Charles Crawford has turned his fire on the Left’s attack on ‘elitist, bourgeois’ teaching of grammar. His bull’s-eye of the day is Michael Rosen. Good. I have added my pen’orth to Crawford’s blog, more or less thuswise: Michael Rosen? Would that be the ageing grammar school boy, Oxford-educated Socialist Worker polemicist and Respect Party candidate? The comrade of the Israel-hating apologist for Islamist mass murder and friend of Saddam Hussein,…
I am a traditional English liberal (N.B. lower case) and I therefore vote Conservative in order to keep out the Liberals. Well, indeed. You may well ask. All right, for the avoidance of doubt and for the confusion benefit of any visiting Americans: The word liberal, in British politics, has the opposite meaning to its usage in the USA where of course it means socialist, as in Uncle Sam Knows Best so shaddup with…
One’s name is coterminous with one’s identity. To have it used carelessly shows lack of respect for one’s humanity. To decide how another shall be addressed is to take power over him. The accused in the dock is addressed as the bench decides he shall be addressed. He is called by his surname, his personal name totally ignored throughout the proceedings other than for the purpose of identification. Thus his powerlessness…
My three-decades old fear which has never abated, that the Euro would end in tears war in western Europe, is sharpened by two comments below Ambrose Evans Pritchards’ blogpost about Ancient Greek wars. First, Achilles-Rage (my emphases in both comments): Every Greek now is an enemy of a German. They are stealing everything from Greece…together with their Turkish friends and former allies. German invasion? Businesses, territories, Democracy, ancient treasures, they have opened the…
Brendan O’Neill rightly excoriates the madman Monbiot, not to mention his fellow-travellers, for their smug propagation of pseudo-science. Not over warble-gloamery this time but IQ. O’Neill is holding his nose in disgust at his (former?) comrades’ adoption of the elitist prejudices of the old toffee-nosed Right as they regurgitate ‘right wing’ (he says) disdain for the lower orders. ’They’re supposed to be Lefties! How could they!’ he wails. There is nothing…
The stitch-up fiscal union proposed by Merkozy (cf. Élysée Treaty) is merely a relaunch of the existing Stability and Growth Pact but this time with the teeth and claws necessary to force compliance by defaulters like France weak economies like Greece, nations coerced or conned into the Euro by Franco-Germany and their pals in the Euroclub of gravy-train-riding elites, against the interests of the peoples of Europe’s nations. Whether F.U. goes through…
A showdown with the EU may come sooner than we expect. The European Commission has today threatened to sue David Cameron’s government unless it starts letting EU citizens come here to claim benefits. - Fraser Nelson Mr Cameron, you must roar Britain’s defiance at the European Union over this or the consequences for both you and the United Kingdom will be dire. These new proposals pose a fundamental challenge to the UK’s social contract [which…
Be not misled by the byline. This was written in 1947 by W H Auden. __________________ The piers are pummelled by the waves; In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns. Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the literati keep…
The Telegraph’s Alexis Dormany is suspicious of people like your humble servant who are anonymous on the web, behind noms de plume. Very… unsettling. He is torn between castigating megacorps for wanting to know everything about their customers and damning the web-facility for saddos to build whole fantasy IDs and lives online, potentially (at least, arguably) damaging themselves and others. He seems to disenfranchise perfectly innocent citizens who wish to contribute…
No, don’t get too excited. Oh, you weren’t. Remember the Polly Conundrum: ‘Is she a moron or a liar?’ Hm, tricky. Polly Toynbee, rousing the comrades to continue flogging their dead horse fighting the class war, writes without a trace of either irony or self-reflection: The postwar years did see an exceptional upward surge, as a great increase in white collar and middle managerial jobs changed a two-thirds working class society…
I wonder. Did Evan Davies blush? On the Today programme (starts at 2.22’38″) this morning (22 August 2011), Davies interviewed a leading member of Britain’s cultural ruling class, a film-maker who, in 1977, scorned the Labour government’s offer of the OBE on grounds of high principle (‘… despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest’). His refined sensibility did…
Prompted by the Tottenham destruction and the Quiet Man’s timely post… There are no human rights. There are only human responsibilities. The notion of ‘human rights’ is a fallacious confection of philosophical concepts which by virtue of their subtle complexity are ripe for manipulation by people who feel entitled to shape society to their political agenda. Many people regard these prosperous practitioners of ‘human rights law’ as secular missionaries for Goodness because they…
RBS boss Stephen Hester spoke to the BBC’s Evan Davis this morning on the Today programme: I think that we are seeing today what arguably we should have seen better in commentary in 2008, and that is it’s not a banking crisis, and it never was, although banks were involved in the crisis, it was one of global economic imbalances in the way that we all collectively deal with…
If there is one word-in-context in the whole of the blogosphere which never fails to make me laugh out loud, it’s the Liberal in Liberal Conspiracy. I mean, do you really think they really think they are really, you know, liberal? Really? I think they should be stopped. Liberal Conspiracy is a handful of people with a particular political viewpoint, pushing their own agenda and trying to influence opinion. Why are…
A single woman living in the United Kingdom at taxpayers’ expense has delivered a baby who was conceived through IVF paid for by taxpayers. I wish the baby well. I wish its mother either paid employment or a substantial surprise legacy from a long-forgotten distant relative so that she may relieve me of the compulsion to pay for her fertility treatment, her maintenance and that of her child – or children,…
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