Seumas Milne remains on the staff of the Guardian and Observer while Labour pays him to work as its director of strategy. As a colleague on leave, he has the right to be treated with a gentleness journalists would not usually extend to spin doctors who do not enjoy his advantages. I therefore write with the caution of a good corporate man and the cheeriness of a co-worker when I say Milne could not do a better job of keeping the Tories in power if rogue MI5 agents had groomed him at Winchester College, signed him up at Oxford University and instructed him to infiltrate and destroy the Labour party.
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“She’s got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.” – British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, talking about Hillary Clinton back in 2007 This is going to be so good 😀 July 15th, 2016 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The desperate need of left-wing journalists to see Obama as “pure” and “most successful” — to see him as they’ve reported him instead of how he is — is in part a result of the racial pathology of the left, its tendency to reduce people to their victim group. The notion that “the first black president” has been a failure would be, according to this way of thinking, a nasty slight against a race rather than, what it is, an indictment of bad ideas and their consequences. Identity politics is, in my view, one of the great, if not the greatest, scourges of the age. It isn’t an exclusively left-wing phenomenon, either. July 11th, 2016 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here’s a newsflash for Marvel: race-baiters and gender warriors who complain endlessly about the “lack of diversity” in comic books don’t buy comic books. They’re interested in identity politics, not fun. When your customers — lifelong comic fans — pick up the latest issue to find a smorgasbord of irrelevant, hectoring social and pop culture commentary, they probably won’t buy the next issue. Not because they’re sexists and racists, but because the stuff you are publishing sucks. – Charlie Nash at Breitbart. PS. I haven’t yet seen the latest Captain America film but it is on the list of ones I do want to see. Any recommendations? July 8th, 2016 | 60 comments - (Comments are closed)
OK, you’re angry. But ignore the vote and tanks could be on the streets. If you wanted to convulse the country with rioting on a revolutionary scale, to cause a lethal rupture between the governing class and the governed and even to provide the conditions for the rise of 21st-century fascism across Europe, here’s what you do. After a referendum in which an unprecedented number of voters took part, and in which well over a million more people voted for change than for the status quo on our membership of the EU, you declare that the decision cannot be allowed to stand, chiefly on the grounds that the people were too stupid. – Dominic Lawson (article behind Times pay wall unfortunately). July 5th, 2016 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
This outpouring of anti-democratic sentiment, this unquestioned faith in the wisdom of the elite over the will of the people, did not begin with the Brexit vote. Through the rise of evidence-based policy and quangos, experts have crept into more and more areas of policymaking. And the sentiment that the masses are a bit thick, brainwashed by the media and stirred up by demagogues, has long greeted every General Election result that doesn’t go the metropolitan elite’s way. But the Brexit fallout has brought this long unspoken prejudice out of the bistros and into the streets. The idea that the people are effectively incapable of taking part in politics, that you need a PhD in European law to have an opinion on EU membership, is now being shouted from the rooftops and scrawled on placards. Left-wing Remain types, so long the sort who would pretend to speak on behalf of the little people, are now openly calling for elite rule. July 4th, 2016 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
During the course of this splendid campaign, every Ponce in Christendom seems to have stuck his patrician nose about the parapet, sniffed the Great Unwashed and called on the waddling geese of Strasbourg to stand between them and us ruffians. Luvvies and musicians (acting and music being two former escape routes for we chavs now colonised by public school spawn) of course, identity politics social justice warriors (writing the most currently disadvantaged people around – white working class males – out of history, one gripe at a time) naturally. And Eddie Izzard! There have never been a greater number of people I’ve loathed who have been made to cry all at once. July 3rd, 2016 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
First, Brexit means Brexit. The campaign was fought, the vote was held, turnout was high, and the public gave their verdict. There must be no attempts to remain inside the EU, no attempts to rejoin it through the backdoor, and no second referendum. The country voted to leave the European Union, and it is the duty of the government and Parliament to make sure we do just that. May is currently the front-runner to be the next Prime Minister. June 30th, 2016 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
