A Whole Civilisation Will Die Tonight

And that death will be as rich as Croesus, whom the Oracle at Delphi told that a great empire would fall if he crossed the Halys River. He did, and his own Lydian Empire fell to Cyrus the Great. Of Persia.

The old neocons have always wanted to take Iran, but we are seeing now why they have never quite tried to do it. Like Donald Trump, they are bad. But unlike Trump, they are not mad.

On 1 April, the Americans bombed their own once and putatively future embassy compound in Tehran, and while that may sound funny in view of the date, that attack broke the doors and windows of the nearby Orthodox church while collapsing the roof of its nursing home.

Last night, during Passover, the Rafi-Nia Synagogue in Tehran was completely destroyed by American bombing. Get out of that one. Or get out of the previous night's bombing of that city's Sharif University, an internationally important centre of science and technology, and something of a focal point for the student protests earlier this year.

Trump's threats are in themselves war crimes that call for the closure on British soil of the bases of which he was the Commander-in-Chief, both on the broader moral principle, and on the moral principle that was the duty to protect our people from retaliation.

Our Sovereign Base Area on Cyprus serves only to provide an excuse for intervention in the Middle East, and significantly endangers the Cypriot population, so we should cut our losses as has always been a British strength, by handing over that territory to the Republic of Cyprus. That has always been the preference of its small permanent population, who are Cypriot rather than British citizens. What a relief.

And a week ago, the Chief Justice of the British Indian Ocean Territory overturned the 2004 ban on Chagossians living on the Chagos Islands, as four of them were already doing. Therefore, Chagos is now inhabited by people, by a people, with the right to self-determination. Again, the perfect excuse to get out. As on Cyprus, we keep it only to do things that we would have no need to do if we did not have it.

Medical Matters

The existential crisis in the NHS is not being caused by the doctors' strike. The doctors' strike is being caused by the existential crisis in the NHS, which goes back to the Blair Government's signature domestic policy of privatising it in England. That idea existed only on the fringes of the thinktank circuit until Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan took office in 1997. Since then, it has been the policy of all three parties except under Jeremy Corbyn, and of most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers continuously.

Only Andy Burnham has ever privatised an NHS hospital, but in September 2009 he modestly proposed that the NHS should be its own preferred provider. Peter Mandelson's and thus Jeffrey Epstein's Progress wrote to Burnham to protest that he was "restricting the use of the private sector in the NHS", and using its eponymous magazine to opine, not only that "With an election approaching, Labour has regrettably adopted anti-market rhetoric on health", but that, "The pro-market principles espoused by Andrew Lansley are the right ones." When were the expulsions and the proscription?

Burnham's position was called "profoundly worrying", and its endorsement by Unite was branded "insulting and ignorant", by the Deputy Chief Executive of the Association of Chief Executives. Don't laugh. All right, do. But that person was Peter Kyle. The utterly ruthless determination to install Mandelson's schoolboy protégé, Wes Streeting, as Keir Starmer's successor is because those who set the line are only 99.9 per cent certain about Burnham on NHS privatisation, a 0.1 per cent deficiency that is enough to make them hate him to the marrow of their bones, whereas they have absolutely no doubt about Streeting. Nor should they have, as may be attested by Peter Thiel's and thus Jeffrey Epstein's Palantir, which has laid waste to Gaza, which is laying waste to Lebanon, which is probably hours away from laying waste to Iran, and which has perfected the art of tracking people via their health records for the benefit of ICE or of anything like it in, say, Britain.

Streeting says that this strike will cost the NHS £300 million. What would otherwise have been done with that money? It is clearly available, so use it to settle the dispute. By striking for a rate of pay that retained the most committed and engaged staff, the resident doctors are striking to save the NHS. You do not have to be poor to be right. If your pay has not kept pace with your private employer's profits, then you have a legitimate claim. Or if, like the NHS doctors, your pay from the currency-issuing State has not kept pace with inflation, then you have a legitimate claim.

Strikes are supposed to be disruptive, and arranging them to cause the most disruption is fundamental to them. Strikes in the NHS do not, in themselves, pose a threat to life, as if Aneurin Bevan, of all people, had never thought to put the necessary safeguards in place. I'll give you a clue. He did, so they are. The NHS flourished in the glory days of British trade unionism. Strikes have always been planned for. There is no threat to patient care, and any Health Minister or informed commentator knows that in detail.

Touch The Sky?

Kanye West has been banned from Britain. As he was always going to be. If only by months, he is even older than I am. Yet suddenly he has cachet with people many of whose parents, and even a few of whose grandparents, were younger than he was. Kerching!

Nigel Farage does not want us to “start banning people from entering the country because we don’t like what they say”, but did he really not know that that already happened? Under him, could David Duke and Louis Farrakhan just waltz in after all? At least Meir Kahane is dead.

The Land For The People?

The Family Farm Tax has come into effect today, to force working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to the giant American agribusinesses with which this Government was hand in glove.

As are all Epstein Class regimes, whether officially centrist or officially right-wing. Taken together or even separately, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are just about the Platonic form of an Epstein Class party. When Donald Trump waxed lyrical about Winston Churchill, then Micheál Martin did not retort with a rendition of Come Out Ye Black and Tans, but instead defended hardcore Atlanticism. Ireland is no more neutral than the green and orange stripes of the Tricolour. Shannon Airport is heavily involved in the war with Iran, because of course it is. And corporate America is landbanking Ireland, because of course it is.

The Duke of Devonshire is trying to put up the rent paid by his County Waterford tenants to €50 per hectare by 2029. While that is only about a quarter of the market rate today, and about one fourteenth of the present average rent for agricultural land, then the problem is the market, and who knows how much €50 per hectare would therefore be worth by 2029? As for colonialism, His Grace is only exercising his property rights under the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland, which has had more than long enough to change those arrangements.

