Three Strikes And You're Out

The Conservatives have been pretending for years that they had always been against the Iraq War. So, for whom will its dwindling band of defenders vote once Ed Miliband makes it three parties out of three that now recognise it to have been both illegal in itself and an unmitigated strategic disaster?

Building The Recovery

The unexpected growth is very largely due to construction.

And construction is very largely dependent on direct public spending.

Sic Virescit Industria?

Or, for that matter, Intento Animo?

Denis MacShane tells The Guardian:

"It is outrageous that something Lord Ashcroft has lobbied for has now been given to him on the DfID (Department for International Development) aid budget. This is an improper use of development money, there is no commercial justification, there are many remote islands in the world without airports, but none so close to Lord Ashcroft's commercial interests in the south-western Atlantic region. This is unquestionably payback time. In opposition, only a few months ago, William Hague and Andrew Mitchell were being flown around in Lord Ashcroft's private jet. Now he is getting his reward. It is a scandal of Pergau Dam proportions."

Now tell me, Dr MacShane, which of those "many remote islands in the world without airports" are British Overseas Territories inhabited by British Citizens? There are some. Explain to me what you mean by their being "no commercial justification". What have you done as a parliamentarian for the people of the British Overseas Territories in general and of Saint Helena in particular? And which community of British Citizens was benefited by the Pergau Dam?

Denis MacShane is a valiant campaigner against prostitution and against obscenity in the media. But he is a signatory both to the Euston Manifesto (old Stalinists and Trotskyists from the Seventies) and to the Henry Jackson Society (old hired help of Pretoria and Santiago from the Eighties). He is still banging on against David Cameron's Polish, Czech and Latvian allies who in fact deserve better British allies, allies from within the historic Labour tradition. And now this.

Status, Symbol

The niqab does not appear to be of Islamic origin at all. It was a status symbol among upper-class women in the Byzantine Empire, enabling them to walk the streets without being mistaken for streetwalkers. As Islam conquered that Empire's Anatolian, Levantine and North African provinces, so this, among much else, was taken on. But it almost certainly has absolutely nothing to do with Islam as such.

By all means let both men and women dress modestly. I do not want to see practically naked girls falling down drunk in the gutter, and I see no reason to regard them as having been liberated, but the very reverse. However, I object in the strongest possible terms to the idea that, simply because one finds women sexually attractive, one might jump on any woman if one can see anything more of her than her eyes. This suggestion is just as objectionable as the genital mutilation of male infants, or the sale of adolescent boys to the highest bidder through the dowry system.

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

I cannot see the story here, unless it is what a loyal Thatcherite this boy is. She, who first conceded joint sovereignty over Northern Ireland, had a continuous line of contact with the IRA.

Carved up between a bizarre fundamentalist sect with close ties to the 1980s Radical Right that is now “the Centre Right”, and a Marxist guerrilla organisation with close ties to the 1970s campus-based sectarian Left that is now “the Centre Left”, Northern Ireland is at the cutting edge of “centrist” politics. We all approve of that. Don’t we?

A Real And Present Danger

Three cheers for the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, the splendidly named Lord Judge. If there was no danger real enough or present enough to dispense with trial by jury in the case of, say, the Krays, then why is there any such now? There is not. Lord Judge has not quite said that. But he may as well have done.

It is the erosion of trial by jury that is the real and present danger. It must be halted, and it must be reversed. Along with the erosion of the right to silence, and along with the provision for convictions by majority verdict, i.e., where there is reasonable doubt.

Crazy Lefties

The libel courts are currently ornamented by one Johanna Kaschke, late of Respect and before that (or was it?) of the Communist Party, who left Labour in 2007 after having failed to secure its nomination for Bethnal Green & Bow, and who ended that year by joining the Conservative Party, in which she has rapidly become quite a well-connected activist. Ms Kaschke maintains that alluding to her past brands her "a crazy lefty".

If she is, then she has joined the right party, and it is no wonder that she is doing so well in it. In fact, the entire SWP faction of Respect in her own Tower Hamlets not long ago defected thereto after having fallen out with the Islamists. Around the country, local factions of various Asian and other origins routinely defect from Labour or other things to the Conservatives on frankly communal grounds, and are always welcomed with open arms.

But of course they are. It was David Cameron's vehicles that toured Ealing Southall blasting out in Asian languages that Hindu, Muslim and Sikh festivals would be made public holidays under the Tories. It was his "Quality of Life Commission" (don't laugh, it's real) that then proposed giving the power to decide these things to "local community leaders". What else would those figures be given the power to decide in return for filling in every postal voting form in their households in the Bullingdon Boys' interest, and making sure that all their mates did likewise? To the statelets thus created – little Caliphates, little Hindutvas, little Khalistans, and so on – people minded to live in such places would flock from the ends of the earth, entrenching the situation for ever.

The Conservative Party recently welcomed, with some fanfare, John Marek, who was fiercely anti-monarchist and anti-hunting while Labour MP for Wrexham, and who went on to become the founder and only ever Leader of Forward Wales, a Welsh separatist, Welsh-speaking supremacist, economically Hard Left, unyieldingly Politically Correct, Tommy Sheridan-endorsed, RMT-funded party which was only dissolved in January of this year.

Will Cameron also recruit, if he has not already done so, Marek's fellow founder-members of Forward Wales: Ron Davies, one of the very few former Cabinet Ministers without a seat in either House, and a noted campaigner both against shooting and for the abolition of the monarchy, recalling Marek's own parliamentary question to Tony Blair requesting that the Oath of Allegiance be replaced with something acceptable to anti-monarchists; Graeme Beard, a former Plaid Cymru councillor in Caerphilly; and Klaus Armstrong-Braun, who in his time on Flintshire County Council was the only Green Party member ever elected at county level in Wales? Cameron has already signed up Mohammad Asghar, a Member of the Welsh Assembly who has moved seamlessly from Plaid Cymru to the Cameroons.

And so on, and on, and on, and on, and on. They obviously find the 1980s Radical Right's company as congenial as they find each other's. As well they might. Blue is the new Red-Brown.

A toxic brand indeed, Tim Farron. A toxic brand, indeed.