My two killer arguments for voting to leave the EU

My sister just called me - to discuss the referendum. Like many people she hasn't made up her mind though I know her heart is Brexit.

My (I hope) killer argument was: it won't be decided by your one vote. If we leave and it goes wrong you can share the blame with 20 million people.

But if In wins - as they almost certainly will - you will spend decades when you watch the news regretting voting In.

Another argument, not the best reason to vote Leave, perhaps, but a persuasive one is that the Remain people are so very annoying. The Out people, by contrast, are mostly terribly nice.

Remaining in the EU is signing a blank cheque

The EU has, on balance, done much good in Eastern Europe, though harm too. Elsewhere since 1999 it has been on the whole a big disaster. The Euro has destroyed the economies of Southern Europe, Schengen has failed to protect countries from invasion, the EU has shown that it cannot be a player in foreign affairs and it is clear now, as should always have been clear, that it can never be democratic because it has no demos.

Immigration is not a key issue - Brexit might not affect immigration at all - except that people who want a million or three million migrants to enter Europe without papers in a single year are very dangerous people - mad, bad and dangerous to know. The one strong argument for our staying is that Scotland might secede in ten years time. If we do vote for Brexit expect the EU to come up with a counter-offer. And more referendums till we get the answer right. 

I don't think we shall ever escape. And young people are educated in the pieties of internationalism, so this is our last chance.

Let's enjoy the next week while Berlin and Brussels fear we might leave the EU

I firmly expect Great Britain to vote to stay in the EU next Thursday, but let's all enjoy every single blissful moment of these halcyon days when our German and other European rulers think we might leave. This is the last moment when Great Britain roused herself to become a free country. After we vote to stay in, it will probably resemble what Claude Cockburn's tutor told him life was like after Oxford: just a long slow slope to the grave.

Bertrand Russell said ‘Collective fear stimulates herd instinct and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd’. I see a lot of this coming from the In camp who seem almost to hate or despise the Outs. Especially they seem to hate UKIP and despise the working classes. The viciousness is born of fear. I find it disgusting but it is what politics and democracy are about. 

Whatever your views on Brexit what a great argument this referendum is for lots more referendums. Though of course there is not really very much room in the EU for referendums.

The opinion polls today show Leave up to 7% ahead of Remain and the bookmakers, who are  always the best place to look, to find out what's going on  today give Leave an astonishingly high 30% chance. I give it a lot less (5-10%?) but what does impress me is that the polls are swinging towards Leave despite the attempts of the government the IMF and most of the establishment to terrify electors with stories of economic Armageddon.

And could we really leave?

I suppose yes!

And then?

Who knows?

The Germans could want to punish us very hard pour encourager les autres but this would do huge damage to the EU economy and especially Germany’s. The German Finance Minister says we will be booted out of the single market (the same Finance Minister who thinks if Germans do not take immigrants they will start committing incest – he really did say that recently). But I was more interested in what Juergen Hardt, senior CDU foreign policy spokesman, told Der Spiegel. If the UK votes to leave, he said the EU should gauge possible action to prevent a British exit from becoming a reality. “Brussels shouldn't close the door right away.”

I had dinner last night with a very Europhile British friend, 60, public school educated and well off, who is anguished that 'Literally ALL my British friends without exception want us to leave'. More than half his British friends live on the Continent, by the way.  

He made a number of weak arguments for staying in the EU. He said that all economists think we should stay (which is, of course, certainly not true) and that no former party leader thinks we should leave. I mentioned Michael Howard, Ian Duncan Smith, David Owen, Margaret Thatcher, Michael Foot. 

I could have mentioned Jeremy Corbyn who probably does not really want us to stay, but Corbyn is a name even less likely to persuade anyone than Foot's. Instead, I surprised him by mentioning Nigel Lawson. He had no idea that very experienced intelligent people like Howard and Lawson wanted us to leave.

Then he said that he thought nationals of other EU countries who live in the UK should have had a vote in the referendum. This was like the thirteenth stroke of the clock, that not only was not convincing in itself but cast doubt on the other twelve. I don't think he gets the idea of nationhood.

A revolutionary moment in Britain

The support in the opinion polls for Britain leaving the E.U. (exactly 50-50 these days) is the nearest the British have come to a revolution since 1848 - and that includes the General Strike of 1926 and the strange revolutionary moment when Diana died. The people (half of them) are battling against the political parties, big business, the banks, the Americans, the Europeans and even the Archbishop of Canterbury. How interesting that the left these days (including Jeremy Corbyn) is always opposed to revolutions.

Donald Trump, of course, is a revolutionary too.

More EU referendum quotations

England has never been more little than it is now, a subject province of someone else’s empire.