Who would be the best candidate to be the next leader of the Conservative Party? Ideally, I would have preferred either of [Lords] Nigel Lawson or the Chingford skinhead Norman Tebbit. Both played distinguished roles under Margaret Thatcher, the first as her chancellor, the second as her “bovver boy.” At ages 84 and 85, however, Lords Lawson and Tebbit are now too frail to bear the burdens of the premiership. Fortunately, there are two outstanding candidates who are fighting fit and at the peak of their powers: David Davis MP and former Defense Secretary Dr. Liam Fox MP. Both are consistent long-term, hard-core Brexiteers. You will note that this list does not include the most-talked about candidate, Boris Johnson. Despite his jovial populist image and the entertaining clown act, Mr. Johnson did a poor job as London mayor, is often not on top of his brief and is unpopular among Conservative MPs. His Brexiteer credentials are also doubtful, notwithstanding the major role he played in the campaign. He sat on the fence for a long time before announcing which side he would support. In fact, it has just been revealed that before deciding which side to take, he wrote two letters to be published, one supporting Remain and one supporting Leave. He himself then admitted that he found the Remain letter more convincing, but opted to join the Leave campaign instead. There is a lingering suspicion that he had calculated that he had nothing to gain if Remain won, but if Leave won, Cameron would be out and he could swan in as the man who had saved the Brexit cause to become Cameron’s obvious replacement. Mr. Johnson is, thus, an opportunist. Read the whole thing, as it contains some excellent analysis. June 28th, 2016 | 105 comments - (Comments are closed)
And yet just because the establishment failed, that doesn’t mean the demos have won. Not fully, anyway. We must stay vigilant. For there will now be a concerted effort to thwart our democratic statement, to weaken it by calling into question its legitimacy. This is already happening. Apparently the demos behaved rashly. We ‘voted emotionally rather than considering the facts’, says Labour MP Keith Vaz. We were in the grip of fear, say others. Or we were making a xenophobic statement, they claim, overlooking the irony of their pontificating about prejudice while suggesting that the 17.5million people who said No to the EU, this vast swathe of people, is a tabloid-poisoned blob given to disliking foreign people. Demagogues ‘injected poison into the nation’s bloodstream’, commentators are already saying, the implication being that we were brainwashed, made mad by evil men. We know not what we do. We’re children. The efforts to rebrand this vote as a kneejerk thing, an emotional thing, a racist thing, are already underway. And others will no doubt argue that because the vote was very close, perhaps we shouldn’t take drastic measures; perhaps we should reform our ties with the EU rather than sever them. We must stand against all this, and insist that the people have spoken, and the people are sovereign, or ought to be. Indeed, that is fundamentally what the referendum was about: do you think Brussels or the parliament in London should be sovereign? The people voted for themselves. June 25th, 2016 | 52 comments - (Comments are closed)
When the government (i.e. Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne – they are the government) supported the Labour Party continuing to get automatic payments from trade union members (i.e. no need to “opt in”) and supported eleven more years of the BBC tax – I knew the “fix was in”. Now we hear that Baroness W. has “left Leave” – the lady was never a supporter of the Independence of this country. Actually Baroness W. is a typical member of the “chattering classes” – endlessly going on about “discrimination against Muslims” and “the politics of hate” (look in the mirror dear lady – you will see someone who practices the “politics of hate” all the time). The idea that this lady was ever really in favour of getting out of the E.U. is absurd. As for the chattering classes in general – they are wrong about just about everything (I say “just about” as even a stopped clock is correct twice a day). Their ignorance is only matched by their arrogance. – Paul Marks June 20th, 2016 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Present reality is that science is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That’s the not-so-tongue-in-cheek message in Science on the Verge, a new book by European scientist Andrea Saltelli and seven other contributors. Science on the Verge is a 200-page indictment of what to the lay reader appears to be a monumental deterioration across all fields, from climate science to health research to economics. The mere idea that “most published research results are false” should be cause for alarm. But it is worse than that. Just about everything we take for granted in modern science, from the use of big data to computer models of major parts of our social, economic and natural environment and on to the often absurd uses of statistical methods to fish for predetermined conclusions. June 14th, 2016 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
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