Lady Hale, ardent feminist

This is the era of narcissists: Mr Obama, Mr Trump, M Macron, Speaker Bercow and possibly (I am not sure yet) Rory Stewart. 

Pope Francis seems self-regarding too.

Even Lady Hale, the most senior judge in the UK is not self-effacing enough. She was interviewed by the BBC not long ago, which is bad, and talked about her feminism. She wants to be admired.






She spoke to a school a couple of days ago standing in front of a slide projected on a screen which says ‘Spider woman takes down the Hulk', i.e. the Prime Minister.


The slide was not her fault, I concede, and it was a reasonable joke but she should not have agreed to stand in front of it.

She praised 'girly swots' in her speech (the phrase used in a cabinet memo by the PM) which was not an improper thing to do - but not accidental. At a moment like this when anger is running very high on both sides of the Remain-Leave divide it was unwise and also self aggrandising.

How very different she is from the great judges of old and how very typical of the Cambridge educated academic feminists of her generation and later. 

Her being an academic, which is most unusual for a judge, explains her. She is part of the philosophical drift in the universities towards progressive ideas.

Lady Hale proudly calls herself a feminist. Margaret Thatcher, by contrast, said feminism was poison. I mention this to suggest that being a feminist is a political position rather than an uncontroversial thing to be and judges should not have public political positions. I therefore wonder if Lady Hales is well-advised to proudly call herself one. 

She no doubt thinks she is on the winning side of history and a progressive social force and this justified. It's a kind of political Calvinism.

How very different she is from the wonderfully High Tory Lord Chancellor Eldon, who was anything but progressive. He set a face of granite against all social reforms and defended hanging for all sorts of crimes stealing sheep and lambs. He used to lunch each day with a Chancery crony and seek to impress the clerk by only ordering two bottles, but invariably they had a third before they left the table (port, not wine).

Then according to Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors, one of the two funniest books I ever read (the other is Kenneth Rose's King George V), Lord Eldon proceeded to the Woolsack to deliver those judgments which continue to perplex the law of equity half a century after his death.

The short march through the Catholic Church

Pope Francis has now appointed more than half the cardinals entitled to vote for his successor. 

Many are 'Franciscans', which means that they have left wing politics and left-wing theology.  

These words came to my mind.

"The evil that men do lives after them."

I'm afraid I decided, after thinking about it, to delete the line before that,

"The good men do is oft interred with their bones"

Here are three quotations from Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, the Archbishop of Bologna, who died in 2015.

“… the Antichrist presents himself as a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist. He …

Quoted from an incredibly sad story on Sky News

It is not only very sad but like a passage from a daringly surreal dystopia - it outdoes Brave New World.

'"I'm in communication with 19 and 20-year-olds who have had full gender reassignment surgery who wish they hadn't, and their dysphoria hasn't been relieved, they don't feel better for it," she says.

'"They don't know what their options are now."

'Charlie says she has been contacted by "hundreds" of people seeking help - 30 people alone in her area of Newcastle.

'"I think some of the common characteristics are that they tend to be around their mid-20s, they're mostly female and mostly same-sex attracted, and often autistic as well."

'She recalls being approached by a young girl with a beard who hugged her after giving a public talk, who explained she was a destransitioned woman too.'

The leading progressive English Catholic journalist leaves me with no words

'Fake news' - will this phrase save us? 'Politically correct' didn't

Still on the subject of what Michael Gove really said at the German Embassy on Thursday and the untruthful tweet about it by one Professor Neumann, a German who was present and is a lecturer at King's College London, it's another case, like Sir Roger Scruton's very shameful sacking, of how people with malign intent misuse social media and spread what is to coin a phrase fake news. 

This is Douglas Murray's report.

Whatever you think of him and however much you might not like him (I don't much like him either), we must all be grateful to Donald Trump for coining that phrase 'fake news' and showing the world that the media are political actors. 