Peter Hitchens


The price of true freedom is uncertainty.

Kate Hoey

We’re getting killed, it’s madness. We’re being asked to argue with our voters, telling them that they’re wrong about immigration and the EU. And then at the end we’re supposed to turn around and say vote Labour. It’s like putting up a sign saying vote UKIP.

Anonymous senior Labour MP quoted in Politico

Unfortunately British Muslims have no choice. They need to ask whether it is safe for them to remain part of a European Union which is being steadily captured by anti-Muslim bigotry and hatred.

The latest example of this dangerous trend concerns the dreadful remarks made two weeks ago by the Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico. "Islam" declared Fico, "has no place in Slovakia".

Fico made clear that he was not calling for a secular Slovakia. He wants to keep Muslims out as part of what looks and sounds very much like a crusade for a Christian Slovakia - and by extension a Christian Europe.

Peter Oborne in Middle East Eye

More Brexit referendum campaign thoughts

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

A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.

Ronald Reagan

We should change the name Conservative Party because we are not.

Margaret Thatcher

The constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, has been drawn up for Man. Now, there is no such thing in the world as Man. In the course of my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; I am even aware, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be a Persian. But, as for Man, I declare that I have never met him in my life. If he exists, I certainly have no knowledge of him.

Joseph de Maistre

In a democracy people identify themselves as part of a first person plural—a 'we' established by inheritance and history.

Roger Scruton

We envisage few political evils worse than that of a government that controls us, but which we cannot control.

Roger Scruton

Brexit referendum campaign thoughts

To simplify wildly the main current in liberal-left thought is universalist. We believe that rights are for everyone. Logically we are committed to the position that a new immigrant to Britain, for instance, should be as entitled to benefits and public services as a British citizen born and bred here. Large chunks of the British electorate could not disagree more. They are communitarians. They believe that natives should have greater rights; that you have to belong before you can receive."

Nick Cohen

'It isn’t important whether you win or lose, so long as you survive. So long as your people survive. And that’s the only good reason for fighting that anyone ever invented. The survival of your people and race and kind. That’s the only victory that matters.'

Sir Harry Flashman (from 'Mr American' by George MacDonald Fraser)

SMILE at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget.
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.

G.K. Chesterton

What people like Polly don't seem to realise is that, rather like at the end of Animal Farm, her beloved bourgeois left crowd and the Neoliberals have become so similar as to be indistinguishable.

Comment on a Polly Toynbee article online

Why I decided I hope the UK leaves the EU

I have always been certain that my country would vote to stay in the EU even as I become more and more persuaded that, on balance, we should leave. But now, suddenly, hope has crept by inches into my heart.

I decided after much thought that I would vote Out had I a vote. But I have been abroad too long. Why? Because the EU will always be undemocratic. Because you cannot have a democracy without a demos.  

Our economic future might eventually be better outside the EU, but no-one knows and people who say they know are deluded or deluding. What matters is that I do not see any reason why laws should be made by unelected foreigners that we in the United Kingdom have to obey. 

There's no right or wrong decision on Brexit - it depends on your values. Do we prefer to be free or want kind masters? I think the English will prefer kind masters. They will vote to stay in, for fear that there would be fewer laws if we leave. But maybe I'm wrong.

One thing that has helped me make up by mind about Brexit is that I find I tend to like the way Brexiters think about things in general, like their sense of humour - and find the

Reaction to the referendum result anticipated by Philip Larkin

Reaction to the referendum result if the UK were to vote to leave the EU, as anticipated by Philip Larkin:

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,

As epitaph:

He chucked up everything

And just cleared off,

Quotations for Monday

She was also incapacitated by much of daily life and had 'no aptitude whatsoever' for domesticity.

Sybille Bedford

Trump routinely deploys all the subversive transgressiveness that campus Leftists claim to value.

Camille Paglia

A lot of the craziness comes from cultural/ethnic issues—rural White Americans who feel they are losing their country, and they are right. They are losing their country. In the end, the power they now have will go away, but it’s a very difficult and dangerous time until then.

Paul Krugman, 2014

When friends succeed

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something inside me dies. Gore Vidal

Failure is not the only penalty for sloth - there is also the success of ones friends. Anon.

Failure, so despicable in others, in oneself the only dignified thing. Claude Cockburn

And everyone knows:

We all of us have the fortitude to bear a friend's misfortune. La Rochefoucauld

Quotations for Wednesday

Eternity is not the very ancient, which existed before time began, but the entirely other, which is related to every passing age as its today and is really contemporary with it; it is not barred off into a 'before' and 'after'; it is much more the power of the present in all time.

