Off The Field

Those of us who have had to deal with Biblical criticism are no strangers to academic fields defined by predetermined, highly politicised conclusions which the fields are then constructed specifically in order to "prove", to the exclusion of anything and anyone who might, by adopting a method which does not presuppose the approved conclusion, arrive at a different conclusion entirely.

At least more broadly, Marxists are the past masters of this. But they are very far from unique. "Free" market economics is another example. So is the thinking underlying the racist, misogynistic and class-oppressive population control movement. And so is that currently associated with the theory of anthropogenic global warming (although that is only the latest problem to which the same old solution is proposed), with its attack on proper jobs, on access to a full diet, on mass opportunities for travel, on the right of the poor or the non-white to procreate, and on economic development in the poorer parts of the world.

Of course, all of these are closely connected. And they are all as closed and as fundamentally fake as Marxist historiography or Biblical criticism, which are also, when put into practice, vicious enemies of the poor, the non-white and the female.

Civil Rights

The Police should not call the rest of us "civilians". They, too, are civilians, whom we pay to do what, should the need arise, we could and would all do for free. That is why, for example, they should have the right to strike. And that is why that bastion of old-school trade unionism, the Police Federation is absolutely correct in defending the entitlement of the whole community to that for which the whole community pays, namely the Police protection of each and every one of the who,e community's members. All of Her Majesty's subjects are therefore equal citizens, equally entitled to the services of Her Majesty's Constabulary. As so often, the Crown guarantees in principle the equality defended in practice by the trade union movement.

MPs Are People, Too

If charged, then they have the right to face their accusers in open court, and, where applicable, to be acquitted by a jury of their peers. There is far too much secrecy in out justice system, and one of the most flagrant examples is secret acquittal by the charged on the part of the CPS. Acquittal without due process is as repugnant as conviction without die process. The innocent charged have the right to hear an open court declare their innocence to the world. Even if they are MPs or Peers.

Democrats Need Luksik

There are four main party candidates for the Senate seat in Pennsylvania. One is the sitting Senator, Arlen Specter, hilariously trying to re-invent himself as a Democrat at his age. Against him in the primary is Congressman Joe Sestak, a social ultraliberal and a war agenda enthusiast who duly endorsed Clinton against Obama. However, it must be said that he is a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act. Sestak is polling well.

Across the aisle are Pat Toomey and Peg Luksik. Both are pro-life Catholics, so that the election of either would, to that extent, make Pennsylvania Republicans the equals of the Pennsylvania Democrats of Senator Bob Casey, sponsor of the Pregnant Women Support Act, and son and namesake of the state's ferociously pro-life old Democratic Governor. But Toomey is also President of the Club for Greed and fully signed up to its motto of "invade the world, invite the world, in hock to the world".

Luksik, by contrast, not only takes the standard pro-life positions and supports the traditional definition of marriage as the union between one man and one woman, but also supports the Second Amendment, supports closing the borders and enforcing immigration laws, supports the right of parents to direct the education of their children, opposes using American troops as the world’s police force, believes that "our military should only be put in harm’s way when American territory or lives are in jeopardy", supports every effort to make America energy independent, opposes "any treaty or organization that seeks to undermine America’s sovereignty or weaken our Constitution", supports making English the official language of the United States, opposes judicial activism (although she doesn’t specify which examples), opposes the bail-outs, supports a requirement that all federal government officials comply with all rules and regulations they pass, supports "fair trade in the international marketplace", supports auditing the Federal Reserve, supports "a total revamping of the federal tax codes to make them simpler and fairer" (although, again, without specification), supports ending all secret earmarks.

Alas, she also professes to "oppose government programs that seek to redistribute wealth from those who earn it to those who want it" and to oppose the "death tax", although on healthcare she says only that she opposes "rationed care for seniors, the disabled, or any other group of citizens", which of course is not on the agenda. Frankly, she is the best of the four. The Democrats, and especially Sestak, could do with being beaten by Luksik, and then they might finally get the message: "If you’d only run a pro-life, pro-family, anti-war, economically and culturally patriotic supporter of public healthcare and the Employee Free Choice Act, then you wouldn’t now be one vote down on public healthcare and the Employee Free Choice Act". And the Republicans might finally get the message, too: "You can only win what is now a naturally Democratic state in the Northeast, not with an Arlen Specter, but with a pro-life, pro-family and anti-war economic and cultural patriot".

No More Troops To Afghanistan

Pull out the ones who are already there.

And take note that from Afghanistan to Kosovo, the "nations" (Kosovo is not one) that we "build" (a very odd way of describing what we actually do in and to these places) are world leaders. World leaders, that is, in corruption.

It's Just A Thought

As "al-Qaeda in the Maghreb" demonstrates, "al-Qaeda" is not an organisation. It is an idea. Making it vastly more difficult to defeat. When will be learn this lesson?

Persistent?

After the case of Rom Houben, will the euthanasia lobby finally relent? If not, why not?

No News International

Old age can be terribly cruel in its striking down of the once-mighty. If Old Man Murdoch really has agreed to move his entire output off Google and onto Microsoft's own pay-to-read-service, then he has finally lost it.

"Disgruntled"?

"No timetable for the selection process has been confirmed."

"Good Enough for The Party of Churchill"?

On Newsnight, they have never heard the term "flogging a dead horse". Nor did it occur to them that if Denis MacShane cared so much about "the honour of British politics", then he should have been called upon to withdraw his signature both from the Euston Manifesto (unrepentant old Stalinists and Trotskyists) and from the Henry Jackson Society (unrepentant old cheerleaders for apartheid South Africa and Pinochet’s Chile). These associations ill behove so important a campaigner both against prostitution and against indecency in the media.

Are Kaminski and the rest "good enough for the party of Churchill"? They are all far too good for it, far too good for him. In the Thirties, there were two British threats to constitutionality and, via Britain’s role in the world, to international stability. One came from an unreliable, opportunistic, highly affected and contrived, anti-Semitic, white supremacist, Eurofederalist demagogue who admired Mussolini, heaped praise on Hitler, had no need to work for a living, had an overwhelming sense of his own entitlement, profoundly hated democracy, and had a callous disregard for the lives of the lower orders and the lesser breeds. So did the other one. Far more than background united Churchill and Mosley, originator in English of the currently modish concept of a Union of the Mediterranean, of which the Turkish accession favoured by MacShane is an integral part.

In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that: “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed, functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini.

Churchill’s dedicated Zionism was precisely that of the BNP: he did not regard the Jews as British, so he wanted them to go away. The anti-British terrorists who went on to found the State of Israel agreed with him, very nearly coming to an understanding whereby Hitler would have expelled the Jews by sending them to British Palestine, which he and the Zionists would have conquered together for the purpose.

All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War in the Far East was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well against him in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent, like the Euston-Jackson alliance, of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

But we have not forgotten the truth about him in the old pit communities. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought, making it a failure in its own terms. And including Latvia, where the Fatherland and Freedom Party deserves British allies with deep roots in the former mining communities, in the women’s suffrage movement, in the 1945 General Election victory, and elsewhere. We are unsullied by the weird cult of Winston Churchill. Instead, we can and do condemn his carve-up of Europe with Stalin.

Just as we condemn genocidal terrorism against Slavs and Balts no less than genocidal terrorism against Arabs, or the blowing up of British Jews going about their business as civil servants, or the photographed hanging of teenage British conscripts with barbed wire. Just as we condemn SS revivalism from Denmark and Flanders to Bosnia and Kosovo. And just as we condemn the neo-Nazi cesspit that was the 1980s Radical Right. Whatever happened to the 1980s Radical Right, Dave? Whatever happened to the 1980s Radical Right, Denis?

The Czech Civic Democrats deserve British allies like the trade unionists who have spent decades defending the high-waged, high-skilled, high-status jobs of the working class. Not for us the restriction of travel to the rich, or the arresting of economic development in the poorer parts of the world.

And the Polish Law and Justice Party, the party of Kaminski, deserves British allies like the Catholic and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, who fought tooth and nail against abortion and easier divorce. Like the Methodist and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, who fought tooth and nail against deregulated drinking and gambling. Like those, including John Smith, who successfully organised (especially through USDAW) against Thatcher’s and Major’s attempts to destroy the special character of Sunday and of Christmas Day, delivering the only Commons defeat of Thatcher’s Premiership. And like the trade unionists who battled to secure paternal authority in families and communities by securing its economic base in high-waged, high-skilled, high-status male employment, frequently marching behind banners that depicted Biblical scenes and characters.

They all deserve British allies like the Labour MPs who mostly voted against Heath’s Treaty of Rome, who all voted against Thatcher’s Single European Act, and who voted against Major’s Maastricht Treaty in far greater numbers than the Tories, including the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so. And they need those British allies in order to call them away from neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy, both of which have in any case collapsed. Nothing could be more destructive of national self-government, or traditional family values, or the historical consciousness of a people. Cameron is completely signed up to both. As - alas, and contrary to his own important campaigning work - is MacShane.

A Hung Parliament: The End of The Lib Dems

The Tory ones in the North would never go in with Labour.

The Labour ones in the South would never go in with the Tories.

And the party as a whole could not survive the creation of a hung Parliament coalition without them in it. What would they then be for?

A Tory-Labour coalition, routine in local government and until recently running Germany (in both cases for the same reason - to keep out the Liberals), is actually more likely than anything involving Nick Clegg.

Still, it would have been wonderful to see George Osborne's reaction when he was told that Vince Cable was going to be Chancellor instead of him. Darling could have coped. But not Osborne.

Tour de France

R J Stove writes:

Contrary to received postwar wisdom, Marshal Pétain could be both witty and trenchant. But he undeniably plumbed an abyss of falsehood when, in a 1941 broadcast, he announced: “Frenchmen, you have short memories.” Calling the French amnesiacs is like calling the Japanese milquetoasts. It would be truer to apply to France Saki’s celebrated epigram about the Balkans: the place produces more history than it can locally consume. Two Esquire contributors, Judy Jones and William Wilson, got matters right during the 1980s: “The French can recall the pecking order of the Merovingian dynasty ... as clearly as you can remember your last love affair, and they’re likely to be a good deal more entertaining on the subject.”

Such common sense could well be unprintable in that magazine today, and certainly a veritable public-relations nomenklatura flourishes to persuade us of France’s prominent part in any Axis of Evil. Columbia University’s Robert Paxton made mischievous fun in these pages of one such attempt at persuasion: John J. Miller and Mark Molesky’s Our Oldest Enemy. Yet the agitprop keeps coming, with an already crowded field having been further enriched in 2005 by Richard Chesnoff’s The Arrogance of the French (“this book will open your eyes!” trilled polymath Sean Hannity) and Denis Boyles’s Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice, and Cheese. (Chances of a book called Vile Israel, Vile Ireland, or Vile Saudi Arabia ever being allowed into stores?) Dignified rebuttals like Bernard-Henri Lévy’s New York Times complaint about Our Oldest Enemy—that it constituted a mirror image of the dead-headed Americophobia he censured at home—met with a two-sentence response from the authors in a National Review Online effusion dedicated chiefly to explaining why Americans call the French “frogs.” One wonders if this childishness was ever noticed by Le Monde editor Jean-Marie Colombani, who had proclaimed that after 9/11 “we are all Americans now.”

To the rest of the world, France and America seem not the inveterate foes of Miller, Molesky, Chesnoff, and Boyles’s fantasizing but rather a pair of quarrelsome fraternal twins. Both are, at least by British standards, “proposition nations.” Both prided themselves, until almost yesterday, upon expecting and enabling migrants to assimilate. Both are currently, to different extents, way stations en route to the Camp of the Saints. Perhaps, then, a more suitable foreign-affairs guide than spittle-flecked oratory would be Joan Rivers’s rhetorical question: “Can we talk?”