This is simultaneously much clearer and much less clear now that the political consensus, meaning what unites the traditional parties while they fight each other, is under attack.

President George H W Bush coined the phrase 'politically correct' to point out the Communist origins of a lot of vexatious ideas. I thought at the time that the phrase would ridicule and laugh out of business those ideas but it didn't at all. Instead it is no longer politically correct (i.e permitted in many circles) to use the very phrase itself.

Had Professor Neumann been untruthful in defence of Cecil Rhodes, let alone the Amritsar massacre, or had he had his picture taken next to man in an Islamophobic t-shirt he might have been given the old heave-ho. Had he said that boys are better at maths than girls he certainly would have had to go.

History lesson

David Lammy

@DavidLammy

.

@michaelgove

pick up a history book. The EU is a project of peace, cooperation and and unity. You are the one who seeks to divide us.

Mr Lammy was commenting on a wholly inaccurate report that Michael Gove, speaking at the German Embassy on the German Day of German Unity, said that the UK's decision to leave EU was on a par with fall of Berlin Wall and East Germans' quest for freedom. This was based on an untruth tweeted by a British professor who was present.

The idea of Mr Lammy telling Mr Gove, a very erudite man who quoted Dryden in a political speech, to be better read takes the biscuit. Mr Lammy was asked by John Humphreys on Celebrity Mastermind last December 'Who succeeded to the English throne aged 9 on the death of his father Henry VIII in 1547?' and answered 'Henry VII'.

Extinction and conservation

One in seven British species is threatened with extinction, according to the new State of Nature report by seventy of Great Britain's biggest wildlife and conservation charities. 

Many argue that this issue is more urgent than Brexit. 

Others argue that another issue that is more urgent than Brexit is that the indigenous English, Scots and Welsh (and all indigenous Western Europeans) are threatened with becoming not extinct but minorities in their ancestral lands. 

Arguments along these lines, however, are almost never heard in the press and asserting them should be made illegal, according to a recent report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. 

I wonder whether Theresa May agrees. It sounds like her cup of tea. 

Does George Osborne?

The Tony Blair Institute, according to its website, "aims to help make globalisation work for the many, not the few".

The collapse of British politics

From Pete North's blog today. It sounds like the sort of thing Maurice Cowling might have written.

'Over the last two decades especially, the main parties have sought to bury the EU issue refusing even to debate it. that proved easy for Labour in that it has always been a matter of little interest to them. The EU has served them well by way of handling the detailed business of statecraft so they can concentrate their attention on health and welfare. Statecraft and external affairs is a bit too grown up for them.

'....If anything has kept the eurosceptic cause alive it is the establishment europhile consensus which sought not only to take us deeper into the project but also to prevent the issue from being debated and to deny the public anything like a meaningful say. The eurosceptic voice was loud but barely represented in parliament. 

'....What we see now, therefore, is not a dispute over the direction of Brexit. Rather it is a tribal realignment. Virtually nobody in mainstream politics is thinking about a viable definition for Brexit and is only thinking as far as the next imminent general election. The EU and Brexit is only a proxy issue that decides which side of the culture wars you're on.

Red Hat Reports awaited

A year or so ago a group of Catholics calling themselves Better Church Governance (BCG), began raising money and hired Philip Scala and ten other former FBI men turned private detectives to investigate the cardinals, to see whether they have remained faithful to their vows. They will publish their findings under the name Red Hat Reports. 

“We hope to separate the wheat of credible accusation from the chaff of rumour or calumny through objective and dispassionate inquiry” said Professor Michael Foley, one of the organisers of BCG.

Mr Scala gaoled numerous mafiosi and uncovered an al-Qaeda bomb factory. It will be very interesting to read the reports when they are published. Why is it taking so long?