Pope Benedict XVI

We have been most secure when we kept out of Europe. Meddling with European affairs has brought us nothing but toil and suffering. The greatest age of British economic achievement was in the nineteenth century. Then we were truly the workshop of the world. The sole principle of our foreign policy was Splendid Isolation. This was the basis for our prosperity.

A.J.P. Taylor

There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make man and woman into beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights; they would mix them in all things ~ their occupations, their pleasures, their business. 

Britain is Non-U

I haven't read Alan Ross's Essay in Sociological Linguistics republished in Nancy Mitford's Noblesse Oblige since I was in my first year at university. I am very ashamed to say that avoiding Non-U (i.e. non-upper class) words and phrases is the most lasting effect of my university education. However I am delighted to discover it is U (upper class) to say England to mean the UK and Non-U to say Britain.


Saying England instead of Britain is that's going out (though Romanians keep up the tradition and talk about the English Ambassador). It's a good thing to do for several reasons - for example it annoys false pedants.

I mean absolutely no disrespect to Scotland, a great country that I love with all my heart and hope one day to visit. But England has been used far more often than Great Britain (or worse Britain)  to mean Great Britain or the UK since 1707 when the two countries merged and therefore England is slightly more correct than Britain. Disraeli signed the Treaty of Berlin as 'Prime Minister of England' and Churchill always spoke of England not of Britain. So did most people, apart from the Scots, the Welsh, Northern Irishmen and Americans, until fifty years ago. 

Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it. Joseph Conrad

Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.

Joseph Conrad

If you must have motivation, think of your pay cheque on Friday.

Noel Coward

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life. 

Joseph Conrad


They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience. 

Joseph Conrad

It’s just so strange.
You used to love me,
and now you’re a stranger
who happens to know all
of my secrets.


Clementine von Radics

Despite my pro-abortion stance (I call the term pro-choice “a cowardly euphemism”), I profoundly respect the pro-life viewpoint, which I think has the moral high ground. I wrote in “No Law in the Arena”: “We career women are arguing from expedience: it is personally and professionally inconvenient or onerous to bear an unwanted child. The pro-life movement, in contrast, is arguing that every conception is sacred and that society has a responsibility to protect the defenseless.” The silence from second-wave feminists about the ethical ambiguities in their pro-choice belief system has been deafening.

Camille Paglia


Faith means deciding for the view that thought and meaning do not just form a chance by-product of being; that, on the contrary, all being is a product of thought and, indeed, in its innermost structure is itself thought.

Pope Benedict XVI

UN says Syrian refugees are mostly economic migrants

Michael Møller, Director-General of the United Nations Office in Geneva, speaking to the Huffington Post, admits,

“The number one reason why people leave Syria is not the bombs or the food or the cold, it’s because they want to find educational opportunities for their children."

In other words, most Syrian refugees are primarily economic migrants.

You might think that that can hardly come as a surprise, but to very many innocent people it will be one.

Nevertheless, Mr. Møller thinks migrants are a "good thing for every country" and points out that the current wave adds a mere 0.2% to the population of Europe. So nothing to worry about. He also deplores widespread antipathy to migrants settling in Europe caused by the fact that 80% are Muslims and the 'completely unacceptable' depiction of 'every Muslim' as either a terrorist or criminal.  

Civilisation and the West

By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as 'the outpost of Western Christian civilisation': France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as przedmurze (bastion), even tsarist Russia. Each of these nation-state myths identified "barbarism" as the condition or ethic of their immediate eastward neighbour: for the French, the Germans were barbarous, for the Germans it was the Slavs, for the Poles the Russians, for the Russians the Mongol and Turkic peoples of Central Asia and eventually the Chinese.

Neal Ascherson

Logically speaking, they might all have been right. Discuss. 

Neal Ascherson's mental universe is Poland -centric. This is from his book Black Sea in which mentions Romania on one page and talks a very great deal about Poland.

As an Englishman I think of France as more civilised than us- in all the bad senses of the word 'civilised', at least. We English seem and feel provincial compared to France and Italy. But when we look westwards we feel like wise Europeans from an old continent.  

As Evelyn Waugh said

We are all born American - we die French. 

Vampires do exist II

Vampires, incidentally, do exist, even if Vlad was not one of them. I well remember the Hamburg Vampire in the middle 1960s. He climbed into a flat and drank the blood of a young woman, who asserted that before he came through the window she had felt a deadly chill and become unable to move. The skeptical police took her off to the hospital, where the Vampire was actually caught halfway up the creepers on the wall, on his way to have one more for the road. He ended up in a mental clinic. The victim and the police officer in the case ended up telling their story in convincing detail on German television.

NEAL ASCHERSON, "Dracula in Britain", Games with Shadows
More about real life vampires here and about Vlad the Impaler here.