* * *

Everyone knows—not least because America’s mass media have so loudly told us—of France’s political and social crises. Had we not learnt about them, l’intifada of November 2005, the worst threat to French civil society since 1968, would have provided an in-your-face study guide. (It might have been still more effective but for French television executives’ confession, to Britain’s Guardian newspaper on Nov. 10, that they censored riot coverage for fear of aiding the Front National.) Strange that those same pundits who yap unendingly, in Iraq contexts, about the dangers of “appeasement” never dared suggest that France’s government was appeasing the thugs who torched 300 cities. No, the thugs were merely exercising their democratic rights against the evil legacy of colonialism, which is all whitey’s fault.

How many of those thugs—whose less murderous antics included scrawling graffiti saying “F--k France”—would have shown their faces at all if Chirac had ordered riot police to fire at will? Clemenceau and de Gaulle, to say nothing of Marshal Macmahon, would not have hesitated for a moment. Faced with such yahoos, they would have ordered enough of a bloodbath to make the Paris Commune’s suppression look like a Spice Girls reunion.

Now that the riots have died down, the true center-right governmental attitude has manifested itself. Interior Minister Nicolas “Sarko” Sarkozy, for all his tough talk during the riots about “hooligans” and “scum,” went on to demand positive discrimination for nonwhites: “I am shocked that there are no nonwhite police chiefs, judges, generals. ... I don’t want to see just one French elite.” Absurd though this is, criticism of it would come better from neocons if their beloved Bush administration had not specifically rejected profiling Muslims at airports.

Moreover, the mania of center-right politicians—Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, José-María Aznar, and John Howard, not to mention the numerous American examples—for cheap labor via indiscriminate immigration ensures that if Enoch Powell-type sanity ever starts to prevail in the form of wholesale deporting, it is likelier to come from the social-democrat Left (in France as everywhere else) than from the Stupid Party in its various national manifestations. Howard sought to justify his own anti-union measures by invoking the riots as an instance of what befell countries that lacked such measures. Not a word passed his lips about the rioters’ ethnic or religious background. Besides, which, ultimately, is sillier? The French method of openly furnishing massive unemployment benefits? Or the Howard-Bush-Blair method of pretending that unemployment does not exist; of exporting to the Third World almost any jobs that might exist; and of massaging jobless figures to ensure that one hour’s work per week and 40 hours’ work per week are treated the same?

* * *

That said, it is fair to conclude that for Anglos, contempt of France’s economic policies is really only a second-order issue. What sets Anglos dancing with rage is more often France’s wartime record: its queasiness—until the 1990s —about open discussion of Vichy in particular and Nazism in general. The flip answer to such complaints is Fred Reed’s verdict on French military failure:

I note ... that the French have Germany on their borders, a condition associated with military failure for everybody enjoying the same circumstances. Americans cannot always distinguish between military prowess and the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, a great many Americans cannot find the Atlantic Ocean.

A more detailed answer would involve citing the May-June 1940 Battle of France (90,000 French dead inside four weeks); the catastrophic impact that France’s Western Front hecatomb of 1916-1917 had on subsequent birthrates; and the fact that the Liberation was nothing short of a civil war, its body count being given by different sources as anything between 10,000 and 100,000. (One alleged collaborator caught up in the mêlée—Sacha Guitry, the playwright—lived to joke about his fate: “It was the Liberation, so they threw me in jail.”) To read American laptop bombardiers’ denunciations of Vichy, you would suppose that all the French needed to do to overthrow the Occupation was to listen to Rush Limbaugh. Quaintly enough, postwar politicians of all stripes—from de Gaulle downward—thought differently and favored minimizing the Occupation’s lasting effects rather than opening the Liberation’s wounds afresh. (They also minimized the lasting effects of treasonous communists like Maurice Thorez, but laptop bombardiers seem never to deplore that.) Far from indicating an amnesiac disposition on France’s part, this strategy attested to the power of history over French minds and to how fragile the most basic social contract would be if the genie of mutual postwar recriminating slipped out of the bottle.

What this whole nasty historiographical wrangle demonstrates anew is the silliness of judging a major country at its worst (who could possibly respect an outsider who condemned all America because of Hollywood?) and the need to judge it at its best. Even the most ignorant Francophobes must have some vague concept of what the French can achieve at full throttle, and if they lack such a concept, Fred Reed’s aforementioned article spells it out for them:

Correct me if I’m wrong—did the French not produce Zola, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Laplace, Galois, the lovely prose of Alexis De Tocqueville, and indeed about 12,000 shelf-feet of such like? ... The French respect intelligence, whereas we are deeply suspicious of it. I’m not sure that intelligence has much place in diplomacy, other than to let one make bad choices in better prose. Still, misjudgment engaged in with class at least makes better reading for later students of history. Whatever their failings, the French do not cultivate boorishness. ... We didn’t either, once.

* * *

What can the French do well? One thing they can do, if not well at least better in the last two decades than at any stage since 1793, is to take seriously decentralization and federalism. Cabinets from 1982 on have felt obliged to give a little administrative independence to the west and south in particular and to make noises about regionalism. Brittany and Corsica now maintain their local dialects—the times are long past when Breton schoolchildren could be thrashed for speaking Breton instead of French—and have their own political parties, varying from mere seekers after autonomy to violent extremists. If Paris tried to demonize all symbols of Breton or Corsican glory the way that successive American legislators have demonized the Confederate flag, it wouldn’t solely be Muslim street kids lighting fires. Even the assassination of Corsican prefect Claude Erignac in 1998 failed to inspire the centralist force de frappe against the locals that it would have provoked a generation earlier.

In many areas of French life, France does, admittedly, continue to mean Paris: “beloved monster,” as veteran British journalist John Ardagh called it. Not only are publishers, radio stations, TV stations, and the main performing arts venues Paris-based, but intellectual life tends to be Paris-obsessed, if only because the last attempt (pre-1982, that is) at encouraging a regionalist mystique occurred under Vichy and thus had to be repudiated afterwards. In theory, Parisians should be suffering from the most unfortunate conformism and self-absorption. One recalls Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker cartoon, “View of the World From Ninth Avenue,” and suspects that the Parisian intellectual hothouse must be similar. It is nothing of the sort. Those ghastly totalitarian Frogs —so freedom-hating that they lack even a First Amendment to guarantee them endless gangsta rap and cinematic porn—manage to demonstrate an ideological liberty and seriousness that, for most Americans, are not so much inconceivable as simply obsolete.

They show it in the most unexpected ways. From 1975 to 1990 TV presenter Bernard Pivot presented a sober, fair-minded literary television program, “Apostrophes,” which at its peak had an audience of six million. Each political movement in France has at least one literate newspaper or periodical allied to it. The conventional Left has its Nouvel Observateur. The more theoretical Left has Le Monde, which once, in its zeal to avoid Eurocentrism, devoted an entire essay to “Why the Filipino cinema isn’t very interesting.” The hard Left has Libération. The conventional Right has Le Figaro, which occasionally dares to publish Jean Raspail. The classicist-Nietzschean Right of philosopher Alain de Benoist has Éléments. The technocrats have L’Express. And the Front National has Rivarol, this last possibly most significant for its wicked lady cartoonist, who signs herself merely “Chard.”

L’intifada gave Chard, predictably, a field day. She skewered the birthright-citizenship doctrine in one sketch that depicted a spectacularly sub-Saharan couple; the woman, obviously about to give birth any second, assured her male partner, “According to the ultrasound, it’s French.” A more recent Chard drawing portrays a grotesque, bespectacled egghead announcing: “Human rights are for humans, not for fascists.” Le Pen, for all his backslapping persona, has a humanities degree from one of France’s top colleges, although Indochinese and Algerian combat gave him little time or inclination to cultivate his inner wimp. The monthly Le Spectacle du Monde, milder than Rivarol, always contains earnest discussions on high culture as well as politics. A random sampling of Spectacle du Monde back numbers over recent years reveals detailed, lavishly illustrated coverage of the “Lost Dauphin” Louis XVII; Georges de La Tour’s paintings; Talleyrand’s diplomacy; Brahms’s music; Saturn’s moons; Chinese Communism’s horrors; and what is presumably the sole instance on French soil of a John Major glove-puppet.

Down at the shallow end of the gene pool, French tabloids—Paris-Match, Voici, Gala—are quite bad enough but have far tinier circulations than their noxious British counterparts, and their direct political influence is effectively neutralized by French privacy legislation (which sharpens their eagerness to pursue non-French figures like Princess Diana). The idea of any French press baron, even the late Robert Hersant, enjoying Murdoch-type powers over an entire public culture would be nonsensical. Of course, France has its own “anti-racist” demagogues forever bemoaning “hate speech” and invoking the 1990 Gayssot Law against it. But by Anglo criteria they are tame stuff: French multiculti apparatchiks suffer from the fatal handicap of being sincere.

Some of France’s comparative media decorum may be connected with the position of Christian religion in modern France: anomalous but hardly to be ridiculed. Statistics of France’s Christian belief seem to point every which way. Eight out of ten Frenchmen call themselves Catholics—last year Lourdes attracted more pilgrims than Mecca—but only one in ten goes to Sunday Mass. France’s Catholic episcopate is almost as discredited as the U.S.’s, although for different reasons: not indulgence towards perverted clerics (of whom France is, by American, Irish, or Austrian standards, blessedly free) but its driveling demands for ever more Third World immigrants, plus its open scorn for traditionalism and the Latin rite. The ultra-traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, despite losing several priests recently, attracts almost as many Mass-goers as other French Catholic churches put together.

French Protestantism survives but remains a strikingly reserved, upper-middle-class affair. This hampers it in publicity terms but helps it in moral ones. Gen. William Boykin said of Bush in 2003 that he “was not elected by a majority ... he was appointed by God.” The notion that Chirac was appointed by God would not cut it with Descartes’s countrymen.

For this, France’s schooling system surely deserves some credit. One difference between Bush and Chirac is that the latter speaks grammatical English. Beavis and Butthead would find few French sympathizers. Not only does France’s baccalaureate still make ferocious cognitive demands—though maybe less so now than before 1968—but the country’s whole teaching process takes precious little account of Dr. Feelgood. Instances of French didactic toughness could be multiplied; one will do. An Australian youth was accepted in 2005 as a novice in a French monastery. Alas, though devout, he knew no French. Solution: the monastery compelled him to undergo French language lessons at an elementary school, where his early-20s self was daily surrounded by six-year-olds. No one gave a flying falafel, to quote John Derbyshire’s graphic epithet, about how this experience would affect his “self-esteem.”

* * *

Does all this strike readers as prima facie evidence of a land on its last legs, a land that has no future except Mark Steyn cheerily administering Old Yurrup’s extreme unction? Possibly. Ardagh, in the last lines of The New France (1973), decided otherwise: “The French genius, as we knew it, is going into partial eclipse ... I have faith it will finally reappear—as it has done, repeatedly, ever since Charlemagne.”

Each visitor to France has his own quintessentially Gallic anecdote; here is mine. In 1988 I ended up, one night, on the Franco-Italian border, squelching through the snow in my slippers and pajamas because the French train authorities wanted to check all our passports. Among other passengers were two Tunisian males, looking as much like terrorists as central casting could have wished. It was obvious that the Tunisians’ passports had been faked. It was equally obvious that the authorities could not have proved this fakery in a court of law. I shall remember all my life the resigned sigh with which one guard expressed his vexation at being powerless: “Vous représentez un problème cartésien, messieurs.”