Philip Davies MP

Brexiteer Tory MP Philip Davies was unknown to me till today when he said:

 I launched the Better Off Out group in 2006 I could always rely on the now leader of the Labour Party to vote for my proposals. I am sorry that he has now ditched the only popular policy he ever believed in.”

Googling him, I find he complained two days ago that his party has selected too many candidates “because of their gender and the colour of their skin”.


A site called Scram News published this story under the wicked lie

Nationalism does a lot of harm - think of Gandhi

Ned Ryun

@nedryun

· 1h

This is correct. Nationalism in the vein of Lincoln, Ghandi, Churchill has absolutely nothing to do with racism. In fact, nationalism, prioritizing your nation’s interests is in fact the pinnacle of morality for any national leader. Any thing else is immoral. https://twitter.com/richlowry/status/1179748257544704000

Rich Lowry

@RichLowry

· 4h

The identification of nationalism with racism is lazy, ahistorical and wrong https://twitter.com/TimFaulkner81/status/1179731220713951232

Nationalism is not racism, but it has caused a lot of unnecessary deaths in unjust wars. Lincoln by making war on the South was responsible for the dead of the Civil War. Gandhi by anti British agitation is partly responsible for the hundreds of thousands who died during Partition.

Boris might just have a solution for Brexit - and the reason why Theresa May failed

Boris's plan today seems like it just might work. It might get through Parliament, at least if the EU will agree to something like it. 

If so Boris has achieved greatness. If not, it looks like we have tried our very best and we have to leave without a deal after an election.

Speaking on BBC Radio Five Theresa May's Chief of Staff Gavin, Lord Barwell, admitted the UK was “obviously” wrong to agree to the EU’s demand that the divorce negotiations take place before the future relationship negotiations. He said this:

“... made it harder… that split is what essentially led to the backstop. Because

What he said

Sam White

@SamWhiteTky

·

2m

Remember when hard right used to mean the BNP? What do we call the actual hard right now?

Quotations

The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.
Hilaire Belloc

With respect to religion: for me, Judaism is not a religion. In my identity, Judaism is a people, an ethnicity, a national culture, that manifests itself in a set of behavioral rules that have been constructed by others, or by non-members, as how religion functions for them. But Judaism is not about religion; it’s not about belief. There is no “I believe” in the Trinity; there is no al-Shahadat (which says “I witness that there is no God but Allah, and that Mohammed is His Prophet”). There is no credo. In the Bible we get the Torah, stating “we’ll do and we’ll listen.” First, there’s the deed. So, Judaism is a legal culture that pervades the life of the community. But it is not a religion in the sense of a creed, a belief. The idea of Judaism as a religion is a construction of modern Western Judaism, designed to enable “Germans of Mosaic persuasion” or “American Jews” to avoid having a double identity.
Professor Yochai Benkler

It’s a no-brainer that we should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there — because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.
Masha Gessen

Quotations

"Unfortunately science is only splendid when it is science. When science becomes religion it becomes superstition." G. K. Chesterton

“I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The actual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively secondary—important but still secondary—compared to what I tried to capture in this novel, which is that we are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old.” Michel Houellebecq

"Of what is significant in one’s own existence one is hardly aware, and it certainly should not bother the other fellow. What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?" Albert Einstein

Promising young actress's career destroyed because she said 'I do not believe homosexuality is right'

A young British actress, Seyi Omooba, was given the lead role in a stage version of The Color Purple but the next day she received a tweet with a screenshot of a Facebook post from September 2014 in which she had written: 

‘It is clearly evident in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 what the Bible says on this matter. I do not believe you can be born gay and I do not believe homosexuality is right…’

She was asked by the theatre and her agency to retract the post and apologise. She refused.

The role was taken from her and her agents stopped working with her. 

She contacted six other agents, who had previously been interested in her. Only one responded and described her as talented but misguided and brainwashed.

She has instructed lawyers to sue the Curve Theatre in Leicester and her former agents, Michael Garrett Associates, for breach of contract and religious discrimination.