Quotations

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself: Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them. Every day begin the task anew. How can you reprove any one with gentleness, when you correct yourself with asperity?

St Francis de Sales

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. 

Francis Bacon (the artist, not the essayist, philosopher, statesman and crook)

You haven't I suppose ever mixed with politicians at close quarters. They're awful...their stupidity is inhuman.

Lord (Robert) Skidelsky

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

Sanders’s campaign manager said in an email that a Clinton nomination could be a “disaster simply to protect the status quo”. That sounds promising. And Trump, despite his un-PC language, is a centrist, even left-of-centre, not remotely fascistic. We can live with either. Now let's think about the British referendum and hope Britain votes to leave the EU, even though I am sure we shall not. Almost sure.

Sex and Culture

In Sex and Culture (1934), Professor J.D. Unwin a British social anthropologist, studied eighty primitive tribes and Roman, Greek, Sumerian, Moorish, Babylonian, and Anglo-Saxon civilizations. He found a strong positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the chastity of its women. He said:

'These societies lived in different geographical environments; they belonged to different racial stocks; but the history of their marriage customs is the same. In the beginning each society had the same ideas in regard to sexual regulations. Then the same struggles took place; the same sentiments were expressed; the same changes were made; the same results ensued. Each society reduced its sexual opportunity to a minimum and displaying great social energy, flourished greatly. Then it extended its sexual opportunity; its energy decreased, and faded away.'

Unwin, who was a sort of Freudian, and not writing from a religious or moralistic point of view, offered 'no opinion about the rightness or wrongness' of female chastity or sexual

Johnson told the rally: “You know the most depressing thing about the campaign to Bremain? It is that there is not a shred of idealism.

“Not a single one of them will stand up and admit that it is political. No one will say: ‘You know what, I love the idea of a federal Europe’, because that is the true logic of their position.

“But that is not what they say – oh no. They keep saying that they are Eurosceptics, but we have no choice. We agree with you about the democratic problem, they say – but it’s the price we have to pay.”

Jeremy Corbyn has been forced to abandon plans to give a speech calling for all Turkish citizens to gain access to the UK amid fears that it could push Britain out of the European Union.

Senior Labour party sources told this newspaper that Mr Corbyn had planned a major intervention this month in Istanbul calling for Turkey to join the EU, allowing it's 75 million people access to Britain under freedom of movement rules.

Sources inside the leader's office are understood to have intervened to get the speech scrapped, triggering a furious row.

Some interesting things people are saying about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton

The most pernicious aspect of this Democratic campaign is the way the field was cleared long in advance for Hillary, a flawed candidate from the get-go, while an entire generation of able Democratic politicians in their 40s was muscled aside, on pain of implied severance from future party support.

Camille Paglia

Despite their show of bravado, most savvy Democratic strategists have surely known for months that Trump was by far the most formidable of Hillary Clinton’s potential opponents—which is why they’ve been playing the race and riot cards against him to the max.

Taking back the USA is out of the question - they made their bed from 1776 to 1783, now they must lie in it

For some time now, Buckingham Palace has been getting letters from Americans begging the Queen to take the US back and end the Trump-Clinton pantomime. Here's the reply received by one of them.



What a pity that President Obama does not adopt the same policy of non-interferemce in the British state, rather than trying to persuade us to vote in the forthcoming referendum to stay in the European Union. 

My first job was in the House of Lords answering letters received by the Lord Chancellor and I am sure that the Deputy Correspondence Coordinator wrote that reply with a smile.

Britain is not a conservative country any more

Britain's real abortion scandal is how hard it is for some women to have one

This is a headline in today's Daily Telegraph. It is terribly shocking how very un-conservative the supposedly Conservative Daily Telegraph now is on so many subjects. It worries constantly about sexism and homophobia.

Tony Blair's achievement is to make Britain, whose centre of gravity used always to be moderate conservative, left of centre.

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

This week's political scandal about antisemitism in the British Labour Party has put the Holocaust in the news, but then the Holocaust is always in the news (very much more so than in the 1970s or 1980s). I think it wise not to wade into the discussion about what the malign Ken Livingstone (a man I detest) said about the Haavath Agreement. If you want to know about it, Andrew Roberts assails Ken here, though my views are different from Andrew's. But I have already stirred the waters in this article and, anyway, the story bores me. 

However, surfing the net (my besotting vice), I came across this interesting synopsis by Stefan Ihrig of his book Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to

Donald Trump really might be the next POTUS. At least he'd be better than Bernie Sanders.

What to think of Donald Trump? 

