G.M.W. Wemyss's Blog, page 3

A sound nose for rubbish

Well. My publishing partner and I have just now put out a volume of collected essays: the permanent things, as it were, as reflected in chalk streams, gun-dogs, regionalism (from my Fife and Wilts to his Virginia and Texas), fields of battle, and (for me) cricket and (for him) baseball.

We did not mention Science, that mighty subject.

Loth as one is to agree with CP Snow about almost anything, there are two cultures; and this is rather a problem. (Looking at who pass for public men in these days, one suspects there are now three cultures, in fact, as the professional politician appears to possess neither humane learning nor scientific training. They couldn’t possibly commit the manifold and manifest sins against logic that are their stock in trade, were they possessed of either quality.)

Bereft of a liberal education – ‘liberal’ in the true sense: befitting free men and training men to freedom – our Ever So Eminent Scientists nowadays are most of ’em simply technicians. Very skilled ones, commonly, yet technicians nonetheless. And technicians do get things wrong sometimes: a point that need hardly be laboured in the centenary year of the loss of RMS Titanic. Worse far is what the century of totalitarianism just past makes evident: technicians are fatefully and fatally easily led to totalitarian mindsets and totalitarian collaboration. They are not, with a few honourable exceptions, armoured against its blandishments by a grounding in humane letters or the grand old fortifying Classical curriculum (as JIM Stewart rejoiced to call it). Their logical faculty has been abandoned: in place of ‘letting the servants do their living’, they have allowed – have abdicated to – machines and lines of computer code, to do their thinking. They – again with a few honourable exceptions – make fallacious appeals as a matter of course – commonly to authority, often their own – and live and move and have their being in a world of invalid syllogisms, falsehood, and suppressed premisses. They’re the sort who, hearing that Eminent Men of Science have found that orgasm cures hay-fever, conclude that the NHS can make a cost savings now, in light of the number of bloody wankers there are in the country.

Therefore has it been the non-scientists, by and large, who have made the running, armed only with logic and a nose for rubbish concealed in scientific language, in nailing the lies, follies, and fallacies of the Technical Bien-Pensant and their totalitarian impulses. Amongst these, and well to the fore, is that ornament of the House, Mr Jas Delingpole.

It is not enough for Mr Delingpole – nor ought it to be – to collate and detail the sloppy work, errors, parti pris reasoning, and outright Lies For a Cause committed by the Islington-and-Notting-Hill Branch of the Federation of Grauniad-ista Scientists and the ‘Green’ movement they serve and are a part of. In Watermelons, he wants to know, Why? And also, Cui bono? The incessant questions raised by Aristotle, Herodotus, and Cicero are as valid today as then: Why are otherwise learned persons saying what is not so or drawing and publishing conclusions their evidence (save when tortured to fit) does not support, and what is their motive and what was their price?

These questions, Mr Delingpole asks. And, alarmingly, these questions have answers, which Mr Delingpole sets out. They are not pretty; then again, there was no reason to suspect that they should be. Once one detects widespread scientific fraud, one must expect that the reasons shan’t be pleasant to contemplate. And so are they not. Aristotle was only the first of many to observe that men do not become dictators to keep warm: that there is a level at which power, influence, is interchangeable with money. Have enough of the one and you don’t want the other; indeed, you will find that you have the other. And of course, in a world of Eminent Scientists who are mere Technicians at heart, pig-ignorant of liberal (in the Classical sense) ideas, ideals, and even instincts, there is exerted upon them a forceful temptation towards totalitarianism – for the good of the rest of us, poor benighted, unwashed laymen as we are. The fact is that, just as original sin, as GKC noted, is the one Christian doctrine that can be confirmed as true by looking at any newspaper, the shading of one’s conclusions to fit one’s pay-packet, grants, politics, and peer pressure is precisely what anyone familiar with public choice economics should expect. And, as Mr Delingpole exhaustively demonstrates, is precisely what has occurred in the ‘Green’ movement and its scientific – or scientistic – auxiliary. They are watermelons: Green without and Red within. (A similar point was made of the SA by Willi Münzenberg, who referred to that shower as beefsteaks, Red within and Brown without.) That overseas Briton Mr Madison, the American revolutionary, noted that government were unnecessary if men were angels: but they aren’t. So also, public choice economics teaches us, bureaucrats, politicians, scientists networked in to the grants-quangos-and-public-purse Establishment (and thus effectively bureaucrats themselves), none of them are selfless (however they delude themselves and others) and disinterested: they are, being human, and being untamed by the precepts of a liberal education, rather out for what they can get: place, power, ‘prestige’ (a much-misused word), and pelf.