Check This

It is an excellent idea that all Commonwealth countries should face a "democracy health check" every two years. By no means all of the countries that would pass have the Queen as Head of State. But all the countries with the Queen as Head of State would pass. Some, perhaps, with cleaner bills than others. But even so.

It is always worth repeating that apartheid South Africa abolished the monarchy, and did so specifically as an act of anti-British revenge. What have the Pretoria regime's erstwhile defenders to say about that? What have our own anti-monarchists, whom the comments on right-wing blogs increasingly suggest are the same people? Or about the monarchy's purported abolition in Rhodesia, which went so far as to remove the Union Flag from its own, something that not even South Africa ever did, although anti-monarchists in Australia wish to emulate Ian Smith in this regard? And in Britain, no doubt.

Unus Pro Omnibus, Omnes Pro Uno

This Sunday, there is a referendum in Switzerland on whether to add the sentence “The construction of minarets is forbidden” to Article 72 of the Constitution. I wish the Yes campaign every success.

Mosques in Switzerland, in this United Kingdom, or anywhere else in the West must not have domes and minarets, which are triumphalistic manifestations of an Islamised society, culture and polity, and which were in that spirit added to former churches during Islam’s forcible overrunning of the Eastern Roman Empire. I have - in Cardiff, if it matters - already seen them stuck onto a nineteenth-century Nonconformist chapel. I suspect there to be many other such examples, especially in the old Methodist and Congregationalist West Riding. How long before Mediaeval cathedrals and village churches go the same way? It happened to the cathedrals and the village churches of Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, the Levant and North Africa, all once integral parts of Christendom.

While certainly not without sympathy for opposition to usury, Sharia law must have no legal status in this country. There should not be Muslim schools here, where my own Catholic schools have existed since a good thousand years before any other kind did.

Halal meat is, not least, a serviceable weapon in the armoury against the hunting ban, but animal sacrifice is totally unacceptable. So is polygamy. There is nothing any more acceptable about male than about female genital mutilation. Face-covering - not head-covering, but face-covering - is incompatible with the conduct of British social and cultural life.

We must expunge the influence of the despotic, misogynistic and Jew-hating Gulf monarchies in general, and of despotic, viciously misogynistic and fanatically Jew-hating Saudi Arabia in particular. And the public holidays in this country should be Christian festivals rather than pointless celebrations of the mere fact that the banks are on holiday; there is no case for non-Christian festivals to be public holidays here, nor, for that matter, for public holidays on purely Catholic feast days.

Invicta?

Although I should add that I am mixed-race in this very white area indeed (if I had every penny that, in conversation, I have caused to drop, then I'd be a lot better off than I am now), The Exile writes:

Peter Hobbins was an Orpington Tory councillor until Saturday when two e-mails that he sent out were leaked to a Liberal-Democrat blog, thus forcing his resignation from the Conservative Party. What heinous commentary did the mails contain? Well, the party is selecting its candidate to fight the next general election and one mail complains about idiotic candidates who ask how to write a speech and want to know where Orpington actually is.

His other e-mail then complained about the number of people who lacked standard British names, using such exotic types as Dilon Gumraj and Zera Zaidi as examples. He concludes by saying that "The candidates' department are simply rushing these names through. They have no idea about how Associations are organised and have zero experience of political campaigning."

It looks to your friendly old Exile as if Peter Hobbins jumped before he was pushed, and that the Tories are making a rod for their own back with this action. The Tory shires are as white as white can be, and the people who live in places like Orpington are unlikely to vote for an ethnic candidate just because the Tory leadership wants to be all nice and diverse.

All David Cameron had to do was sit back and wait for the election to fall into his lap, but he seems determined to make his path to Downing Street as difficult as possible.

Palin: Danger To Her Own Supporters

Gary Younge writes:

In the film, The American President, the president's speechwriter Lewis Rothschild (played by Michael J Fox) appeals to the commander-in-chief to take a firm, clear stand against the Right. "People want leadership, Mr President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone," he says. "They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand."

The president (played by Michael Douglas) retorts that the American electorate's problem is not a lack of leadership but an undiscerning palate.

"We've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight," he says. "People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference."

As the faithful wait in line in small towns across the country (some for more than a day) to see Sarah Palin on her book tour, the question of whether the US is deprived of a competent political class or gets the leadership it both deserves and truly desires seems as pertinent as ever.

On the one hand there is roughly between a quarter and a third of America that will clearly believe anything. That is the figure that strongly approved of George Bush's handling of the economy last year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the bailout. That same figure, in the immediate aftermath of hurricane Katrina, believed that Bush's response to the disaster was "about right", and still supports the war in Iraq.

That also happens to be approximately the same proportion of Americans who back Palin for president. Most data suggest the overlap is considerable. Palin's rise to prominence, from little-known governor to one of the most popular and arguably most charismatic Republicans in the country in just a year, has been startling. She had a thin record when she was picked to run as vice-president. Today, having quit the Alaska governorship mid-term and published a bestseller, only her wallet is thicker.

Her resignation speech was so rambling that you would have struggled to find a coherent sentence with an industrial-strength searchlight. "Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me – sports," she announced. "I use it because you're naive if you don't see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket ... and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win." This was not the answer to a hostile interview from the "liberal media elite" but a prepared speech of her own making.

It would be easy to discount her as just a media phenomenon who would go away if we stopped talking about her. That would be a mistake. It would be even easier to poke fun at her as just a small town hick who has blundered into the limelight with a nod, wink and a "you betcha". That too would be a mistake.

For the very things that liberal commentators ridicule her for – being inarticulate, unworldly, simplistic and hokey – are the very things that make her attractive to her base. Indeed, every time she is taunted she becomes more popular because it reaffirms the (not entirely mistaken) view that the deeply held values of a sizable section of the population are being disparaged.

The same dynamic was true for George Bush, but with one crucial exception. Bush is the scion of a wealthy family who turned his back on the cultural trappings of his class while embracing the social confidence and political and financial entitlement that came with it. Palin had none of those advantages: she grew up far from power and privilege in every sense.

The difference in their comfort levels when put on the spot with simple questions was evident when each was asked about their newspaper reading habits. Bush was cocky: "The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world." Palin froze: "I've read most of them … all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years."

In her world, Ivy League is a slur; cities are not the "real America"; and those who know the price of arugula but cannot handle a rifle are not to be trusted. Palin is the antithesis of an aspirational figure. Her supporters love her not because they want to be like her, but because they already are like her. So for better and for worse, Palin is an entirely self-made – and, if her book is anything to go by, self-invented – personification of the kind of political animal Bush sought to both emulate and nurture. Bush was Palin-lite.

To that extent her performance over the past year has been more tragic than comic. Palin represents the thwarted aspirations and brooding resentment of a large section of white working class Americans. That is not to suggest that her supporters are necessarily racist, but polls show her support is racially exclusive.

Her base has plenty to be resentful about. Their wages are stagnant, their economic security has eroded, and their prospects for social and economic advancement have stalled. In 2004, white Americans were the only racial group for whom the poverty rate actually rose. The fact that it was lower than every other group is of little comfort. Demographically, they are set to become a minority by 2042. Geopolitically, the country for which they display so much patriotic fervour has lost one war, is losing another, and is regularly lectured by others about the urgency of putting its fiscal house in order. America is not what it used to be. The country they keep saying they want to "take back" no longer exists and is not returning.

So when Palin rails against Washington DC, bank bailouts and elitist media she catches their ear. The longer unemployment keeps rising, house prices keep falling and universal healthcare continues to be elusive, the more ears there will be. Motivated, organised and angry, Palin's wing of the Republican party does not have the numbers to make bad things happen; but, as it showed over the summer during the healthcare town hall meetings, its determination to derail good things should not be underestimated.

The trouble is that while many of their grievances are well founded, their affection is certainly misplaced. None of their problems can be remedied by the politics championed by Palin. Indeed, the greater the traction her politics gets, the worse things will be for her base. The America whose passing they mourn was lost precisely because of the freemarket, low-tax, warmongering agenda she advocates.

To crawl through the desert in search of water only to find sand is disappointing; to not know the difference between water and sand is delusional; but to go looking for sand in the belief that it will truly quench your thirst, not once but twice, well that is truly depressing.

Tony Blair, Warmongering Liar

Say it ain't so:

Tony Blair, the former prime minister, misled MPs and the public throughout 2002 when he claimed that Britain’s objective was “disarmament, not regime change” and that there had been no planning for military action. In fact, British military planning for a full invasion and regime change began in February 2002.

Throughout most of 2002, Mr Blair’s consistent line was that – though military action could not be ruled out – no decisions had been made, no British military preparations were in train, and any action had to be pursued through the UN. That, today’s documents make clear, was not correct.

See also here.

The Beautiful Game?

A bad week for football. People have had it out with me on here in the past for daring to criticise that “working-class” game, with its season tickets so obviously pitched at the manual labouring market. Well, each England player’s new strip is bespoke – measured for, and then run up by, a Savile Row tailor. Each new member of the squad now goes through this, as a sort of initiation. What a touching act of solidarity in the current economic climate.

I sometimes wonder why the really big Premiership clubs still bother with football. They are so rich that they could name a “squad” of simple beneficiaries of some sort of trust fund. The fashion, the glamour, the gossip, the drugs, the drink, the sex, the lot could then just carry on as before, with no need for training sessions or what have you. Who would be able to tell the difference? The pricing of the working classes out of football, its legendarily bad treatment of its staff, and its use as a sort of circus of performing chavs as there might be performing seals or the performing monkeys like which they are now even trussed up, cannot be tolerated for ever. Or, indeed, for very much longer at all.

If you are still minded to describe football as “the sport of the working man” or whatever, then you need look no further than Sunderland away to Portsmouth in May. On a Monday evening. The evening of a normal working day, followed by another normal working day. There was no possibility of getting back to Sunderland any time before five o’clock on the Tuesday morning. It would have been on the Saturday, and many people had already paid for accommodation in Portsmouth that night. But it was moved. On the orders of Setanta.

Ah, the beautiful game…

"Dissident" Republicans

Britain created Fianna Fail to hang them. They were.

Britain now bankrolls Sinn Fein to shoot them. They will be.

Progressives for Immigration Reform

This comes via Right Democrat's Twitter feed:

Progressives for Immigration Reform is a non-profit organization that supports the principles of protecting workers’ rights and ensuring fair wages for America’s workforce. Concerned that the skyrocketing U.S. population has direct implications for a sustainable future, PFIR promotes immigration policies which result in a sustainable population and resource conservation. PFIR advocates for initiatives that provide opportunities for immigrants to improve the economic, health, social and environmental conditions within their own countries.

Progressives for Imigration Reform’s leadership team includes: William N. Ryerson, president and chair, who has worked in the field of reproductive health for nearly 40 years; vice president Frank Morris, Ph.D., retired Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Morgan State University and a former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation; and Vernon M. Briggs, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Labor Economics at the New York State School of Labor and Industrial Relations at Cornell University and a former chair of the National Council on Employment Policy.

Resources and data available on PFIR’s website include:

● The results of a national poll of self-identified liberals and progressives which underscores the broad range of political constituencies involved in and the non-ideological concerns about the current levels of immigration into the United States and the harmful effect that current immigration policies are having on U.S. population growth, the environment, and the availability of jobs. The Pulse Opinion Research survey, conducted in April 2009, revealed:

● 67 percent of liberals and progressives felt the level of population growth caused by immigration negatively impacts the quality of life in the United States.