Odi et amo. My feelings verge from love to hate. He's a bully, a coarse braggart and a thrice married, casino-owning philanderer whom Evangelicals love, but if he could modify in part the left-wing zeitgeist that rules our lives?

I have decided to watch how things pan out and hope for the best. I start to have a feeling that, though Hillary is the favourite, the one I'd probably put money on, the Donald might do it. He's a politician of genius and she has a political tin ear for the music of the

Politicians should dissolve the electorate and choose a new one. Oh wait, they have.

Ted Cruz admits defeat, a wise move, and Donald Trump is Republican nominee presumptive. I just heard a Wall St Journal journalist just explained on the BBC that Donald Trump appeals to 'certain populist elements in the Republican Party'. A revealing slip. He meant the voters in the Republican primaries, I suppose. 

So voters can be populist. This reminds me that someone on Facebook last year accused Ed Miliband of 'pandering to the electorate'. It would have been better for him if he had done a better job of it.

Then the BBC moves on with its diet of pro-immigration propaganda. A woman explains

On this day in 1915 General Von Mackensen drove Russia from the Northern Carpathians

On this day in 1915,General August von Mackensen led a combined Austro-German force in defeating the Russian army near the Dunajec River (a tributary of the Vistula which runs through what is now Slovakia and Poland) and decisively ended nine months of victorious Russian advances in the region since August 1914. It was a key turning point in the war.

After Romania declared war on Austro-Hungary on 15 August 1916, Mackensen conquered Romania and on December 6 1915 Bucharest fell to him. Norman Stone said that by entering the First World War on the Allied side Romania delayed Allied victory by a year.  

At the end of the war Mackensen complained when he left Bucharest that

"I came to Bucharest two years ago with a legion of conquering heroes. I leave with a troupe of gigolos and racketeers.”

Matt Ridley's article from behind Times paywall. Key lines: "Fragmentation is not necessarily a bad thing. As David Hume was one of the first to point out, Europe’s overtaking of China after 1500 owed much to the fact that its peninsulas, straits, mountain ranges and islands meant it could not be unified for long, with the result that innovators and experimenters could escape uncongenial regimes by crossing borders. From Gutenberg to Voltaire to Otto Frisch, they did so."

Back in Bucharest with Fu Manchu, the greatest threat to the white race

What a delight to be back from the Far East.

Bucharest is so much nicer, more poetic, more human and more exotic than Peking or Seoul.

It is always wonderful to be back in Bucharest. I felt this when I returned after Christmas after I had been here only three months. Many foreigners lucky enough to live here told me they felt it was home immediately. Is there a more welcoming, friendly city or people anywhere?

This weekend was the Orthodox Easter. On Friday, the Orthodox Good Friday, the town was full of possessions for the Burial of the Lord . On Saturday at midnight everyone stands outside a church with a candle and then cracks eggs. This is much more interesting than China, because it is Christian.

A long weekend at home alone is the perfect antidote to my travels in the East and I'm finally reading The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu. Fu Manchu seemed trash when I bought a paperback in Cambridge market as an undergraduate and bad trash, worse than Dracula. Now I found him on Google books and it's actually rather fun. Who knew? 

The world of Fu Manchu is a very engaging world of lascars, dacoits and seductive but evil oriental women. References to rare poisons in Burma make me so proud that I know Burma.

Dr. Fu Manchu himself is the prototypical evil genius, 'the yellow peril' and 'the greatest threat to the white race'. 

Fu Manchu comes after Professor Moriarty but before a whole series of evil geniuses. Osama bin Laden is part of the line. Osama came from a very Westernised, rich Saudi family and will have seen the Bond films and the Pink Panther film where Herbert Lom threatens to blow up the world. 

The world has been remade by William Le Queux 

says the protagonist of Graham Greene's wonderful thriller The Ministry of Fear which is

My old China: I was twenty years too late for Peking

Ironically, North Korea in the 1960s and 1970s had far higher living standards than China and North Koreans would frequently congratulate themselves on not having fallen into the chaos and backwardness of their giant neighbour. It was only in the early nineties, with the end of Russian and Chinese subsidies, that the North Korean economy collapsed. 

James Palmer, Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao's China (2012)

Many years ago a young Romanian friend, Alexandra, was about to go to China and asked me for advice. I gave her three pieces of advice: to observe, not judge and to eat dog. She told me she did all three. I have just come back from China and only followed the first of these. 

Tourism in Peking leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Literally. The taste of Starbucks coffee and Starbucks baguettes.  

A shiny, very modern mega-city has been created by order of the Party in a place which

South Korea is a triumph of the human spirit

I was in South Korea for less than three days, as a holiday within my holiday in China. Since I was a little boy I have wanted to see Portuguese churches under a Chinese sun in Macao but am told it is like Las Vegas now. Instead of Macao it therefore seemed a good idea to get out of China and the flight to Seoul took only ninety minutes, though the queue at passport control took slightly longer. 