The ‘Green’ movement as a whole – and what a whole it is – is, and Mr Delingpole shows it to be, innately obscurantist, illiberal, totalitarian, intolerant, inquisitorial, and fundamentally dishonest. Although only a part of his work deals directly with its pseudo-scientific underpinnings, they matter the most to me, and have taken perhaps a disproportionate amount of this note, because they do underpin the whole crooked boiling. Absent junk science, no one should take these swampies and sleb cranks seriously for a moment; instead, they’ve money thrown at them, not infrequently from the enemies of liberty in all quarters (notably Brussels). Note, please, that I condemn only junk science (as does Mr Delingpole): this is in fact a measure of my, and his, regard for good science. Junk bonds do not, by their existence, condemn the existence of markets; crony capitalism – which is indissolubly tied to the ‘Green’ movement and its loudest advocates, who are bought and paid for by cronyism – does not condemn capitalism; junk science does not invalidate science as a discipline. Indeed, the greatest and most implacable enemies of junk bonds are and by rights ought to be traders; of crony capitalism, capitalists; and of junk science, those who hold true science in its just regard.

The ‘Green’ movement is a crooked sell, erected upon junk science and funded by the totalitarian-minded. It is therefore meet, right, and one’s bounden duty to call them on it. Mr Delingpole has done so, for our new nomenklatura; and I foresee the day when Watermelons shall be regarded as we now regard Djilas’ New Class and the works of Robert Conquest. Hasten the day.

Remembrance: Old Soldiers at the Cenotaph

The Bath chair or the Zimmer frame,

The agèd, gnarled, claw-like hand:

Was it to this that heroes came

In England’s green and pleasant land?

Do generations give just due

To those who faced the direst foe:

The Senior Service and the Few,

The BEF of long ago?

Burma – (Blenheim, Ramillies –),

The Mons Canal, El Alamein,

The ancient wars that won the peace

Are figured in their names again;

The trenches of the Kaiser’s war,

The aerodromes at grass in Kent,

The surge of ships in seas afar,

The bagpipes in the Orient –

‘Old men forget’? No. These persist,

Though backs are bent and eyes are blear,

The best who graced the Army List

When backs were straight and eyes were clear.

Or do they wish they slept beside

Their fellows who will not grow old,

The proven true however tried,

Refined from dross and wholly gold?

Ghost-comrades in a rank and file

That reaches back past Waterloo

Fall in behind them – with a smile,

That tells the warrior’s point of view.

The long, thin, red, unbroken line

Of history and struggle shared

Makes glories that will long outshine

The simple facts our school texts blared.

And these, now spent with weight of days,

Yet stand erect in heart and thought,

And match the bovine, staring gaze

Of those who live because they fought;

These yet, as honour fades and goes,

In times made fat and dull with peace,

Enjoy the warrior’s right repose

Who paid in blood for civil ease.

Uniform: Remembrance Day 2011

Old men, as such, are very much alike;

And dress themselves – are dressed, as oft as not:

For they are old, and hands may not obey

The mind’s commands as once they did obey

Commands far sterner – dress themselves, I say,

Much of a muchness; and occasion, time,

The purpose of the day, quite often will

Impose a uniformity of dress.

There’s nothing uniform in uniform.

And these old men, attired as they have been

In clothes distinctly undistinguishing;

In Bath chairs or with sticks, or tottering;

Look very much the same: until one sees

A dullish green and claret double striped,

Or red and blue in patterns infinite,

Or blue and buff, or black and trebly gilt –

These regimental ties that surely bind

And bind fast those who bound themselves in youth

To regiment or battery or troop.

There’s nothing uniform in uniform.

One wonders: are they playing at this role?

Young soldiers but pretending to old age,

A regimental concert running on

For more than the duration of the war?

Of course they’re not: one knows that. Even so,

The young men that they were, one yet perceives:

They peep out shyly from the mask of age,

And signal presence in the stripes of silk

That signify their regimental lives.