● 58 percent felt that the current levels of immigration are harmful to the environment.

● 63 percent said that current levels of immigration hurts job prospects for American workers.

● Statistics issued by the Bureau of Labor for January 2009, reveal a national unemployment rate of 7.6 percent, with 11.6 million Americans reportedly out of work. In Fiscal Year 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.45 million new immigrants gained legal authorization to work in the United States. In addition to these new, legal foreign workers, The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that during that same year, 7.7 million illegal aliens were employed in the United States. Nationally, some estimates for the number of American workers displaced by immigration each year are as high as two million. The large number of new immigrants added to the workforce through legal and legal immigration has major implications on the availability of jobs for many Americans. Unemployment rates in the U.S. are now the highest in over 16 years.

● Projections issued by the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that over the next 50 years the United States is set to add an additional 167 million more to its population, with 105 million resulting solely due to immigration. This projection is an increase of more than 55 percent of the U.S. population today. Immigration accounts for 63 percent of our nation’s population growth. For over 30 years, immigration has served as the largest contributor to the increase in U.S. population. As a direct result of its immigration policies, the United States is now the third most populous nation in the entire world and grows at a rate of more than twice that of China. In fact, the United States has the fastest population growth of any industrialized nation, and is surpassed only by India and Nigeria.

● The World Bank determined that roughly between 25-50 percent of individuals having a college education in developing nations lives abroad. By comparison, developing countries have less than 5 percent of their educated working abroad.

Hang The Lib Dems

They think that they would matter in the hung Parliament that everyone now knows is going to happen (good to see you all catching up).

But they need not at all.

It would depend on who else was also in it.

So, over to the rest of us.

Old Nick

What a curate’s egg is Nick Cohen. He certainly has his moments. But this is not one of them.

He lazily accuses "the white working class" of providing the electoral support for the BNP, which in fact comes entirely from white people who, while they may in some cases be objectively classifiable as working-class, very consciously do not define themselves as such, and therefore self-consciously always voted Tory in the past, at least in the absence of an extremely rare National Front candidate. And he seems never to have heard of Naxalism, or Irgun, or Lehi, or the Italian Red Brigades, or the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Nor even of the IRA and the INLA, Leninist organisations persistently described as "Catholic" by the Leninist-infested BBC.

Ah, there’s the rub. With his Communist background, Cohen is blind to many things. But not to the hatefulness, as such people see it, of those who created the Labour Movement, the reason why Britain never had a Marxist revolution, a success avenged by the Stalinists (as Cohen used to be), fellow-travellers and Trotskyists in the form of their total destruction of Labour, namely New Labour.

Some of us would vote for candidates in the tradition of the Labour MPs who defended Catholic schools, and thus all church-based state schools, over several successive decades. Of the support by national leaders of the Social Democrats for Christian religious instruction in the schools of Berlin. Of the early Labour activists who resisted schemes to abort, contracept and sterilise the working class out of existence.

Of the Catholic and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, who fought tooth and nail against abortion and easier divorce, not least including both Thatcher’s introduction of abortion up to birth and Major’s introduction of divorce legally easier than release from a car hire contract. Of the Methodist and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, who fought tooth and nail against deregulated drinking and gambling. Of those, including John Smith, who successfully organised (especially through USDAW) against Thatcher’s and Major’s attempts to destroy the special character of Sunday and of Christmas Day, delivering the only Commons defeat of Thatcher’s Premiership.

Of the trade unions’ numerous battles to secure paternal authority in families and communities by securing its economic base in high-waged, high-skilled, high-status male employment. And of the trade union banners depicting Biblical scenes and characters.

But we can’t.

So we are going to have to be those candidates ourselves.

Neither Chariots Nor Fire

I have just heard Lord Puttnam in Durham Cathedral on the need to return to pre-Modern societies for the sake of the climate. How dare he come to the spiritual heart of an impoverished county still standing on vast reserves of coal, and come out with that!

We demand high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs, including as the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. We demand mass opportunities to travel. We demand universal access to the meat that is part of our natural diet. We demand economic development in the poorer parts of the world. We demand the unfettered right to reproduce on the part of working-class people, of non-white people, and of people in the developing world.

We demand chariots.

And we demand fire.

Guide Our Endeavour

After the Turnip Taliban come the Suffolk Swedes, determined to resist the exclusion of the Deputy Leader of Suffolk County Council (a woman, for those who think that a candidate’s sex matters) from the shortlist to succeed her own retiring MP at Central Suffolk and North Ipswich. All of the shortlisted candidates for this Friday’s selection meeting are meterosexual.

I have every sympathy with those Tories who still have an absolute commitment to the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, grammar schools, traditional moral and social values, controlled importation and immigration, and a realistic foreign policy. They characteristically have a no less absolute, and indeed inseparable, commitment to the Welfare State (including farm subsidies), workers’ rights, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation (not environmentalism), fair taxation, full employment, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, and a base of real property from which every household can resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. In a farming area such as Suffolk, invariably so.

They are now getting the treatment meted out to those Labourities who had an absolute commitment to the Welfare State (including farm subsidies), workers’ rights, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation (not environmentalism), fair taxation, full employment, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, and a base of real property from which every household can resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. They characteristically had and have a no less absolute, and indeed inseparable, commitment to the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, grammar schools, traditional moral and social values, controlled importation and immigration, and a realistic foreign policy. In a mining and steelworking, Catholic and Methodist area such as County Durham, invariably so.

We should get together sometime...

Oh Uganda, Land of Beauty?

Should we aid a country which is preparing to execute those who persistently engage in homosexual acts? Well, we send our boys to die for a regime which has legalised rape within marriage, illegal under those misogynistic Taliban. If Afghanistan can have our blood, then Uganda may as well have our treasure. In what remaining position are we to make any sort of moral stand?

A High Pay Commission?

Why not? But it would depend on who was on it, and on how much they were paid. And more importantly, there needs to be a statutory ban on any company's paying any of its employees more than ten times what it pays any other of its employees, with the public sector (including MPs and Ministers) functioning as one for this purpose, its median wage fixed by statute at the median wage in the private sector.

No Fool Like An Old Fool

Though not in a remotely amusing way.

Primary Healthcare

These are the House Democrats who voted both for the Stupak Amendment and for the Healthcare Bill itself:

Baca, Berry, Carney, Cooper, Costa, Costello, Cuellar, Dahlkemper, Donelly, Doyle, Driehaus, Ellsworth, Etheridge, Hill, Holden, Kanjorski, Kaptur, Kildee, Lynch, Matheson, Michaud, Mollohan, Murtha, Neal, Oberstar, Obey, Ortiz, Perriello, Pomeroy,
Rahall, Reyes, Rodriguez, Salazar, Space, Spratt, Stupak, Wilson.

Together with the Republican Congressman Cao, who has made it clear that he would not have voted for the Bill had it not included Stupak.

Like those Democrats who voted for Stupak but against the Bill, all will be facing primary challenges. Unlike those Democrats who voted for Stupak but against the Bill, all deserve every possible support.

Four Into One Will Go

Most of the Welsh never wanted devolution. And it is quite clear that no proposal for anything further will come before the Commons while there is breath in the bodies of almost any Labour (or, almost certainly, Lib Dem) MP from Wales. Never mind the 12 to 14 Tories whom the Principality is expected to return next year. Nor would it ever pass the Lords, who would rightly feel perfectly entitled to refuse it Second Reading.

The combined No voters and abstainers outnumbered the Yes voters in Scotland, too. So much for "the settled will", a theory in any case incompatible with the Scottish theory of popular sovereignty: a sovereign will can never be settled. Scottish Labour MPs desperately didn't want devolution, and would scrap it tomorrow if they could, no one more so than the current Prime Minister.

As in Wales, the local communitarian populists of the Lib Dems knew that it would balefully neglect their own rural strongholds, but were trapped by the "federalist" sentimentality of those of their co-partisans who maintain debating clubs in the Home Counties rather than properly functioning political machines; at least one Scottish Lib Dem MP will not suffer the words "West Lothian Question" in his hearing.

The SNP has given up on the constitutional question and become just another pressure group for ever-higher central government spending in Scotland. And even the Tories, by far the most enthusiastic, might come back if Cameron, needing both them and the SNP in a hung Parliament or other tight spot, quietly forgot about "English votes on English laws". They might then stand some chance of winning back those Orange votes that put the BNP almost level with them in Glasgow North East.

Speaking of Orange votes, today we learn that the Stormont body on which all the Northern Ireland parties now depend in order to justify their continued existence, but which is not at all hat anyone in the electorate at large really wants, really may not have much longer to last.

There will probably always now be devolved bodies at Holyrood, Cardiff and Stormont. But in ten years' time, they will do almost nothing, indeed they will barely sit. Next to no one will vote for them, and seats will be even harder to fill than, based on many of the people who have turned up in those seats, is manifestly already the case. Westminster will routinely avail itself of its right to legislate in every policy area for every part of the Kingdom. Everyone in practice, not to say most people in principle, will be perfectly happy with that state of affairs.

The only complaint, not without cause, will be about the cost of the life support for essentially defunct institutions. And those complaints will come loudest from within the Labour and Liberal traditions (themselves organisationally re-shaped, as throughout the country) in Scotland and Wales.

Senator Hoffman?

Giuliani makes Scozzafava look like Taki.

But last time, Hoffman held to the line of Bush and the Club for Growth on immigration. And he held to the line of Bush and Palin on war, including the "War On Terror". Has he learned the lesson? Capitalism and its wars not only are not conservative, but nor do they deliver the votes.

So perhaps, in the state that returned James L Buckley to the Senate under strikingly similar circumstances, what is needed is a candidate who already knew that both of those things were the case. Who and where is that candidate?

What with this and, we may yet hope, the nomination of Bob Conley against the preposterous Joe Wilson, alleged scourge of illegal immigrants but supporter against Conley of Lindsey Grahamnesty, next year's Congressional Elections are shaping up to be very, very interesting indeed.

Barnier Storming

William Hague thinks that an economically patriotic friend of agriculture, manufacturing and small business, who wants to regulate the City and compel it to pay some tax - in a word, a Gaullist - will go down badly in Britain.

He might consider consulting the Turnip Taliban - the British Gaullists - of, say, the Richmond division of North Yorkshire.

I am not sure as to the specific event at which it might occur, but might Michel Barnier be the man to deliver to the TTs a speech as epoch-making as that of Jacques Delors to the TUC in 1988?

Better yet, might he be the man who rallies the TTs, and with them the TUCs, from one end of the EU to the other, against the Eurofederalist project's hostility to agriculture, to manufacturing, to small business, to organised labour and its achievements, and to the regulation and taxation of City Boys and their ilk, again from one end of the EU to the other?

It's just a pity that he has to be put in charge of Thatcher's wretched Single Market in order to do it.

No wonder that Hague, a devout Thatcherite and a Cabinet Minister at the time of Maastricht, doesn't like him.

"Cathy Ashdown"

So David Steel called her on Any Questions?

No prizes for guessing who he had wanted instead.

Celebrate Good Times, Come On

Neil Clark writes:

The man pictured above is the new EU President. His name is Herman van Rompuy, but for all I care it could be Herman Munster. The most important thing is that his name is not Tony Blair. In the words of Kool and The Gang ‘Celebrate’.

Neo-cons sneered at the campaign to block Blair from becoming EU President. They sneered at our petitions and they sneered at those of us who wrote articles opposing Blair’s candidacy.