South Korea is not my kind of place but I liked it. It is a great triumph of the human spirit.

Utterly ruined and impoverished in 1953 it is now one of the richest countries in the world, not because of mineral resources but because of human resources.

The Gyeongbokgung palace

Seoul is a wonderful argument for capitalism, especially useful against people who worry that the state has too little power and multinational companies too much. South Korea has very little welfare safety net and not too many poets or painters, but there are more and

Back home after not going to North Korea

I got back to Bucharest last night after two weeks not visiting North Korea. Today I feel bliss that thanks to the rain I can have a long weekend at home with books, rather than go to the seaside. One more outing for this thought from Logan Pearsall Smith

'Thank heavens, the sun has gone in and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.'

I had been supposed to go to North Korea with four pals, but the political situation in North Korea became a little too exciting. I felt the time was not right. But I had bought a ticket to Peking via Istanbul and Kiev, so I spent some days in Peking and flew to South Korea for three days. A good decision, because I would never have chosen to go to China, a place I once glimpsed, and disliked, in a stopover. I still don't like it very much but it is very important indeed. And I met two very interesting and civilised foreigners, both historians, who live there, speak Chinese and explained the country.

I had dinner last night with Marc, one of the four who was just back from North Korea. I was disappointed that I did not get to that room on the border where a North and South Korean soldier eyeball each other. He said he was too.  

A lot in North Korea was as I guessed it would be. It has all been written about by bloggers, but nothing compares with seeing for oneself, which Marc has done and I have not. Pyongyang was impressive and in many ways normal, although the roads were almost empty of traffic. He could talk to people freely, except almost none spoke English. The beer was good. He only saw two old tractors in the countryside. I pointed out that from 1996 to about 2004 I never saw a single tractor in Romania, only ploughs.

He was not afraid while in North Korea, but knew he had to be always on guard. The beautiful and charming twenty-four year old girl who was his guide would, he knew, have killed him without a moment's compunction if ordered to do so. He was in a bubble, but nevertheless found the place fascinating. He warmly recommended that I go and I may well. 

What was the best moment? Oddly, visiting the very odd mausolea of the two deceased Kims. He made it sound like Evelyn Waugh's satire about American funeral directors, The Loved One.

Ian Coles took this shot

South-Eastern Europe has always defended Europe from Asian invaders, without Western Europe feeling gratitude.

I first wrote and published this in July 2010.

I picked up a couple of years ago in a second hand bookshop an essay by Mircea Eliade and idly opening it I had an odd experience. As I read Eliade say the historical destiny of Romanians, Serbs and Bulgarians was to spill their blood to protect an ignorant and ungrateful Europe from the danger of Muslims I recognised that I had heard similar ideas many times in guide books and inscriptions in places as far apart as Poland and Greece. They were the kind of local patriotic white noise one shut out but now the words had a chilling clarity.... 

Stanley Baldwin said 'Freedom is England's secret'

GreaterGlasgPolice ‏@GreaterGlasgPol  Apr 1

Think before you post or you may receive a visit from us this weekend. Use the internet safely. #thinkbeforeyoupost

The Archbishop of Canterbury learns he is illegitimate: how very attractive 1955 seems now

A strange story, worthy of a nineteenth century novel, was broken yesterday by, of all people, Charles Moore. Mr. Moore is the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, the Young Fogey's Young Fogey and himself a comfortingly nineteenth century figure, not someone I think of as a sleuth reporter, but on this occasion he has scooped the world.

It seems that, as a result of Mr Moore's investigations, the Archbishop of Canterbury took a DNA test to disprove the rumours about his paternity. He found to his surprise that they were true and that he is the illegitimate son of Sir Winston Churchill's last private secretary, Sir Anthony Montague Browne.

Since Dr. Welby was born almost exactly nine months after his mother's wedding to the

Quotations I read or remembered recently

"HG Wells had a mind like a limitless ocean, six inches deep."

Rebecca West 

"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." 

Damon Runyon

"It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people."

Logan Pearsall Smith

"The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything." 

Is America a nation founded on a creed or on British stock and culture?

G.K. Chesterton said in 1921

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. 

The US's House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, thinks so. He told interns in Congress this week that

America is the only nation founded on an idea not on an identity.

But is that right? Forty years after the American declaration of independence the South American republics were founded by deists and Freemasons based on the same creed. The

VERY well done, New Zealand!

