly after taking office, but I thought the man who called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old was one of the most famous foreign ministers in history, comparable to Metternich.

Tuesday 12 November 2019

Mars

I was surprised recently to learn that the Mars bar has nothing to do with the god of war or the red planet, but was invented by a Mr Mars and that the Mars family was said to be the richest in the world back in 1988, worth a cool $70 billion. 

I had never heard of them. 

The family have now been surpassed in the USA and the world by the Walton family and the Koch family.

Romanians entertain a unique relationship to failure


From The Philosopher of Failure: Emil Cioran’s Heights of Despair by Costica Bradatan, The Los Angeles Review of Books, November 28, 2016
But when Cioran went to college in Bucharest, the country’s southern capital, he stepped into a whole new cultural universe. Here the winning skills were different: the art of doing nothing, sophistry (from slightly playful to plainly cynical) trumping intellectual soundness, procrastination as métier, wasting one’s life as vocation. As an undergraduate philosophy student, Cioran came in touch with some of Bucharest’s best performers in this respect. The mix of intellectual brilliance and a striking sense of personal failure that some of them exhibited gained his unconditional, perpetual admiration:

In Bucharest I met lots of people, many interesting people, especially losers, who would show up at the cafe, talking endlessly and doing nothing. I have to say that, for me, these were the most interesting people there. People who did nothing all their lives, but who otherwise were brilliant.

Nigel Farage has marched half his troops down the hill and implicitly backs Boris's deal

Thank God Nigel Farage has given up his decision that his Brexit Party “fight every seat in the country” and said that he would not be fighting the 317 seats held by the Conservatives. 

I wish very much he’d not fight any seats.

All Brexiteers must be grateful to him. Without him the Brexit referendum would not have happened and, had it happened, Leave would not have won. 

But he was very foolish initially to refuse to countenance Boris’s deal. 

He did so out of vanity, to a large extent, and now, out of vanity, he changes his mind because he wants to avoid humiliation. 

Monday 11 November 2019

Mr Rose's Diary

Kenneth Rose's biography of King George V is the funniest book I ever read. His book on the Later Cecils is in my top ten for laughter. I love him and must read his diaries, which the Daily Mail is serialising.

He was a howling snob, known as Climbing Rose, and how I envy him being in the midst of the establishment.

The establishment today, made up to a large extent of earnest Europhiles and egalitarians, is probably very much less fun: think John Bercow, Eric Pickles, Archbishop Welby and the bishopesses he keeps appointing.

But how recently it was full of Victorian figures like Lady Diana Spencer's father, Earl Spencer and Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon. Perhaps it still is mid-Victorian. I hope so.

Here are some extracts.


July 31, 1979

Lunch with Harold Wilson at the Travellers Club. He is smart and spry in a well-cut, very dark brown suit, with starched cuffs and elaborate cufflinks.

Some talk of anti-Semitism, especially Ernest Bevin’s. Wilson has heard of the relish with which Bevin, on becoming Minister of Labour and National Service in 1940, boasted that he would call up all the East End Jews.

‘Real working-class anti-Semitism’, says Wilson.


April 14, 1982

George Morpeth tells me that when Dorothy Macmillan, tiring of [her affair] with Bob Boothby, returned to Harold Macmillan, there was no emotional reconciliation or apology. The doorbell rang, and there she was with her suitcase. She said: ‘Are there any letters?’


June 9 1982

John Grigg tells me that Michael Foot is now absolutely besotted with admiration for Margaret Thatcher’s handling of the Falklands crisis and the assault on the Argentine forces.


February 6, 1983

I hear reports of the school where the Princess of Wales taught infants. She is apparently not very clever and certainly without any of the intellectual resources needed in marriage to the Prince of Wales.

March 12, 1983

When the Duke of Devonshire joined the SDP, the Labour MP Eric Varley said: ‘He will bring to the party that common touch which Roy Jenkins lacks.’


December 6, 1983
Lunch with Harold Macmillan at Birch Grove. For a man approaching his 90th year, he looks in splendid shape. During the Falklands campaign, the old war horse felt the smoke of battle in his nostrils again when he called on Mrs Thatcher and was asked for his advice. ‘You see, nobody at No 10 had ever fought a war before. So I told her how to run it, with a small War Cabinet, and she wrote down everything I said in a small notebook.’

Heseltine is one of the few members of the Thatcher Government for whom he has respect. Norman Tebbit is another. On Mrs Thatcher: ‘I worked for a united country. She is narrow and hard, a middle-class megalomaniac.’


November 19, 1986

Julian Amery tells me that when Ian Harvey had to resign as Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office after being found with a Guardsman under the bushes in St James’s Park, Harold Macmillan could scarcely understand his foolishness.

‘Why didn’t he put the Guardsman into his official car and drive him home?’