The Wall Street Journal, which attacked me in one of its editorials, called those of us who didn’t want Blair to be EU President to be part of an 'angry, fading movement'.

But the movement that is fading, as we saw from last nights announcement, is the one which tried to get an unindicted war-criminal appointed as EU’s President. As far as arrogant, elitist movements go, the campaign to get Blair - a man loathed across the continent- the top job in the EU, really took the biscuit. Blair’s appointment would have been the culmination of the neo-con dream. But happily it failed.

p.s.

Uber neo-con commentator Daniel Finkelstein does not find the appointment of Baroness Ashton, a former Treasurer of CND, to be the EU’s first Foreign Minister to be ‘reassuring’.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I find the fact that a hardcore neocon like Finkelstein doesn’t find Ashton’s appointment ‘reassuring’ to be most reassuring.

Take it away, Kool.

Are The Republicans Stupak?

This is the point at which the Republicans are called out on abortion. Ideally, when radical feminist Dems threaten to sink the Bill because of Stupak. Don’t bet against that one.

Handed the power to save the Bill that, by making most healthcare federally funded, would make abortion all but impossible (even before the provisions of the Democratic-sponsored, Obama-endorsed Pregnant Women Support Act saw off most of the usual arguments for abortion to be legal at all), what will the GOP then do? Plenty of Catholics, white Evangelicals, and others will be watching.

It might not happen like that. But it is going to happen. Thanks to Stupak, this is the point at which the Republicans have to put up or shut up on the abortion issue. And thus on any future hope of the pro-life vote, without which the GOP could no longer continue to exist.

Sarah, The New Oprah?

An idea whose time has come, say I.

Ernest Bevan

Or was it Aneurin Bevin? Either way, there was apparently a Labour PPB this week. Yes, I also mananged to miss it. Did anyone, anyone at all, actually see it? Well, enough to notice that the makers did not know the difference between Bevin and Bevan. Seriously.

Bevin refused to join the European Coal and Steel Community on the grounds that it was “the blueprint for a federal state” which “the Durham miners would never wear”. In that tradition, Gaitskell rejected European federalism as “the end of a thousand years of history” and liable to destroy the Commonwealth.

Most Labour MPs voted against Heath’s Treaty of Rome. The Parliamentary Labour Party unanimously opposed Thatcher’s Single European Act. 66 Labour MPs voted against Maastricht, including, in Bryan Gould, the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so. Every Labour MP, without exception, voted against the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies annually between 1979 and 1997.

Half of the French Socialist Party successfully opposed the EU Constitution. Half of the UKIP vote, based on its geographical distribution, must be Old Labour or Old Liberal rather than Old Tory. And the No2EU – Yes To Democracy list at the 2009 European Elections included in London Peter Shore’s erstwhile agent.

Bevan, meanwhile, rejected class war, speaking instead of “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon” which “makes war upon a system, not upon a class”. He ridiculed the first parliamentary Welsh Day on the grounds that “Welsh coal is the same as English coal and Welsh sheep are the same as English sheep”.

In that tradition were those Labour MPs who in the 1970s successfully opposed Scottish and Welsh devolution not least because of its ruinous effects on the North of England. Those Labour activists in the Scottish Highlands, Islands and Borders, and in North, Mid and West Wales, who accurately predicted that their areas would be balefully neglected under devolution. The enormous No vote to the North East Regional Assembly in traditionally Labour areas.

The feeling among English, Scottish and Welsh ethnic minorities and Catholics that they no more want to go down the road of who is or is not “really” English, Scottish or Welsh than Ulster Protestants want to go down the road of who is or is not “really” Irish.

And the historic success of the Welfare State (not least, Bevan’s NHS), workers’ rights, full employment, a strong Parliament, trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies, and nationalised industries (often with the word “British” in their names) in creating communities of interest among and across the several parts of the United Kingdom, thus safeguarding and strengthening the Union.

Bevin sold out national sovereignty and the Commonwealth by joining NATO. And Bevan denounced the just war tradition of Christendom by supporting nuclear weapons. But no one’s perfect.

Rumpy and Frumpy

Now, that's just unkind...

The Biggest Scandal In Modern Science?

Here.

Jobs, travel, development, children, meat.

Is that too long to be a slogan? To answer a chant of "What do we want?"

Roman Vampyre Hun?

It is an anagram of his name.

But these are his wise words:

“The universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigour with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey.”

A Bilderberger? Probably not. And anyway, George Osborne is a Bilderberger. They are harmless, since clearly they will let in absolutely anyone.

But certainly a Belgian, traditionally a very pro-British lot indeed, although there is some doubt as to whether historically or principal ally and trading partner on the Continent, a Kingdom of our own reigning House, can survive without his steadying influence.

And certainly one who makes a monthly Benedictine retreat. So, trying to create a Holy Roman EU? Most unlikely. In August, the CSU argued that a stronger say for the German Parliament over EU decision-making should not only be embedded in new legislation but also in the German Constitution. The CSU is a very Catholic party indeed: pro-life, pro-family, pro-worker, anti-war, at least broadly Distributist, the lot.

As in, for example, several Polish cases, or that of the Mouvement pour la France of Philippe de Villiers, the more Catholic, and thus committed to Christendom, a party is, the more hostile it is to the grotesque parody of Christendom that is the EU, itself part of "the West" as defined by the neoconservative movement rather than the True West that is Christendom.

Canada: Unionisation Means Jobs

This comes via Right Democrat's Twitter feed:

A group of Canadian scholars has issued a collection of academic research regarding the U.S. Employee Free Choice Act, and the emerging "Canadian connection" to the ongoing U.S. debate over the provisions of that Act.

The research is published today in a special edition of Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society. The journal is published electronically by the Centre for Research on Work and Society at York University in Toronto, Canada, and is downloadable here.

The special edition contains 10 articles by prominent Canadian university professors and other researchers specializing in labour market issues (including Pierre Fortin, former President of the Canadian Economics Association, and Michael Lynk, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario). The articles review the implications of Canadian collective bargaining experience for the ongoing U.S. debate over President Barack Obama's labour proposals.

"There has been an attempt by some business lobbyists to demonize Canada's experience, as part of their all-out campaign to oppose the Employee Free Choice Act," said Norene Pupo, Director of the Centre for Research on Work and Society at York. "But an objective, scholarly review of the evidence proves that, if anything, Canada's labour market functions better than America's."

In several provinces, Canadian labour laws include features similar to those proposed in the Free Choice Act (including majority sign-up provisions and first-contract arbitration). Moreover, Canadian unionization is significantly higher than in the U.S. (with over 30 percent of Canadian workers covered by a collective agreement, versus 14 percent in the U.S.). However, Canada's unemployment rate is significantly lower than the U.S., and job-creation has been significantly faster over the past decade.

Several articles in the special edition critically examine the claim (made by some U.S. opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act) that unionization in Canada has destroyed jobs and resulted in higher unemployment here. One U.S. researcher, Anne Layne-Farrar, claimed in a commissioned study (based on extrapolating Canadian data) that the Act would destroy over 2 million U.S. jobs and increase unemployment dramatically.

Three articles review in detail Layne-Farrar's methodology and findings, noting several weaknesses in her approach. These include the inappropriate use of non-stationary (time-trended) data for econometric regressions, the exclusion of other relevant determinants of employment and unemployment, and the arbitrary and inconsistent extrapolation of her Canadian findings to the U.S. context. Correcting Layne-Farrar's approach for these problems, it turns out there is no statistically significant link between unionization and unemployment in Canadian data - and no reason to expect negative labour market consequences from the implementation of the Free Choice Act in the U.S.

Pupo said she hopes that the special edition of her Centre's journal will promote a more informed debate by Americans regarding the implications of unionization and collective bargaining. "The claim that unionization destroys jobs and raises unemployment is absolutely not supported by the Canadian empirical experience."
The special issue also includes a comparison of key labour market statistics in Canada and the U.S.:

- In 2008 (before the current recession) Canada's unemployment rate (using comparable U.S. statistical concepts) was 5.3 percent (compared to 5.8 percent in the U.S.).

- Canada's unemployment advantage has widened during the recession. Adjusted for comparable concepts, Canada's current unemployment rate is more than 2 percentage points lower than in the U.S.

- Canada's employment rate (employment as a share of working-age population) is now almost 3 percentage points higher than in the U.S.

- During the decade ending in 2008, Canada's labour market created new jobs twice as quickly (averaging 2.0 percent per year) as the U.S.

Thought For The Day

Whether religious or not, where do they come from?

By all means have atheists and agnostics on it. Their position is no more neutral than anyone else's.

Woolas Thinking

No, Phil. When an American ally invaded British territory, NATO did nothing. When one of the two American super-allies (except when it comes to sending troops) attacked an American naval vessel, NATO did nothing, and nor even did America. When the other attacked America herself, NATO began a war against somewhere else entirely. And NATO has done no good, but much harm, since 1991. It must be disbanded immediately. Or we should simply pull out of it.

Obama And Cuba

Cuba is the country to which I would move if I really did want a government that persecuted those who engaged in homosexual acts.

Now that there is no longer an American Administration full of people who have never recanted their Trotskyism, President Obama should lift the entire blockade, which only attracts sympathy to this regime that does not deserve it, perhaps most notable as the model for Britain’s impregnable pseudo-comprehensive schools by means of which the real, but vigorously self-denying, ruling class perpetuates itself from generation to generation.

He has already shown his indifference towards the Israel Lobby that so damages American (and Israeli) interests. So he should have no problem against the anti-American activities of vastly less numerous Cuban pretend-exiles, who are in fact economic migrants and free to go back any time they like, and who, far from being conservative, merely wish to restore the Cuba that existed before 1959, a giant drug den and brothel for the American super-rich.

Elected Police Chiefs

"We'll resign", shriek those who have effectively legalised cannabis and lowered the age of consent to 13, both without reference to Parliament.

Go on, then.

Community Right To Buy

Shame on a party allegedly Fabian, Christian Socialist and co-operative in its roots, that it didn't do this years ago.

And good old Phillip Blond. To the best of my knowledge, Phillip is the only person with the ear of David Cameron to be a member of Facebook’s David Lindsay Appreciation Society.

PhD candidates yet unborn will devote enormous attention to the history of Radical Orthodoxy and its Diaspora.

Wot No Kelly?

Brown will need all those double-jobbing SDLP and DUP votes in the coming hung Parliament.

Because You're Worth It?

Are you? Really?

Botax

What an excellent idea. We should take a leaf out of the book of the country that, in Medicare and Medicaid, already has the largest public healthcare system in the world.

How is elective cosmetic surgery ethical? How is cutting into healthy tissue not mutilation?

John Bull's Other Island

I don't follow football. But I do notice the re-emergence of political traditions assumed dead. Such as the idea that all these islands are essentially one nation, whose enemy is the French. Half right is a good start.

Of Lads and Lavs

Today is both "International Men's Day" and "World Toilet Day". Which one are you celebrating? Why? And, although I hestitate, how?

Tony Benn For EU President

Because Peter Shore is dead.

Either Insulted Or Invisible

Although he is wrong about the BNP (a party of Sally Websters and Ian Beales), Mick Hall writes:

Once again we are living though a period when it is perfectly acceptable for the mass media to insult working class people, often for no better reason than ‘some’ of them live on Council Estates. Indeed LBC, one of London’s most popular ‘talk radio’ stations does this daily. Tune into this station and throughout the day ordinary working class people will be lumped together and described as lardies or scrubbers who live on council estates, benefit scroungers, hefty hideaway girls and thoughtless automatons who strike whenever a trade union leader demands it. These are just some of the less insulting terms of abuse and class prejudice this station’s broadcasters spit out daily. That those who work at LBC front of mic are almost exclusively middle class people tells me how deep such class prejudices have become amongst a large section of that class.