Only preliminary results are in but it seems New Zealand voted to keep their old flag - with the Union Jack in the corner. Britishness is the kernel of New Zealand, Australia, Canada and, more distantly, of the USA. More important even than that, history is vital to every nation. History gives one a footing in the universe. The alternative is a soup of individuals possibly linked by things called values.

I wrote here about how nations should not be made of values but of blood and history.

My old friend the historian Andrew Roberts also rejoices at New Zealand's decision.

If only instead of belonging to the European union Great Britain belonged to a similar body composed of Canada, New Zealand and Australia as Joseph Chamberlain far sightedly dreamt of. Rhodesia and South Africa though would have presented problems. 

If the Queen wants to leave the EU does that settle the question?

Does H.M. the Queen want to leave the EU? If she does, does that settle the question of how to vote or would that be being too loyal to the throne?

According to a story in the Sun headlined "Queen backs Brexit" she does and the editor of the Sun, Tony Gallagher, said on Radio 4 

"We knew much more than we published".

But in fact the Sun's story, true or not, dates from 2011 and 'Brexit', Britain leaving the EU, was not mentioned.  So, however much the Sun protests, things are not clear.

I was told last year that the Duke of Edinburgh is strongly for Brexit but the

Neagu Djuvara tells me Europe is committing suicide

"Europe is committing suicide. Langsam aber sicher. Slowly but surely."

Is there nothing we can do to avoid this, I ask.

"There is no escape. It is our destiny."

I am taking tea with Neagu Djuvaru, the doyen of Romanian historians, who will be 100 in August. He is an old man but has the ebullience of a child, except when he thinks about the future of Europe, which he is glad he will not live to see. There is, he says firmly, no alternative to a Muslim conquest of Europe and the end of Western civilization. 

One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

One does odd things. You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not “for good”; one thinks everything is a rehearsal - to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One

Emigrants as national assets in a borderless world

Professor Neagu Djuvara told me, when I met him last week, that his generation, of whom he is one of the last survivors, went abroad to study and to return, whereas young Romanians today leave Romania and do not want to come back. This he describes as tragic.

He has a very good point. Romania is now an emigrant country. Most Romanian emigrants will not come back though more and more do, including the Prime Minister, Dacian Cioloș, who for years worked abroad as an expert in rural development. But what perhaps Professor Neagu Djuvara does not understand is that emigration means something very different in the age of smartphones and Facebook from what it did when he went to Paris to study in the 1930s.

A couple of days after I met Neagu Djuvara  I was invited to a conference on the Romanian diaspora at the Cotroceni Palace in Bucharest and heard Kinsley Aikens, a world authority on diasporas, talk in a much more cheerful  way about migration. Which is as

Meeting Neagu Djuvaru

'Europe is committing suicide. Langsam aber sicher. Slowly but surely.'

Is there nothing we can do to avoid this, I ask.

'There is no escape. It is our destiny.'

I am taking tea with Neagu Djuvaru, the doyen of Romanian historians, who will be 100 in August. He is an old man but has the ebullience of a child. He seems a very happy man except when he thinks about the future of Europe, which he is glad he will not live to see. 

There is, he says firmly, no alternative to a Muslim conquest of Europe and the end of Western civilisation. It is a thesis he has repeated several times in interviews. Romanians, who have not been exposed to cultural relativism, treat it with great respect.

I tell him that an American history professor recently said to me that Western civilisation will not come to an end because it is now universal.  There is no other civilisation. But as I
say this I realise that there was no alternative to Western civilisation in the fifth century

Nations will be made of ink

Joseph De Maistre said that nations are not made of ink. In the future they will be. Made of values, anyway, which come to the same thing.

At the moment, European countries are ethnic states, made of blood and history, even where the bloodlines are partly fictitious. Renan, we recall, defined a nation as a group of

Email from the Englishman in Damascus

Joe, the Englishman who lived twelve years in Damascus, sent me these comments, which he says are quick and garbled, on yesterday's post about him.

Since the regime is essentially Alawite and one of the smallest minorities in the country they have looked after the other minorities with exception of the Kurds to act as a barrier to the Sunni majority. There has never been much in the way of sectarian disputes other than resentment of Alawites unfairly promoted to positions of power. If you look at the history of Syria, and remember Damascus is the oldest city in the world, the various faiths have happily lived side by side, so the last forty years of the Assad domination is only blip. Damascus old city is divided amongst all faiths including Jews and

I was in Syria in 2007

I was in Syria in 2007 and this is what I saw. 

I was also in Beirut last October. I had a couple of interesting conversations. My taxi driver warned me the migrants in Europe were thieves and bad people (this was seven weeks before Cologne) and a man who knew Assad told me he is "useless, completely useless, a really poor quality person". I wrote about it here.

