History lesson

David Lammy

@DavidLammy

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@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.

Boris, Pretty Fanny and Squiffy

I’d as soon take advice from my valet as from the Conservative Party Conference, said Arthur James Balfour. Boris might agree, had he a valet. Tory Prime Ministers, even if they went to Eton, have come down in the world since 1905, but I hope No 10 provides him with one.

He'd agree with another of Balfour's maxims, 'Never apologise, never explain', according to the BBC News this morning which said that this has been Boris's motto all his life. They did not provide a source to back this assertion, which might have been merely supposition based on observation.

Balfour, who was known as Pretty Fanny when he entered the House because of his beauty, was once caught heavy petting in a summer house with a female Apostle but, unlike Boris, he seems to have been a lifelong virgin. 

He was perhaps the cleverest Prime Minister we ever had (or was that another Etonian, Gladstone?) and the least successful except for Sir Anthony Eden and Theresa May. Which of the latter was the worst we shall only know in a couple of decades.

Boris is not the first Prime Minister to be accused of putting his hand on a woman's thigh. No young woman was safe from H.H. Asquith's wandering hands. 

Talking of Asquith, his nickname was Squiffy. It is often said that this is the origin of the word squiffy, meaning tipsy, but it is not true. Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English says that the word originated around 1873 and probably derives from "skew-whiff". I suppose Asquith might have been called Squiffy partly because he liked champagne but, though he liked a drink, a recent biography says that he did not drink to excess. 

Sky News is even more pro-Remain than the BBC

Beth Rigby

✔@BethRigby

MP tells me that Johnson had an ‘angry meltdown’ in voting lobbies. Am told that @jessphillips personally challenged him as did others . MP tells me PM saw a group watching through the doors & then started jabbing his finger towards us all

Beth Rigby of Sky News's tweet about the Prime Minister losing his temper with a woman Labour MP Jess Phillips is wrong. Jess Phillips herself says it didn't happen, but Beth Rigby did not take down her tweet. 

Mrs Phillips tweeted, with touching lack of grammar:

The Labour Party expects to lose 100 seats

"The attempt to abolish [Tom] Watson’s post last weekend is seen by insiders as the clearest indication yet that the party does not expect to win the forthcoming general election.

"The Sunday Times understands that internal union polling shows that the party is on course to lose more than 100 seats. The poll also suggests that up to a third of those who voted Labour at the last election could desert the party and support the Liberal Democrats. A further 10% are expected to switch to the Brexit Party, according to the data."

It looks like I was probably wrong and everyone else right when I wrote on Friday that Jeremy Corbyn's Brexit policy, i.e. making an acceptable deal with the EU and then holding a referendum on it, might enable him to hold onto his voters. But who can know?

The paper says that up to 100 Labour MPs, including members of the shadow cabinet, were prepared to leave the party with Tom Watson had he lost his job as deputy leader.

Tom Watson's chief claim to fame is giving credence to untrue and absurd allegations of paedophilia against elderly and dead public men, when he repeated them in the House under privilege. 

He is also notable for having lost a huge amount of weight by the expedient of putting butter in his coffee.

It looks as though the Labour Party will not be held captive by Trotskyites and Maoists indefinitely. 

But nowadays, very bad though Communists are, in some ways moderate socialists are as bad. David Miliband, the Blairite who was supposed to succeed Gordon Brown, has argued that refugee camps are outmoded and refugees should be housed direct in Europe. 

He was one of those who repeated wholly unsubstantiated stories about Syrian soldiers going from door to door killing civilians when Eastern Aleppo fell and one can well imagine Prime Minister David Miliband and President Hillary going to war to topple the Assads. 

Tony Blair did more to destroy conservative Britain than any earlier Labour politician.

What is clear is that a Labour government is the worst misfortune that can befall Great Britain. The second worst is a Social Democrat government calling itself Tory, like Mrs. May's. 

The Queen is not at all amused

A No 10 Downing St has told the Sunday Times that prime minister telephoned the Queen "as quickly as possible to say how sorry he was” after the astonishing decision of the Supreme Court. However the H.M. the Queen, according to sources, is angry. 

Neither Boris nor David Cameron is ever going to be made a Knight of the Garter, an honour in the Sovereign's gift.

The paper said a royal source confirmed that the Queen’s senior advisers are “fed up”. That means Her Majesty is fed up, for readers innocent of journalistic conventions. The source said, “It’s difficult to tell which of them they are crosser with, Cameron or Boris”.


According to the same or another source, Sir John Major, who is a Knight of the Garter and joined the action and gave evidence against the prorogation, would not have done so without the tacit approval of the Queen’s advisers. That sounds like it means the tacit approval of the Queen, but the Times goes on to add confusingly that there is no suggestion that Sir John sought approval from the palace before joining the case.


The prime minister told the cabinet on Thursday that it had been a “mistake” to dismiss warnings that his language could lead to attacks on MPs as “humbug”, another apology in private that he has not made in public. The Sunday Telegraph has an interview with him today and says he is unapologetic about the remark. He says (rightly) that the 'debate', meaning the 112 questions put to him following the recall of Parliament, was "totally pointless".

Veray parfit gentil knights

In my callow youth I disliked the Thatcherite 'dry' Tory MPs and also the Powellites and the apologists for apartheid. Instead I liked the 'wets', but I always loved reactionary Tory knights of the shire. 

They seem almost an extinct species but Tory MP Sir Desmond Swayne might be one. He defended my least favourite politician in the world, Justin Trudeau, for 'blacking up', saying he had dressed up as James Brown and that he would do it more often were it not for the difficulty in removing the make-up.

I also love the Attorney General Geoffrey Cox and his great speech on Wednesday attacking the Dead Parliament. He sounds like just the sort of Tory MP I wanted to be when I was a schoolboy.

How annoying that he does not have the knighthood Attorneys-General were always given automatically. David Cameron ended this tradition when he did not knight Dominic Grieve, another of my least favourite politicians, but perfectly fit by bearing and social class to be a knight. Boris should revive this tradition and many others.

Replacing the Supreme Court with the Law Lords and putting them back in their corridor in the House of Lords must wait until Boris wins a majority, if he does.

Brexit is a locked room mystery

On Sunday Boris Johnson will attend his first party conference as leader. 

Dominic Cummings did think aloud, weeks ago, that the conference might be scrapped but instead this one will be the first to take place while Parliament is sitting.

I’d as soon take advice from my valet as from the Conservative Party Conference, said an earlier Tory Prime Minister and another Etonian, Arthur James Balfour. 

Nowadays conferences don’t even give advice but are there to let politicians get on television.  This is very important as Boris is fighting an election campaign even though he is not allowed to call one. He has never made  good speech in the House of Commons but he has always been wonderful at the party conference.

His Government’s attempt to suspend the House for a three-day recess for the conference was the seventh motion it has put down in the House of Commons and the seventh that was defeated.

Ministers may be flown to and from the conference by helicopter, at the party’s expense, so they can return to vote if the Opposition stages an ambush and puts down a surprise motion or bill. This could be money wasted though, as it seems unlikely the Tories will win any vote in the House, even if all Tory MPs attend.

Ministers do not have control of the House or its order of business and yet remain in office, hanging together and swinging in the wind. 

Speaker Bercow humiliated the Prime Minister, who flew in that day from New York, by making him stand and answer 116 questions on Wednesday night. 

He seemed to taunt the Prime Minister when he told MPs at the start of his statement