As well as advocating such decidedly un-American expropriation, Irish-Americans remain as lacking as ever in any self-awareness about their own presence on the ancestral lands of the Lenape and the Massachusett, or about their own fanatical support for the settler colonists who were violently expelling the Catholic Church from the Holy Land and from at least two of its neighbours. But Ireland really is in the midst of a colonial land grab. As is Britain.

A Triflin' Friend Indeed?

All publicity is good publicity, and the people who booked Kanye West knew that as well as he did. He has not applied for a visa to enter the United Kingdom, and there has never been any chance that he would have been granted one, but that has always been the point.

A visa ban, never mind a full-blown exclusion order, would sell truckloads of West's material to a generation of Britons that until then had been barely, if at all, aware of his existence. If the stakeholders in Wireless Festival had no stake in that, then, well, it is impossible to finish that sentence. Of course they are in.

But who should be out? While perish the thought that the politicians who decided these things, or at the very least their parties and the like, might eventually benefit from some trickle-down, on the principles that would be cited to prevent West's entry, who else should be similarly inhibited, and why?

Khudaya, Rahem Kar

Fair play to Dame Sarah Mullally, who knew exactly which buttons to press at her installation. The winner of the recent Gorton and Denton by-election had been criticised for having issued a leaflet in Urdu, while Spanish was the language of both countries that had outstanding territorial disputes with the United Kingdom, so the Kyrie was sung in Urdu, while the Gospel was read in Spanish.

Alas, then, that in the readings for the Annunciation, Archbishop Richard Moth found himself having to read out, ostensibly from Isaiah, the dated and banal “a young woman shall conceive”, which would of course have been an everyday occurrence, while the passage from Hebrews 10 was omitted completely, when it has never been more urgent to proclaim the futility of the animal sacrifices of the Old Covenant. Christians must resist to the utmost any attempted restoration of the Temple cult, as is now being actively pursued with physical violence against the Christians of the Holy Land and of the wider region, including Pierre Moawad, whom the IDF has just admitted to having killed “by mistake” in Lebanon.

That brings us to the fact that there are at present three great threats to the unity of the Catholic Church. One is that the Society of Saint Pius X will consecrate more bishops, and the second is the German Synodal Way. The bishops of Bangladesh have declined the Government’s new monthly honorarium and festival allowance for religious leaders, lest it subject the steadily growing Church there to undue influence in future. The rapidly declining Church in Germany needs to refuse the Kirchensteuer, and call for its abolition at least for Catholics, since it had given everyone who paid it the notion that they were entitled to a say on doctrine. Nothing is worth that.

Most Catholics, however, will never directly encounter either the SSPX or the Synodal Way, much less will almost anyone else be affected by either of them. Whereas the third threat comes from the activities of Bishop Robert Barron, whose Word on Fire apostolate has done real good, yet who turned up to an Easter luncheon in Holy Week at all, never mind with Donald Trump, Paula White and Franklin Graham. At that event, Trump compared himself to Jesus on Palm Sunday, White compared Trump to Jesus on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and Graham gave thanks to God for having raised up Trump to deliver victory to Israel over Iran. Days earlier, the Israelis had prevented the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Land from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday. Bishop Barron did not mention that, but he has spoken in the past of the need to “re-Judaize Catholicism”. Urgent action is now required.

Benefits Bonanza Day?

It delivers a pitifully low pension by international standards, and even for that people are soon going to have to wait until beyond average male life expectancy, but the triple lock does at least put money in the pockets of the people who spent it, thereby injecting it into the consumer economy, and thus employing the young.

The same is true of the sickness and disability benefits that have in fact been cut to what we all know will be a widely fatal extent, despite the lie that Keir Starmer had "backed down" on such cuts, a lie to rank with Starmer's having in any way kept Britain out of the war with Iran (and notice that we can afford that), with his having been state secondary educated, with his heading "the most working-class Cabinet ever",  with his having been "a human rights lawyer" rather than a ruthless securocrat even by the standards of a Director of Public Prosecutions, and with his graciously and heroically having lifted the two-child benefit cap when in fact he had withdrawn the whip from seven Labour MPs because they had voted for nothing more than such an amendment to the Humble Address, and when that amendment had been defeated, then they had voted with the Government.

37 per cent of people on Universal Credit are in work, including 59 per cent of those who will benefit from the lifting of the two-child cap, so the problem is low pay. Most of the rest are medically unable to work, an extremely difficult status to attain. If you doubt that, then try it. PIP, on the other hand, is an in-work benefit. You do not get it for having a specific condition, but for how your conditions affect your life. You most certainly cannot self-certify onto it. Again, try it. By giving money to people who spent it, PIP stimulates our consumer economy, as sickness and disability benefits in general do, as the triple lock does, and as the lifting of the two-child benefit cap will, all while declaring the social and cultural value of the direct beneficiaries.

There is a case for Motability to buy only vehicles manufactured in the United Kingdom, but show me a PIP claimant who had been bought a BMW or a Mercedes on Motability. And how many more times? You may have constipation, or tennis elbow, or whatever, while also on Motability, and that would be listed among your conditions on the paperwork. But nothing like that could be grounds for the award. The cost of leasing your vehicle is deducted from your PIP, costing the State not one penny piece more than you would in any case have received. If you did put that towards a "premium" car, then you yourself would have to pay the difference. For a vehicle that you still would not own. Without Motability, far fewer physically disabled people would be able to work. Motability buys, and then owns, one in five new cars purchased in this country, which also translates into a lot of people's jobs. Some of those people are on PIP. Since PIP is an in-work benefit.