One LBC broadcaster was lamenting the deaths of British solders in Afghanistan and demanding the government spend more on up to date weaponry and give extra support to their families. As is the way today, he then quickly flipped subjects and poured out a torrent of hate, calling a minor celebrity, one Sheryl Cole [sic - nice one, Mick], "a working class scrubber who should get back to her council estate in the North East where she and here family belong." He seemed totally oblivious to the fact that a majority of the young squaddies he speaks so highly of and are killed and maimed with sickening regularity in Afghanistan, along with their families, in all probability come from a council estate not dissimilar to those he was so willingly disparaging.

If it were just a case of one local radio station churning out such poison I could possibly live with it, but it is not. Such class hatred is endemic throughout the mainstream media. For example, recently in an episode of Coronation Street, the UK’s most popular soap, one of its main characters, Sally Webster, shouted at John Snape, recently released from prison and the new husband of her neighbour Fizz, “He should clear off and live on a grotty council estate.”

EastEnders is the same, if not worse, the programme is set in East London, an area which has tens of thousands of decent law abiding council and housing association tenants, yet not a single character portrayed in the show lives in a council or housing association property, they all either own their own home or rent from the private sector. (What worker could afford to buy a home in east London today?)

This lack of reality is not a mere oversight, there has been a sea change in the BBC’s portrayal of working class people since EastEnders first appeared on our screens, and today the show undoubtedly reflects this.

When EastEnders first hit the TV screens, out went the mockney middle class actors who portrayed working class people as stereotypes and spoke like Dick Van Dyke in the movie Mary Poppins. The producers of EastEnders searched out actors who came from a working class background. Not anymore, if you look at any of the characters who have come into the programme in recent years they are almost exclusively played by middle class actors, this is especially true of the children. Market trader and fly by the seat of his pants businessman, Ian Beale, has kids who all speak as if they went to an English public school or County grammar, despite in the programme supposedly attending the local comp. The same is true of the Asian family in the programme. Even the villains are now played by middle class actors.

These days, the only time council tenants are portrayed on TV is as victims or villains, living on sink estates, surrounded by joy riders, lumpen drug dealers, violent hoodies, benefit fraudsters, and various other forms of supposed low life. Never mind such people exist within all sections of society, and live on a host of differing housing estates. When was the last time a TV journalist reported that a convicted criminal or victim of crime lived on a Bovis Homes estate, or one owned by the Duchy of Cornwall? Never. Yet today these lazy hacks feel it is imperative for them to tell their viewers/listeners if someone lived on a ‘council estate,’ as by saying these two words they believe there is no need for any further explanation.

Not only are they wrong and incompetent bigots, they are stereotyping and devaluing all those who do live on a council estate and in the process make a damn fine pair of shoes of a life lived in often difficult economic circumstances. When I see a young working class single mother, I do not see a scrubber but a hero who daily creates a tiny miracle despite the obstacles society throws up at her; for she provides love, substance and shelter for the next generation and in return; far too often, from the aforementioned media types she has excrement thrown in her face.

Shame on them for doing it, shame on us for allowing it to happen.

Of course if this upsurge of anti working class propaganda was only about more working class journalists and actors working and appearing on TV we could leave the matter to their trade unions the NUJ and Equity, but it is not. The real purpose is to demoralize and further atomize working class people.

At a time when our living standards and quality of life are under attack, it is imperative workers come together collectively to resist all attempts by the State to drive down their quality of life. If class solidarity is depicted in the media as a 20th Century fiction, and working class people are portrayed daily as living on squalid estates and fighting amongst each other like cats in a sack, it makes it all the harder for the class to pull together.

That a ‘tiny’ minority of working class people have, at the ballot box, given their support to the BNP, has given the media a field day to portray us in a bad light; and goes some way to explain why the BBC were so ready to give a platform to Nick Griffin, for if it is to their advantage the ruling class never pass up an opportunity to use the Fascists.

In case anyone feels I am over egging the pudding, I suggest they Google ‘council estate’ as I did when looking for a photo to accompany this piece, I found page after page of tower blocks and flats and not one of the many well kept council estates which exist throughout the UK. I rest my case.

Should Bloggers Out Other Bloggers?

The Exile doesn't think so. And nor do I.

Audit The Fed, Now

Yes, this really is the Wall Street Journal, in which Senator Jim DeMint and Congressman Ron Paul (yes, Ron Paul, in the Wall Street Journal) write:

For nearly a century the Federal Reserve has operated in the shadows, away from the prying eyes of Congress, journalists and the American people. Created in 1913, the Fed was given enormous responsibility to protect the value of our currency. Yet in the last 96 years the U.S. dollar has lost more than 95% of its purchasing power. The Fed's unprecedented actions over the past year in attempting to stabilize the financial system have now forced it into the spotlight, and caused millions of people around the country to question the opacity of the Fed's financial transactions.

While the Fed is more transparent now than it was 20 or 30 years ago, there is still a long way to go. If the Fed were fully transparent, organizations such as Bloomberg and Fox News wouldn't have to sue its board of governors to receive materials that should be available through Freedom of Information Act requests. These include information on which banks and companies received loans and for what amounts after the 2008 financial meltdown.

One puzzling assertion made by the Fed and its supporters is that the Federal Reserve has some sort of independence from the government and independence in undertaking monetary policy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Federal Reserve is a government-created banking monopoly, and its top decision makers are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. If they do not perform satisfactorily in the eyes of politicians, they will not be renominated.

The Fed has also, for the past three decades, been required to engage in monetary policy with the goal of maintaining stable prices and full employment. Since the natural trend over time is for prices to decrease, a mandate to maintain stable prices is a mandate to pursue an expansionary monetary policy and inflate the money supply to counteract the lower prices we would expect from increased productivity.

The Fed chairman is required to appear twice a year before Congress to explain the Fed's actions, and how the Fed is complying with its mandates of stable prices and full employment. However, the idea that this constitutes any sort of oversight is laughable.

Each congressman who questions the chairman receives only a few minutes in which to ask questions and receive answers. Having been on the receiving end of Alan Greenspan's notoriously obtuse "Greenspan-Speak" answers and Ben Bernanke's similarly convoluted statements, we can assure you that the process is completely ineffective at getting any real answers.

No matter how direct the questions are, Fed chairmen answer with a vagueness common to bureaucrats. The whole process is window dressing for public consumption, not any sort of attempt to exercise oversight or gain any real insight into the Fed's actions.

What is needed is a full audit of the Fed, something that has never happened. We need to know who the Fed is giving money to, what types of securities are being purchased and what backs those securities, how much money is being paid for those securities, etc.

While Rep. Mel Watt's (D., N.C.) efforts to audit the new lending facilities authorized to bail out private firms such as AIG is a step in the right direction, it is still just a first step. These facilities have the same effect on the money supply as securities purchased through open market operations. Why should securities placed on one line of the Fed's balance sheet be subject to audit while the exact same securities placed elsewhere on the balance sheet are not subject to audit? The loopholes need to be closed.

In coming weeks we plan to offer companion amendments to legislation already before the House and Senate that will open the Fed up to a complete audit. The amendments set a six-month time lag on the publication of previously unreleased audit data to address the Fed's concerns that actions undertaken in support of monetary policy would immediately be politicized. The transcripts and minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee meetings would continue to be made public at the Fed's discretion, with unpublicized details of meetings not subject to any additional scrutiny. Finally, the amendments make clear that the purpose of the audits is not to interfere with or dictate monetary policy.

As strong opponents of government intervention into the economy, we do not want to see Congress directly dictate monetary policy. But while the Fed is involved so heavily in monetary policy and its actions so heavily influence the future of our economy, it is necessary that it be fully transparent. Interventions into the economy on the order of trillions of dollars cannot continue to escape public scrutiny. American taxpayers deserve better.

The Fake Nuclear Threat From Iran

The Morning Star is not always right, but it certainly is this time:

If you've been taking the US and Britain's recent pronouncements on Iran seriously, you're probably just about ready to stock up on canned food and start digging a fallout shelter in your back garden.

Secret underground nuclear facilities? Breaches of non-proliferation rules? Dark hints of military action to stop the mad mullahs from a crazed attack on Israel?

To listen to Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, you'd think the world was plunging into a new cold war.

So we should treasure the words of former British diplomat Richard Dalton. They're a rare sign that someone in the Establishment is willing to talk sense on Iran - although Dalton doesn't go nearly far enough.

He's right that attacking Iran would make the world more dangerous. We've seen what a mess we've made of Iraq and Afghanistan. We've no reason to believe an assault on Iran would be any less disastrous.

He's right that ignoring international law - yet again - would only harm prospects for world peace.

But Dalton could and should have been far more damning in his criticism of Western sabre-rattling.

It's not enough to say there's no solid evidence of Iran's nuclear ambitions and no proof that the Qom facility is designed for making weapons. Technically true, certainly, but not enough by a long way.

Here's what Dalton could have said, if he wanted to tell the whole truth.

He could have said that Iran has no nuclear ambitions and no plans to attack any other country.

Iran has an official policy, restated again and again, of "no first strike." It hasn't started a war of aggression in modern history - unlike, say, the US, Britain or Israel. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has forbidden nuclear weapons as un-Islamic and he maintains that Iran is not trying to develop them.

And the US intelligence agencies all agree that he's telling the truth.

Dalton could have said that Obama had, if not lied about, then massively exaggerated the "dramatic discovery" of the "secret" underground facility at Qom.

After all, it's not as if James Bond had to sneak in with a camera hidden in his watch. This "secret" facility was "discovered" when Iran told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about it - completely in line with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Qom could, in theory, be used to enrich uranium for bombs - but not if IAEA inspectors are present, and Iran has said it's happy to let them in.

Dalton could also have pointed out that Obama was talking nonsense when he accused Iran of "breaking rules that all nations must follow."

First, Iran has broken no rules. It has put noses out of joint at the IAEA, which is why the agency is throwing tantrums. But that's hardly cause for dire threats.

Second, "all" nations? If only Obama's words were true the world would be safer. But Britain and the US are only two of the countries failing to fulfil their own obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty - which requires them to scrap their own nukes and help other nations, such as Iran, with peaceful nuclear energy programmes.

And four countries are not bound by the treaty. Of these, only one has a secret stockpile of up to 400 warheads. Only one regularly launches unprovoked attacks on its neighbours. And only one is willing to be the first to use nukes in a conventional war.

Is Obama sincere in his call for total nuclear disarmament? Is he willing to earn the Nobel prize he was so prematurely given?

If so, he should drop the threats against Iran and rein in that one country - Israel, the Middle East's real rogue state.

Israel has the only outstanding threat of nuclear action by any country against any other. But any such attempted strike - against Iran, which has not started a war in modern times - would be shot down by Obama’s boys in Iraq. There is no other reason why they are still there. And America owes Israel one from way back where "friendly fire" is concerned.

The Fate of Iraq's Christians

Kelley B. Vlahos writes:

How easy it is to declare Iraq "turned around" while an ancient people face the swirling desert sands of their own extinction.

While it might sound a bit hyperbolic, there is no denying that the Christian minority in Iraq is slowly bleeding out, even as U.S. lawmakers justifying their support for the invasion of Iraq – such as Senators John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham – insist the United States military made that country a better place to live.