The yeomanry who left the hussar’s role,

Retrained as gunners, with a hussar’s dash;

The tank crews that survived in Normandy

When bocage meant no more than sudden death;

The sailors pared and honed by storm and sea

To something sharper than the well-honed dirk;

The Few who rode the deathly airs of Kent

And came safe home: all these live on in them,

The men now old who offered their young lives.

There’s something uniform in uniform.

Here is a Gloster of Korea; here,

A sapper who remembers fiercer suns;

And there a Scot who wears the Burma Star.

And there’s a younger man, a Desert Rat

All empty-sleev’d since Basra, standing tall.

There’s one thing uniform in uniform.

In Brussels is no revelry by night:

By day, dull, cautious bureaucrats

Work daily to betray the victories

These men, and those who fell, once won in blood:

‘The nation state must end. It leads to fear,

And fear to ego, and from that, to war.’

Ad interim, the quiet British graves

Of all the Fallen must be vandalised

With EU signs and plaques; the Menin Gate,

Dieppe, and Becklingen, all these must change,

Be changed, not in the twinkling of an eye –

‘No trumpets, please, that’s not the EU’s way’ –

Transmuted to a Europhile ideal,

Made safe – un-British – common to the foe

As to the victor who fought for the right

And justice and the freedoms of mankind.

In London, there are subjects of the Crown

Who will not own allegiance to the same,

And owe their loyalties to foreign foes.

They burn the poppies of remembrance, scream

Abuse the dead who freed them to that act,

Adhere to those with whom we are at war.

‘Was it for this those men now old once fought

Beside those who shall never now grow old?’

‘Well … in a sense, perhaps –’ (one hears the tone

Of donnish equability, perturb’d,

Mild, quibbling, measured, bloodless, quizzical)

‘– They did, you know: free speech, and it is that,

And after all we mustn’t go too far….’

Well, yes; yet I would gladly see an old

Risaldar-major of the War, two Sikhs,

And one old Gurkha, men true to their salt,

Explain that concept to the protesters.

There’s one thing uniform in uniform.

My father is not on parade this year:

He has for many years enjoyed his sleep

In that green rural churchyard, far and far

From ice and mountain, Chinese bugles blown,

And all that was that grim Korean hell.

As well he sleeps: he need not watch and damn

As students riot, Belgians plot, and foes

Use British liberty to mock the dead.

It seems the end, a grim collapse: and yet,

Old men who once were young ‘Dukes’ at the Hook,

RM commandos who’d known Um Qasr,

The Paras of Goose Green – men young, men old;

The Wrens, the nurses, chaplains, signallers –

All these, the Forces, old or newly trained,

Old soldiers and those serving on this day,

Keep yet their Covenant, and see us through.

There’s one thing uniform in uniform.

Procurement’s buggered. All the money’s gone.

Our sovereignty is like a fort besieged.

The law is daily twisted out of shape.

And yet the Forces bide, and like grim death

Hang on like bulldogs of tenacity.

They save the sum of things for little pay,

And less respect. We shall remember them.

At sunset and at dawn, we shall pay heed

And tribute to those standing – and who fell –

Between us and the darkness, bright with faith:

(There’s one thing uniform in uniform)

Whose way was duty – and whose names yet live.

The dreams of raging sheep

I am not, really, particularly fond of footer: not so much despite, as because, I, necessarily, had six years of it at school despite my loathing it. I avoided it when I might – there were other games peculiar to my school that could be played in the appropriate halves – but endured it as a necessary evil until, each year, the sweetest of seasons was introduced, not by the first cuckoo, but by the opportunity at last for all longsuffering dry bobs to wash off the mud and don crisp white flannels for the only game that matters.

That much being granted, I am struck, not dumb, but rather to a fury of words, by the latest in Fifa’s long and sordid history of base and contemptible actions.

As most of you will have seen, Fifa have refused to permit the wearing of the Remembrance poppy by England in a friendly against Spain at Wembley (a place, when last I looked, that is still on British soil). Fifa will not allow it.

We’ll come to the merits in a moment. First, however, let us simply consider this: permit; allow. Who do these bastards think themselves to be?

Spain, let us not forget, was neutral(-ish) in the 1914 and 1939 Wars. I cannot imagine that the Spanish side object, and they haven’t the objections a German side might advance (and the Germans have in fact kindly stated they don’t object, as if they’d a veto in any case), to the poppy; and there’s nothing unmannerly about its being worn in a friendly against Spain.