What is really going on in Northern Syria

This is a link to two exceptionally important interviews, one with Peter Oborne, an unusually fair-minded journalist with no axe to grind, whom I know and trust, and one with the very knowledgeable Alastair Crooke, an ex-MI6 man who then became Middle East adviser to Javier Solana. The story they tell is very much at odds with the interpretation of the war you read in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the Washington Post and hear on the BBC. There is no doubt that the Syrian forces have committed absolutely terrible atrocities, but the rebels have done the same.

The next step in the war will probably be a race between the Russo-Syrian forces and the

Former MI6 man says 'The Syria War Will Not Be a Quagmire -- Because Putin and Assad Are Winning'

I recommend you click on this very interesting article by Alastair Crooke in the Huffington Post about the sudden recent successes of the Russians in Aleppo, which he thinks mean victory for the government is imminent.  Alastair Crooke used to work for M16, writes regularly for the Guardian and was Middle East adviser to Javier Solana, the EU's High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy, from 1997 to 2003.

Points from the article include:

If government forces, moving north, can make friendly contact with the Kurds in the northeast, almost all Nusra and allied rebel forces would be nearly surrounded. The insurgents would be caught in a cauldron with their backs to a lightly populated and forested territory.


The ISIS-controlled corridor, especially the Jarablus border crossing with Turkey, remains effectively open. Turkey has proclaimed this represents its "red line." Were this corridor to be closed by the Syrian Kurds, the Turks have indicated they could respond by invading Syria. The YPG say nonetheless, that they are contemplating just such a move.

...Syria seems to be heading not towards a "quagmire" as many western politicians have suggested, but rather to a clear military outcome. As one

Sun Tzu in his Art of War explains the crisis in the Western world today

"If you know your enemy and you know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself you will succumb in every battle."

Whatever one thinks of him, Trump is a genius

I was arguing with a Romanian friend (Romanians are often tremendous intellectual snobs) who insisted that Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and George W Bush were all too stupid to be president.

About Sarah there is no question. But not about the others.

Stupid people do not do what Trump has done, destroy the Bush dynasty, outsmart the Republican party and runs rings round every other politician. He is a born natural for politics. Think Tony Blair in England, Ion Iliescu in Romania.  Of course, it's intuitive with Trump, as with Berlusconi, Blair and Putin. Hitler too, I suppose, and probably Pericles. All great politicians and artists are intuitive.

I long considered Putin a stupid man in many ways, a poor strategist but a very good tactician. (I remember an English friend of mine, who lived in Russia, telling me 'Russians

Peter Tweedie on the Colectiv disaster

I was sorry to hear last week that Peter Tweedie has died, aged 68, though I didn't know him. I think I met him three times and not since the turn of the century. He brought Rigips, the construction materials company, to Romania and thereby gave birth to a word for a partition that has entered the Romanian language.

I regret not having known him. He was one of the few foreigners who came to Romania before the revolution and they are always more interesting to me than the ones who came

The silence of the feminists: the dog that didn't bark in the night

Feminists, I hope, will be reminded of Cologne every time they talk about rape for many years to come. I hope worse things do not happen for them to ignore.

The almost complete silence from feminists about the events in Cologne on New year's Eve has been deafening. Feminists talk about a non-existent Western rape culture but not about sex crimes committed by Muslims throughout Europe, which are now suddenly being openly discussed in the previously craven press. 

Click here for a Guardian article that does touch gingerly and laughably on the subject, no doubt written on the orders of the editor. (The writer muses about whether the affluence of young German women, evidenced by their mobile telephones, led to the assaults.) 

Yet when, during a recent television interview, a cricketer asked a woman journalist to

Cologne changes everything

I am very pleased that migrants committed the Cologne mass sexual assaults this New Year's Eve and not in two or three years' time, when millions more refugees had been admitted to Europe. The same logic makes me grateful that Muslim fanatics murdered many innocent people in Paris in November, rather than waiting ten years. 

Cologne might be of lasting and huge significance to European history. Europe, or rather

Algiers is uncooked

I thought of several distant countries to visit at Christmas time when nothing happens for two or three weeks. In the end England seemed more appealing and a short-haul or medium haul trip to somewhere warm on Boxing Day. I was resigned to going somewhere unadventurous like Malta when suddenly I thought of and immediately decided on Algeria. Looking it up I found that not only was it pretty cheap to get to but, to my disgust, Her Majesty’s Government no longer advised her subjects not to visit. Only the great south, the Sahara, was to be avoided.

For countries to be interesting they must, of course, fulfil two criteria. Getting a visa should be difficult and/ or time consuming and, when you tell people you are going there, they should warn you that you might be killed. Algeria fulfilled both these two.