A Private Secretary said: ‘But Prime Minister, Under-Secretaries do not have official cars.’

A few days later, there came an edict from No 10. In future, Under-Secretaries were to have official cars.

September 21, 1991

Duncan Davidson [founder of housebuilders Persimmon] tells me that he is still sometimes teased for having been a page at the Coronation in 1953. ‘Did you not faint at a rehearsal?’ someone asked him recently.

He says: ‘Yes — one of the bishops made an indecent suggestion to me.’

September 27, 1991

Dinner party for Jim and Audrey Callaghan. Jim tells me that, walking out of Westminster Abbey after the memorial service for Elizabeth Home, he found himself next to Ted Heath. It was the morning Mrs Thatcher had resigned — and Ted turned to Jim and said: ‘I had better compose my features so the photographers will not record my true feelings.’

August 28 1991

I hear that when Charles de Gaulle was succeeded as President of France by Pompidou, he said: ‘It’s like being cuckolded by one’s chauffeur.’

December 13, 1992

Arnold Goodman calls. We talk about the Wales affair. He does not care for Charles’s ‘empty pretensions to be an intellectual’, nor for his unforgiving character.

‘Of course,’ he says, ‘Diana has deliberately and publicly humiliated him — and incidentally made Morton a millionaire. So it is not surprising that he hates her and has not the generosity of spirit to offer a reconciliation.’

How will Diana now behave? Will she lead a quiet and dignified life that could one day lead to a reconciliation? Almost certainly not. She wants to make it difficult for Charles to become King, and to ensure that she will be the nemesis.

March 24, 2000

Johnnie Nutting tells me a story of Jonathan Aitken’s arrival in prison. He was interviewed by a psychologist, who asked him: ‘How big is your immediate family?’ ‘Five.’ ‘And how many people not of your family know you are in prison?’

‘Oh, I suppose about 20 million.’ The psychologist put him down as a megalomaniac.

June 8, 2006

Hugh Thomas tells me that Black Rod, in the House of Lords, has a disconcerting habit of asking a new peer: ‘How much did you pay for it?’

There are three sorts of response: (a) outraged silence; (b) a nervous giggle, and (c) a bold, ironic ‘£200,000’.

April 7, 2009

Lunch with Peter Carrington at White’s. He tells me of the worst row he ever had with Mrs Thatcher when he was Foreign Secretary.

In front of Robert Armstrong [the PM’s Principal Private Secretary] and Michael Palliser [her Special Adviser], she rebuked him for his policy on Israel, which she said was much resented by her Jewish constituents in Finchley.

Peter replied: ‘I thought it was the policy of the Government, not mine alone. But if you think that our policy should be based on whether or not it satisfies your Jewish constituents, you had better get yourself another foreign policy and another Foreign Secretary.’

And he went out, slamming the door. Later in the day, he passed the PM in a corridor, who said: ‘That didn’t go very well this morning.’

As Peter says to me: ‘That was as near as she ever got to an apology.’

March 7, 2010

Peter Carrington was talking to Margaret Thatcher the other day and said: ‘I had no idea you were going to turn out as you did.’ She said: ‘Nor did I.’

September 13, 2011

I am deeply disturbed by the conduct of David Cameron, the PM, who has declared a planning free-for-all in the construction industry, apparently in return for huge donations to the Conservative Party. He is not a true Tory at heart but a spivvy Etonian entrepreneur.

101 Years after the End of the War to End All War

No photo description available.

Today is the 101st anniversary of the end of the First World War, in which Romania suffered very much and needlessly. Norman Stone said Romania's entry into the war on the Allied side delayed the Allied victory by a year, but her sufferings were very well rewarded by obtaining large stretches of what had been Austria Hungary and Russia. 

When the First World War began, Western civilization seemed unassailable, though its brightly glittering surface concealed weakness and corruption. No other civilisations, such as the Japanese or Chinese ones, any longer existed. 

By the time the armistice was signed the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires were destroyed, the long epoch of rule by the aristocracy was coming to an end and Communism threatened the world. The two German empires lost land they had ruled for  many centuries to indigenous Slavs and Romanians and more recently acquired Italians. 

From the moment the Bolshevik conspiracy hijacked the Russian state, Russia was a pariah. Therefore there could no longer be a Franco-Russian alliance to enforce the 1919 settlement in the ethnic mosaic of central and eastern Europe. Someone aptly called the  settlement the peace to end all peace. 

Austria and Germany caused the First World War and Germany caused the Second World War but a Second World War was inevitable, unless France and England allowed Germany to redraw her eastern boundaries without a war.

The Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916 was one of the most significant events in the First World War, because it was seen throughout Africa and Asia as a rebellion against colonial rule by one of the great powers. The victory of Japan over Russia in 1905 had already shown them that white men were no longer necessarily supreme.