See here, damn it all, there are any number of faults one may allege against professional footballers as a class, particularly the modern ones (‘swanning about like so many adulterous spivs’ being the first entry on the charge-sheet); but they are naturally, dives notwithstanding, not commonly bereft of physical courage and certain of the manlier virtues – at least in the UK.

And thereby hangs a tale and a tradition: the tale and tradition of the service battalions of the Middlesex Regt and the Edinburgh Pals of the 15th and 16th Bns, Royal Scots (Lothian Regt).

When the call went out in 1914, Hearts, Raith Rovers, Dunfermline, and Falkirk answered. Seven Hearts players were killed; four others were never able to play again. The Middlesex Regt – ornamented by Frank Buckley, who rose to attain a major’s crown on his cuffs and shoulders – filled two service battalions with footballers and supporters. Celtic lost seven players killed, and L/Cpl William Angus was disabled in the course of rescuing a wounded officer, an action under such perilous fire that there was no question but that he should have, as he was indeed awarded, the VC. Brechin City FC lost six players in the Great War. Bradford City lost nine players. The first professional to join up was Donald Simpson Bell, who was swiftly promoted, commissioned into the Green Howards, awarded the VC for actions on 5 July 1916, and killed five days after. Air Cdre Philip Fullard CBE, DSO, MC and Bar, AFC was a reserve player for the Canaries before becoming a Great War flying ace. Jimmy Speirs was capped for Scotland in 1908 whilst with ’Gers, volunteered in 1915 although married, over age, and a father, won the MM at Second Arras, was promoted sergeant, and was killed, aged 31, at Passchendaele. Dick Roose had been a Gunner in peacetime (and had played as well for Villa, Everton, Stoke City, and Celtic, amongst others); when war came, he joined up, and on his first day in trenches as a Royal Welch Fusilier, won the Military Medal, only to die soon after at the Somme.

The story repeated in 1939. From Chelsea and West Ham, Liverpool and Wolves, across the UK almost 800 footballers served King and Country over the course of the Hitler War. Footballers in a newer uniform were sunk at sea, shot down over Berlin, killed in the Normandy bocage. Players for Bolton Wanderers, Swindon Town, and Southampton died in the great struggle. Rangers striker Willie Thornton won the MM in Sicily in 1943 with the Scottish Horse. (On the Continent, meanwhile, the captain of the French national side was collaborating with the Gestapo and being commissioned into the SS, and Evald Mikson, seven times capped for Estonia, was the Deputy Chief of the SiPo in Tallinn, a war criminal who happily participated in the Holocaust.)

But Fifa will not allow and refuse to permit Remembrance poppies on the England kit.

The bleedin’ obvious question – even more so for a friendly match – is what in buggery gives Fifa the right to permit and allow what the England national side may or may not do to mark a solemn British holiday of memorial?

I have heard their explanation, such as it is, and it’s balls. Unlike these vermin, the British understand – because we have – precedent: it’s the foundation of the common law, something most of that lot know no more of than a dog. (It’s their mother’s influence, no doubt.) Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Blatter?

Be it in sport or in international relations, it is never, never good for Britain – as this sorry episode reminds us – to surrender control of our institutions and freedom of action to a lot of foreigners. Fifa is to footer what the ICC is to cricket: a useless and parasitical kleptocracy of jobbing nonentities with chips on their shoulders towards the inventors of the game.

The question remains, Why are Fifa taking this tack? What in buggery are they thinking?

Unlike many, I don’t attribute it to the fact that almost all of Fifa is in the hands of individuals who are Not British: that is their misfortune, not their fault. Not everyone can enjoy the inestimable benefits of being British, and they are to be commiserated, not mocked, for that ill luck.

Nor is it simply that they resent, and seem to live to plague, the people who created the sodding sport in the first place.

No. It’s something else again.