Millions of Iraqis, including the Christians who have fled the country since the 2003 invasion or who have lost family members in targeted killings or kidnappings, probably disagree. While their brethren in exile encounter unemployment, isolation, and even homelessness because of the worldwide economic crisis, the Christians who remain in Iraq are subject to ongoing intimidation and violence from Muslim fundamentalist militias and even the Kurds who once took them in under wartime duress.

"We are considered the weakest of the weak. That is why we are targeted, because we don’t have the means to fight back and our Christian teaching does not allow us to fight back," insists Joseph Kassab, executive director of the Michigan-based Chaldean Federation of America, which advocates for the welfare of all Christian Iraqis. Though numbers vary a bit, Kassab says there are approximately 400,000 Christian Iraqis left in the country, down from a pre-war population of about 1.4 million (other estimates place the remaining number of Christians at between 500,000 and 600,000, down from 1.2 million).

Nevertheless, says Kassab, "we are dealing with the issue of survival here," and things are getting worse. Many Christians – who as of 2003 accounted for about 3 percent of Iraq’s population – fled to the northern Kurdish areas after being persecuted by militias in Baghdad and other urban centers after the invasion. Now, according to news reports and a recent alert by Human Rights Watch (HRW), they are struggling in the crossfire – along with other ethnic minorities like the Yazidi, Shabak, Turkmen, and Kakai communities – between the dominant Kurds and usurped Arabs, particularly in Nineveh province.

From the HRW report:

"Both Kurdish and Arab authorities lay claim to Nineveh’s disputed territories, and since 2003, the Kurdistan Regional Government has been in a position to reshape the reality on the ground through its extensive security and political presence. To consolidate its grip, it has offered minorities financial and other inducements to win their support while simultaneously using repressive measures to keep them in line. Kurdish forces have engaged in arbitrary arrests and detentions, intimidation, and in some cases low-level violence, against minorities who have challenged regional government control of the disputed territories. …

"Extremist elements in the Sunni Arab insurgency, for their part, view minority communities as ‘crusaders’ and ‘infidels.’ Some have carried out devastating attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians. Nineveh’s provincial capital, Mosul, has become a hotbed of the insurgency in part because the regional government’s hegemony in the immediate area has alienated Sunni Arabs long accustomed to positions of privilege and power under previous governments."

The recent uptick in violence against these Christians and other minorities follows years of persecution. Baghdad is pretty much drained of any Christians, according to reports, and only 300 Christian families total are still living in the southern part of the country, declared Archbishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk, in a recent interview with Aid to the Church in Need.

"I feel more pessimistic now than ever before," he said in September. "We do not have the same hope that we had before. In fact I am not seeing any signs of hope for the future. Our whole future hangs in the balance."

What Happened? One Man’s Account

Kassab charts the apparent demise of his people, veering wildly from the predominant view in the U.S. that things are finally on the right path in Iraq.

"After the invasion of 2003, people cheered up – mainly the members of the religious and ethnic minorities of Iraq, because they thought democracy was coming," he says. "I was in Iraq in 2004, and everyone was cheery and happy. The people in U.S. uniform were happy too. It wasn’t long after that we saw a dramatic change to things nobody had expected."

"Many Iraqis became more sectarian than secular. This did not help the minority people at all. Then there was a significant brain drain in Iraq. The intellectuals, the professors, the educated people became targeted by the fundamentalists and the militias," according to Kassab. "[Christians] were assassinated and put out of work, and they fled Iraq."

Before the war, Christians were a learned, professional class that enjoyed civilian jobs and some deference from former dictator Saddam Hussein. But like Kassab himself, many fled during the 1980s to avoid conscription into Saddam’s Ba’ath Party, and the dictator’s treatment of Christians became increasingly erratic and brutal as he became more paranoid and unstable through the 1990s. "He prevented newborn babies to be given Biblical names, and [he] nationalized our institutions," says Kassab.

But nothing could prepare his people for what was to come after Saddam fell. Out-of-work Ba’ath soldiers became armed brigands. Sunnis and Shi’ites roamed the streets, seeking scapegoats. Churches were targeted. Christians who had lived in relative harmony with their Muslim neighbors before were now branded traitors and accused of colluding with the Americans, of being "infidels" and "crusaders."

"The whole situation in Iraq led very frail communities in Iraq, like the Christians, to be hurt first and foremost. They don’t have tribal people to help them, they are small. People were kidnapped and killed right in front of their neighbors and families. We’ve had people crucified. Some women have had acid tossed in their faces."

And it all happened with seemingly little rhyme or reason, other than to punish arbitrarily – whether it be the Chaldean archbishop of Mosul, who was found in a shallow grave after he was kidnapped in March 2008, or the 5-year-old boy who was kidnapped and killed, his small body found partially eaten by wild dogs, in a small village outside Mosul in May of this year.

The Shia-dominated government in Iraq, led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, has made many promises to stop the violence, but so far, has not come through, says Kassab. Meanwhile, with only two Christian members of parliament, it is extremely difficult to exert political pressure internally. In November, one of the parliamentarians, Yonadam Kanna, called for a formal inquiry into the recent killings.

"We definitely get sweet words [from the government], no doubt about it, and a lot of sympathy," says Kassab, "but not all the action."

Refugee Crisis

Many Christians have joined the 2.5 million internally displaced Iraqis and the more than 2 million who have fled the country, mostly to Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, and Turkey.

Thanks to the efforts of groups like the Chaldean Federation, some Christians have been resettled in Europe and the U.S. in increasingly larger numbers. After a political bottleneck in the U.S. (the Bush administration had a hard time acknowledging publicly that anyone would want to leave Iraq after the invasion), upward of 35,000 Iraqis of all religious and ethnic backgrounds have been granted asylum in the U.S. since 2007. Reports indicate as many as half are Christian.

But hard economic times all over have led to disastrous outcomes for some of these refugees. In Sweden, Iraqi Christians are actually being kicked out after courts declared the fighting in Iraq over. "Some of the asylum-seekers are now forced into hiding to avoid being sent back to Iraq," according to one investigation by the Swedish press.

In America, this is the worst possible time to be an immigrant. For example, in 2008, 2,415 Iraqis arrived in the greater Detroit area – which as of September had an unemployment rate of 17 percent – an increase of 1,565 percent over 2006, according to a Georgetown University study released in October. However, funding to the state to help refugees actually decreased during that period, according to the report.

"Across the United States, many resettled Iraqi refugees are wondering how, after fleeing persecution at home to seek refuge in a country that barely tolerated them, they have found themselves in ‘the land of opportunity’ with little hope of achieving a secure and decent life. From Washington, D.C., to Detroit to San Diego, recently resettled Iraqi refugees face odds so heavily stacked against them that most end up jobless, some even homeless. …

"The United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) is unique in giving new life and opportunity to millions of refugees, accepting many times more than the rest of the world combined. But this report finds that the United States is opening its gates to refugees and simply forgetting about them after they have arrived."

Longtime residents and citizens are now competing more vigorously with recent immigrants for American jobs, heightening tensions and fueling the political demagoguery behind recent debates over immigration, illegal or otherwise. This month, activists in the "tea party" movement attempted to turn the public’s ire on immigrants, too, by joining up with anti-immigration forces for a series of Nov. 14 protests across the country.

The irony is that Iraqi Christians like the three men who attempted to cross the Rio Grande last summer after paying a hustler $20,000 each would not be in such a desperate place were it not for the U.S. invasion of their country. Furthermore, Iraqi Christians have been largely ignored by one of the most powerful political movements in the U.S. – Christian conservatives – at a time when they could use a hand the most. Because it’s not "politically correct" for these Republican foot soldiers to talk about the plight of women, children, and refugees caused by the Bush administration’s war policies, their efforts to address the issue have been minimal.

Though earnest champions like Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) have promised to advance their cause on Capitol Hill, Christian Iraqis must compete for crumbs in Washington’s bread line against myriad organizations with more money and better lobbyists.

According to Kassab, Christians don’t want to feed from the trough; they want to return to Iraq. These ancient Christians – Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Syriaks – descend from the earliest Christian communities in Greco-Roman antiquity. They speak the original language of Christ – Aramaic – and claim Mesopotamia as their home. "This is our ancestral line," says Kassab. These Christians don’t want to resign themselves to the unmerciful sands of time, and certainly not to the backlash of struggling Americans who might resent them.

But first there must be safety and, yes, respect for and official recognition of Iraq’s ethnic and religious minorities, says Kassab. So far, contrary to what McCain, Lieberman, and Graham say about the "success" of U.S. military action in Iraq, this has not happened.

As Kassab puts it, "When the United States came to Iraq, it came with the assumption that democracy should take root, number one, and that all people of Iraq should be protected. This is not happening – not the democracy, not the protection of the people."

Preferential

Free personal care for the elderly is like abolition of hospital car-parking charges, and abolition of undergraduate fees. Any preferential spending in Scotland must be extended to the whole United Kingdom, paid for by a reduction in the block grant to the Scottish devolved body, which has its own revenue-raising powers with which to make up the shortfall. Easy.

A Legal Right To A Good Education

Grammar schools.

They raise standards across the board.

AWOL, Indeed

We are paying the price of our cross-party, and thus electorally irremovable, support for Bush.

Controlling The Population

Reducing carbon dioxide emissions has been a solution in search of a problem for decades. It was once supposed to be the answer to global cooling. What it always entails is that high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs for the working class in general and for working-class men in particular must never be created or restored, while travel (and now even meat-eating, for which our teeth are designed) must be re-restricted to the rich, and while development in the poor world must be arrested or reversed. And today, not for the first time, it became bound up with the view that the problem with the world is that there are proles and darkies in it, so that they have to be stopped from breeding.

Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, should read my friend Ann Farmer’s Prophets and Priests: The Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement (London: The Saint Austin Press, 2002; ISBN 1 901157 62 8). In addition to its unyielding racism, the war against fertility is, and has always been, the war against the working class, the war against the poor at home and abroad, the war against the electoral base of the Left, the war against the social provisions for which the Left exists, and, above all, the war against women.

Furthermore (this bit is Lindsay, not Farmer - but I’m sure that she would agree with it), the idea of fertility as a medicable condition, requiring powerful drugs or even surgical interventions to prevent a woman’s body from doing exactly what it does naturally, is basically and ultimately the idea that femaleness itself is such a condition, a sort of XX Syndrome. I can think of nothing that is actually more misogynistic than that, although some things are equally so, notably the view that the preborn child is simultaneously insentient and a part of the woman’s body. Is it the whole of a woman’s body that is insentient, or only the parts most directly connected with reproduction?

Amazing

This week's Moral Maze? Apologies long after the event, as in Australia this week. What a cop out. How about this: apologies for entire schemes because of the abuse of a small minority of the participants? But that would never do. The Commonwealth (and thus the Crown), and the Catholic Church, must never, ever come out of anything well.

Transnistria

Daniel Hamilton must be thinking of Kosovo, or of Georgia, or increasingly of Bosnia.

Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh have never been governed in practice by post-Soviet Georgia, Moldovo or Azerbaijan. Nor were they ever part of pre-Soviet Georgia, Moldavia or Azerbaijan. Do they want, as Kosovo did and as Chechnya does, to join globalisation, European federalism, and American military-industrial hegemony?

And the militant Islam to which those forces pretend to be opposed but are in fact closely allied. After all, look at 1980s Afghanistan, at 1990s Bosnia, and at today’s Kosovo, Chechnya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Look at how a bulwark against Islamic militancy has been taken out in Iraq, with all the predictable consequences. Look at how the global capitalist economic system depends on mass migration, not least to the West from the Islamic world. And look out for Xinjiang.

