Politics

Whenever I am defending toffs one of the main points I like to make is what great conservators they are. Because they have owned vast swathes of Britain, often for many generations, they understand the importance of their role as trustees of the landscape. Certainly, this coincides with their hobbies – hedges and stone walls rather than barbed wire because you don’t want your mount’s belly ripped open while you’re hunting; copses for covert while shooting, and so on – but nonetheless I do think our landowning classes have generally had a deep understanding of what makes the British country the most beautiful on earth, and by and large have done a great deal to keep it that way.

Until… Read More

On BBC Scotland, the Prime Minister has been talking about the recent sting that caught out Stephen Byers, Geoff Hoon etc.
The sting was carried out in a Channel Four Dispatches show that aired last Monday night. Mr Brown’s spokesman last week told journalists that the PM didn’t watch the show.

Today, asked about its revelations, Mr Brown said this:

“I was appalled by what I saw. I was appalled by some of things I saw happening that I knew nothing about.”

Eh? Anyone able to make sense of that? Has Mr Brown been taking speaking notes from John “I voted for it before I voted against it” Kerry?

Twenty years ago, as an undergraduate, I set up the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain. Our goal was to repeal Sections Two and Three of the 1972 European Communities Act, thereby ending the primacy of EU law in the United Kingdom – a goal which, I’m afraid, we have spectacularly failed to achieve.

We did have one success, though: our demonstration at an EU finance ministers meeting in Bath on Saturday 12 September 1992 became the leading news item across most of Europe. When the markets opened on the Monday, sterling came under unprecedented pressure. By the Wednesday, the pound had been forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, opening the door to a stretch of low-inflationary growth so spectacularly… Read More

A Doctor Writes: I think my initial diagnosis of the patient known as “the British electorate” may have been unduly pessimistic. Yes, the patient did appear to be completely brain dead, simply not responding to such crude stimuli as three ex-Cabinet ministers being suspended from the Labour Party for corruption. But this morning, for the first time in weeks, the patient has shown faint signs of brain activity. Incredible as it may seem, given the patient’s recent vegetative state, Alistair Darling’s black hole budget seems to have had the effect of a wake-up call. It’s obviously early days — and this could be a freak occurrence, like a chicken continuing to run around after it’s head has been… Read More

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has declared the “Special Relationship” to be dead. In what can only be described as a staggeringly unhelpful move in the middle of a major war in Afghanistan, the Labour-dominated committee has published a report today which actively undercuts the alliance between Great Britain and the United States. It should be noted that at least five MPs on the 14-Member committee dissented.

A summary of the report’s recommendations, by committee chairman Mike Gapes, the “Labour and Cooperative Party MP” for Ilford South, can be found here. In essence it describes the Special Relationship as an anachronism and a one-way street, with Britain unfairly portayed as subservient to the United States. The… Read More

It’s time for “Earth Hour”, a pointless, hypocritical and silly stunt organised by the WWF in which people turn off their lights and other appliances and delude themselves into thinking they’ve made a difference. So here goes.

Click.

Click.

Where’s the oven switch? Ah, yes. Click.

Nearly forgot the loo! This one’s on a cord. Done!

Now to turn up the stereo.

Telly on, though sound off.

Laptop one: already on.

Laptop two: booting up now.

And why not the printer? Done.

Maybe my electricity bill will be a pound or two higher. And, of course, I won’t have shortened the planet’s life by a nanosecond, any more than the thousands of Guardian readers, Lib Dems, sad celebs, smug tech journalists and poor brainwashed children will have made a difference.

Still,… Read More

Check out Labour’s five key general election pledges, due to be announced later today. By “impressive” I don’t mean convincing or plausible, obviously. I mean the overall message is impressively clear. It’s a pithy distillation of brand Brown. No doubt the hand of Mandy is behind this. (And Blair probably had some input, too.) It confirms the awful, sinking feeling — which I suspect is all-pervasive within Team Cameron — that the Tories simply don’t have anyone with Mandelson’s election-winning genius in their campaign team.

UPDATE: I expect the mood in the Conservatives’ campaign team is more one of head-scratching bafflement rather than admiration for Mandelson and his team. They must be thinking, “Why oh why is the British public… Read More

Or, as we Old Brussels Hands say: “Hört auf euch ausnehmen zu lassen!”

No country does as badly out of the EU as Germany. It pays more into the system than anyone else, and has the lowest per capita representation in the Brussels institutions. The fiscal transfers made by German taxpayers to French farmers under the terms of the Common Agricultural Policy go beyond anything envisaged by Clemenceau when he demanded war reparations at Versailles. The Cohesion Fund, under which Mediterranean states got hand-outs in advance of the launch of the euro, was underwritten by the German treasury. It was only natural that, when Greece collapsed, the other euro-zone countries should look to the Angela Merkel for yet another cheque.

I have… Read More

Well, whatever the gifts of the Rev George Pitcher, a talent for rebuttal is not among them.

I wrote a blog post yesterday expressing no small degree of wonder that the Religion Editor of the Telegraph should smear by the laziest association two of the most admirable figures in his own Church, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali and Lord Carey. His rebuttal, in a rather silly manner, simply attempts to smear me in the same way.

I will try to answer George’s latest by simply asking the following of fair-minded readers. Is it, or is it not, the case that the blogosphere has many irritations? And that one of them is that whatever you write, alongside educated, well-informed and kind people, a certain number of crazy, rude and sometimes very bad people will chip… Read More

My, whatever the many gifts of Douglas Murray, a talent for polemics is not among them.

I write that the comments of clergymen such as Michael Nazir-Ali about Islam can be picked up and celebrated by BNP supporters.

Douglas writes that I have “smeared” the great man (entirely wrongly, as it happens – I took care to dissociate entirely Bishop Michael from the BNP) and that it is not the BNP that gets “mileage” out his comments about Muslim “no-go” areas and the like.

And who piles in to celebrate and congratulate Douglas on his post and to keep the moderator busy all day taking down libellous and racist comments in support of his case? Why, the numpties of… Read More