Look at them. Remarkably few of them ever participated in the game, that mimesis of warfare. Mr Blatter is, as well as a model of a modern major embarrassment (and – allegedly of course – corrupt), a former tourist tout and lobbyist against pantyhose. He was drawn into football when he became president of the Zurich Brown Shirts (unfortunate name, really, particularly in this context). Mr Grondona – you remember him: ‘I do not believe a Jew can ever be a referee at this level. It’s hard work and, you know, Jews don’t like hard work’: that Mr Grondona, Mr Blatter’s ‘monumental man’, Sepp’s ‘friend forever’ – Mr Grondona is a bureaucrat (he doesn’t like hard work, you know) who, unlike other Fifa bosses, expected only the most patriotic and disinterested of bribes when selecting the World Cup hosts: he wanted the Falklands before he’d consider the UK bid. M D’Hooge has admitted accepting bung. Mr Warner is a former schoolmaster and poly lecturer (as well as reeking with – alleged, of course – corruption).

And M Valcke, Mr Blatter’s hand puppet and designated fall-guy, is no retired footballer either. He’s a French journalist – you remember French journalists: the lot who suppress news stories so as not to embarrass the latest Bonapartish Head Dwarf in the Élysée Palace – turned marketing man.

And here I think we come to the nub of the true reason for this at once arrogant and frightened opposition to the wearing of Remembrance Day poppies. I hold, as I’ve said, no brief for Premier League footballers. Were the Germans to invade Belgium tomorrow – I mean, with soldiers rather than with bankers – I rather suspect we’d likelier see Cook A and Broad S as gallant young subalterns before we should see most star footballers joining up, although one gathers that the sergeants’ mess should quite likely see the figures of, inter multos alia, Mr Ferdinand and Mr Wilshere. But the footballers do at least play a physical game, with physical courage.

The idea that the England side should honour a tradition of bravery and sacrifice, then, seems to have touched the soft-handed, jowly administrators of Fifa in a sore spot, and all for one, clamantly evident reason. Raging sheep dream of turning the tables, not only upon the wolf, but upon the sheepdog. The vandalism of the war graves of those honoured by the poppy is a symptom of the stark fact that many Western Europeans cannot bear the reminder that they were liberated by Britain, her Empire and Dominions, and the United States – twice; and not by themselves. They cannot forgive being rescued, for it reminds them that they were in want of rescue and did not or could not rescue themselves (and failed to oppose those from whom they wanted rescuing). Sinners lash out in embarrassed rage against any rebuke to sin: it is unendurable to them to be reminded of their failings; and men who are cowards by nature simply cannot bear to be reminded that valour exists, and is honoured and remembered.

Rememberèd, from this day to the ending of the world

At 11.0 AM, British Summer Time, 11 September 2001, one Mohamed Atta left Portland, Maine, for Logan International Airport in Boston.

Thirty seconds after 1.46 BST that afternoon – 8.46 AM in New York – American Airlines Flight 11 was flown, as a shaped charge, into the World Trade Centre.

Thousands of Americans were to lose their lives over the course of that day, in New York, in Washington, and in rural Pennsylvania. Amongst them was a former British Para born in Cornwall, by 11 September 2001 a naturalised American citizen and former United States Army officer: CR ‘Rick’ Rescorla, the World Trade Centre security chief who gave his life in rescuing others. Thousands of others.

On 11 September 2001, as today, HM the Queen was monarch of the United Kingdom, and of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, and Papua New Guinea. She was, as she remains, the Head of the Commonwealth.

Thousands of our American allies were murdered in the mass criminal attacks of 11 September 2001, even as ululating celebrations and the passing out of sweets – ‘this is a sweet from Sheikh Usama bin Laden’ – stained the record of Palestinians and others, celebrating death.

Yet it wants also to be remembered that on that day, there were also murdered by savage barbarians, upon American soil, some three hundred two-and-seventy persons who were not American citizens. Of these, the majority were subjects of Her Majesty or citizens of Commonwealth states. The greatest losses after the Americans themselves were sustained by the United Kingdom, followed by India.

Of Her Majesty’s subjects, eleven Australians were murdered; two dozen Canadian subjects; sixteen Jamaicans; two New Zealanders; sixty-six British subjects; and one Bermudan. Of the citizens of member states of the Commonwealth, there were forty-one Indians killed in this act of mass criminality; six Bangladeshis; two Ghanaians; three Guyanese; three Malaysians; one Nigerian; two South Africans; and fourteen citizens of Trinidad and Tobago.

Beds and Berks, Hants and the Hebrides, knew loss on that day. Melbourne and Victoria suffered. All ’round the Commonwealth, from Vancouver and Toronto and Winnipeg, to Devonshire Parish in Bermuda, in India and South Africa and Jamaica, death stalked past. This was a vile act of mass murder on American soil and by far the greater number of its innocent victims was American, but it was not a crime only against America and Americans.