Do the people of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh want into this? Or do they want out of states moving in that very direction? The latter. They therefore deserve full recognition and every possible support.

Russia is leading that recognition and support. In common with all the Slavs, Russia is the gatekeeper of the Biblical-Classical synthesis that is the True West, not the secularised, consumerised, de-historicised, borderless, culturally debased, morally bankrupt pseudo-West, a wasteland without an Eliot, aimlessly waiting to be incorporated into the Dar al-Islam.

If Moldavia simply went back to Romania (assuming that she would take the poor relation), or otherwise pursued integration with the EU under overall American control, and if Transnistria became a nominally independent state effectively run by Russia, then it is not even be a matter of whether anyone would mind. Would anyone even notice? And why, where borders are concerned, should Stalin have the last word?

Red-Green, Red-Brown

Beatrix Campbell should come clean and admit that, in common with all the old Communists and Trotskyists in New Labour, she hates the Labour Movement because it prevented a Communist revolution here in one of the two countries that Marx himself thought most likely to have one.

No wonder that she is now a Green. All those coal mines and nuclear power stations providing the economic basis of patriarchal authority? We can’t have that. The former pit villages are now so much better than the pit villages ever were. Aren’t they, Bea? Come back to the North East and say that.

Alive To The World

Fr Tim Finigan writes:

Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) is a political football in educational policy in the UK. Many Catholic parents are rightly concerned that their right to bring their children up according to the faith is undermined by some of the programmes in use.

Therefore it is good to see a new PSHE programme that can be highly recommended. Alive to the World was created by Christine Vollmer, who is well known in international circles for her campaign work for the family. She sits on the Pontifical Council for the Family and the Pontifical Academy for Life. She originally created the programme for Latin America and the UK team has edited the English translation to make it suitable for use in England. The books are designed for whole school PSHE but can also be used in the home and in parishes. Alive to the World is published by Gracewing and may be ordered from the dedicated website at a special introductory discount.

Knowing that there can always be pitfalls, even in well-meaning programmes, I gave the materials from this one to some people whom I know to be aware of the issues involved and critical of bad material. This is their verdict:

This is the best PSHE programme we have seen, being both genuinely educational and suitable as a resource across the curriculum. It is very readable, and whilst presenting personal situations which the children will be able to recognise from their own experience, it draws on charcters from history and literature, avoiding the tediuos and narrow fare usually tackled by such material; 'Me', drugs, sex, the environment.

The more personal areas are, rightly, designed to be dealt with in single sex groups, although some areas would be better used as homework.

It is understandable that some diocese and faith schools have already bought this course, but it also is suitable for schools with no 'faith' basis. We found these books useful as a parenting tool and look forward to the year 9 and 10 books.

Reviewed by a group of parents and teachers.

A Catholic father who has reviewed the material wrote to me: "It's an excellent course, and to see a book that deals well with pornography, promiscuity and other issues so well is really refreshing. It also gives really good resources around the 98+% of life that is not those issues. I've never seen anything as good as this and I've seen quite a few of them."

The Turn of The Screws

As Shadow Home Secretary in the run-up to the 1997 Election, Jack Straw personally campaigned for the votes of prison officers by promising to give them the right to strike. And, to his credit at the time, he did indeed give them that very right once he became Home Secretary. A decade later, what ridiculously still purported to be a Labour Government repealed that legislation of its own. And the Cabinet Minister responsible was, once again, Jack Straw.

His primary objective was to smash the emerging new Triple Alliance of the Prison Officers' Association, the Police Federation (whose members, being civilians, really should have either the right to strike or their long-established pay deal in lieu) and the Fire Brigades' Union (whose members really do need to watch out, because they are next on the hit list). But it won't end there. Aren't NHS staff essential? Aren't teachers? Aren't train, bus and tram drivers? And so on, and on, and on.

Meanwhile, there is a silver lining. Yet more secondary action, just as during the Lindsey oil refinery dispute. Thatcher's anti-union laws are now dead letters. So why bother compounding them?

In The Bagge

“What does she do? She looks after me. Looks after the children. Runs the house.”

Lady Bagge should contest South-West Norfolk as an Independent, and the revolting Liz Truss could explain how the experience of a homemaker and mother made her unqualified to be an MP. After all, CCO managed to put up someone on Newsnight to argue that neither Sir Jeremy Bagge with his estate, nor anyone else in Norfolk, had any experience of employing people. They really do think that that is what life is like outside London. And not only the Tories.

Unlike Cameron and Osborne, Lady Bagge is presumably a proper, shire toff, who therefore does not think that she is where she is on “merit”, but rather by sheer good fortune, by which Divine Providence confers responsibilities on the more fortunate towards the less fortunate. She doubtless has not their capitalism, which is as anti-agrarian as it is hostile to anything or anyone else. She is unlikely to support making the world anew at the barrel of a gun, or to share Osborne’s anti-fatherhood abortion enthusiasm. It is most improbable that their Israel First, America Second foreign policy views are hers, since those views are as far as can be from the traditional upper-class norm.

Bring her on.

And bring on whichever girl out of the typing pool is to be the New Labour loser here in North-West Durham. Who is she? Where is she? Nothing is done in December, so exactly how much longer are they going to wait? Or can they find absolutely no one at all?

Truss It Up

There was little wrong with the old House of Lords, and there is little wrong with the present one. But it is still a shame that the Constitutional Renewal Bill has been dropped. Properly drafted, a British Senate could have been at least a partial remedy against the scandalous abuses most lately on display in South-West Norfolk.

Each of the 99 units that are the English ceremonial counties, the Scottish lieutenancy areas, the Welsh preserved counties and the Northern Irish counties should elect the same number of Senators. Four? Five? Six? How big do we want the Senate to be? For the sake of argument, let’s say six per county. Each of us would vote for one candidate, and the top six would be declared elected at the end. Another six, who would have to be Crossbenchers, would be elected in the same way by the country as a whole. Certain newspaper columnists and others could be told to put up or shut up. They would in any case be glad to put up.

Party candidates should be selected by submitting the shortlist of two to a ballot of all registered voters in the county. As ever with primaries, there would be nothing to stop unsuccessful candidates, or anyone else, from putting up as Independents. There should be a residency requirement: candidates for the Senate should have to have been registered voters in the county (or, perhaps, one immediately adjacent) throughout the previous 10 years. And while Ministers should have to appear regularly before the Senate in order to answer its questions, Senators should be banned from being Ministers. It would thus be possible to build a career specifically as a legislator.

And we should ban parties that contest Commons elections from contesting Senate ones. This would allow new formations to emerge, and locate them within the parliamentary process. An economically and socially libertarian, internationally neocon party, if you must, although I’m not sure that anyone would vote for it. But also a High Tory paleocon party, an Old Labour Left party, an Old Liberal party (quite possibly the old Liberal Party, which still exists), a party for us Old Labour High Tories, and others. With none ever having a Senate majority.

The East Asian Century?

Why not? A culture which reveres tradition and ritual, upholds government by moral rather than physical force, affirms the Golden Rule, is Agrarian and Distributist, at least in the Chinese or Korean case has barely started an external war in five thousand years, and is especially open to completion by, in, through and as classical Christianity. Nor is China going to destroy her own economy by calling in American debt.

But we do not want East Asia's low-grade products, putting our high-quality producers out of business. Nor do East Asians want our low-grade products, putting their high-quality producers out of business. That way leads to the ill-feeling that grows, and escalates, and we all know where it ends up.

As we must also learn when dealing with many other places, civilisation is not capitalism, and it is the former that conservatives exist in order to conserve.

Famous Belgians

There are quite a few, but most people don't know that Audrey Hepburn was Belgian, or assume that Simenon and Lévi-Strauss were French.

Didn't we once fight a war at least ostensibly to defend Belgium, historically our principal ally and trading partner on the Continent, an entity not unlike our own United Kingdom, even headed by a monarch of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and with a social democracy based on Christian principles?

So, if there must be a President of the European Council, then we could do a lot worse than a Belgian, provided that he is not one of the SS nostalgists of Flemish separatism, a carve-up in the interests of global capital such as would be brought to the United Kingdom next. That Belgian might not be quite as pro-British as John Bruton. No one could be. But nor would he be quite as anti-British as Tony Blair. No one could be.

Heart of Darkness

The conviction of Protais Zigiranyirazo has been overturned.

There were two genocides in Rwanda. “Genocide” is a slipperier concept than you might think. In 1993, the former Bolivian President, García Meza Tejada, was convicted of “genocide” for the deaths of fully eight people. Those may or may not have been the only people whom he killed. But they were the only victims of his “genocide”.

And so to Rwanda. Or, rather, to what is to be our model in these matters, a kangaroo court in Tanzania, set up by a UN Security Council resolution with no authority to do so, and specifically empowered - again, on no proper authority whatever - to try only members of the former, devoutly Catholic regime, and not of that which overthrew it, namely a direct extension, by means of a Ugandan invasion of Rwanda in 1990, of the only-too-successful Maoist insurrection in Uganda. Thank God that no one is now to be sent from this country, historic refuge of the oppressed, to appear before that kangaroo court.

Théoneste Bagosora was finally convicted (well, of course he was – this sort of thing never, ever acquits anyone) eighteen months after the prosecution’s final submission, and fully twelve years after his arrest, even though his trial had started almost immediately. That was entirely typical, as is the use of European and American activists as “expert witnesses” even though they witnessed absolutely nothing and were in fact thousands of miles away at the time alleged. As is the heavy reliance on anonymous prosecution witnesses (even though it is in fact six defence witnesses before this “Tribunal” who have been murdered soon after giving evidence), universally known to be paid liars.

As is the routine holding of session in camera. As is the admission of hearsay evidence. As are the rulings that no corroboration is necessary to convict a man of rape even he has pleaded not guilty, and that it matters not one jot if a prosecution witness’s written statement differs markedly from his testimony in court. As is the astonishing principle that a prosecution witness’s inconsistencies are proof of trauma, and therefore of the guilt of the accused. And as are the farcical translation problems.

The remit of this “Tribunal” is frankly racist, providing only for the trial of Hutus, the overwhelmingly predominant ethnic group, for crimes against Tutsis, the historically royal and aristocratic minority. Crimes by Hutus against Tutsis undoubtedly happened. But so did crimes by Tutsis against Hutus. Neither Maoist guerrillas nor embittered, dispossessed aristocrats are characteristically restrained in these matters.

No one knows how many people were killed, often with machetes. The usual figure cited is eight hundred thousand. Perhaps that is correct, perhaps it is not. But what is undoubtedly the case is that not all the perpetrators were Hutus, although many were. What is undoubtedly the case is that not all the victims were Tutsis, although many were. What is undoubtedly the case is that no Tutsi has ever been tried, because none can be: that whole people has been declared innocent in advance, and another whole people declared guilty in advance.

What is undoubtedly the case is that an invasion of a sovereign state by a larger neighbour at exactly the same time as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait has been backed up to the hilt by the West in general and the United States, so that the Americans are now where first the Germans and then the Belgians once were: running Rwanda through a tiny clique drawn exclusively from the Tutsi minority.

And what is undoubtedly the case is that that clique is Maoist, whereas the majority-derived government that it overthrew was headed by a daily communicant, Jean Kambanda, whom it subsequently tortured into confession while illegally detaining him, and whom it denied the lawyer of his choice.

The world is finally beginning to wake up to what really happened in Rwanda. Not a moment too soon. But when will Britain, where we now propose to try one Rwandan genocide but not the other, even though neither of them was perpetrated either on our soil or against our (then) citizens?