Let us remember our fellow subjects then as well, and fellow citizens of the Commonwealth, on this day: who will never again see a century at Lord’s, or raise a pint to the feats of Tottenham or Arsenal or Partick Thistle or Wolverhampton, hear Evensong or make aliyah or celebrate Dewali or make the hajj or observe Vaisakhi or listen to Professor Dawkins on Radio 4; who will not know their children or be there for the deaths of spouses and parents – or put a bit on the favourite in the St Leger. They’ll not do these things because their tomorrows were stolen from them by a band of murderous savages ten years ago who shamed the name of their religion and embarrassed the whole human species.

Let us remember them as we remember those who served in the Forces, for these also were, all unknowing, servants and symbols of the cause of liberty and right.

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,

England mourns for her dead across the sea.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old,

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The legacy of lies

Friday 12 August was meant to be and shall yet be a Good Day. My co-partner’s book drops (our latest Bapton Books release, recounting how the American Congress, four months before Pearl Harbor, kept the Forces in being by one vote); and I go forth armed, as always on the Glorious Twelfth, to confront the disaffected and riotous grouse of N Derbs. And yet….

London is burning. Oh, not all of it, but perception counts for much. The Little Looting Bastards have managed, for a space of time, to do what Hitler and the Luftwaffe could not do – psychologically, at any rate.

All of us have different Londons, of course; it is an aggregation of smaller communities, what were once Burke’s ‘little platoons’. I for my part go up to Town infrequently and unwillingly, and it is tempting to react to the portentous and fatuous solemnity of the news reports with an infernal facetiousness: so long as one’s club, one’s tailor, one’s barber, Wilton’s, Rules, Simpson’s, Lord’s, and the Oval are safe….

It is equally tempting to react to the Dr Heinz Kiosk lot, searching for the Root Causes to palliate and excuse, by observing, fairly enough, that were Slough to be a target for riot, these pompous Leftist twunts (but I repeat myself) should find a way to blame Betjeman.

Yet there are root causes for this inexcusable spree of criminality, and they want to be addressed. Quite simply, they are the consequences of generations of lies from the Left (but I repeat myself…).

There is, of course, as Adam Smith observed with his accustomed wisdom, a great deal of ruin in a nation. On the other hand, as his countryman Rabbie Burns equally wisely observed, when there is such a parcel of rogues in a nation (and I am not referring to Oli Frey’s works, here), one reaches the overdraught of that amount of ruin rather swiftly.

Actions have consequences. When condign consequences are not visited upon rioters and looters, that is itself both action and consequence; and it creates further consequences. The invertebrate response to the Leftist riots of earlier this year is a root cause of the riots today.

At this writing, it appears that Mr Duggan did not fire a weapon at police in the shooting that led to his death. It is so far uncontroverted, however, that he had and brandished what appeared to be a weapon at the time. He may not have intended the consequences, but that really does, to borrow an American term, amount to ‘suicide by cop.’

It is, however, simply a lie, in any event, to assign to that shooting and Mr Duggan’s regrettable death, the causality of the riots and the riot-scum. The Little Looting Bastards are acting out of feral greed and criminality, not political ‘awakening’ and certainly not out of material deprivation, not when they’re mobilising with social networks and BlackBerries and iPhones and All That: they say so themselves. The savvier of them have now begun to spin, for Fleet Street consumption, the line that the Leftist commentariat has given them; but this is merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Yet assume for a moment this were at all true, that they have been motivated by politics. Were this so, the Left should have a still heavier responsibility for this insurrection.

None of the rioters are toddlers (Mao Banana not withstanding). All have come of age into the vaunted ‘state of deprivation’ under the Blair and Brown governments. Certainly all of them who are on the dole were rendered workless, and eventually, not unnaturally giving over, rendered workshy, under and by Labour. It was Labour that created a parasite state, in which an incomprehensible number of people have never had a job. It was Labour and its sheer ignorance of economics (the idea, for example, that higher marginal tax rates do not drive producers out of the economy, the notion that one can soak the middle class, let alone the rich, and they will remain obligingly in place to be looted by the State) – it was Labour and its sheer ignorance of basic economics (see any piece by that half-witted old trout Mary Riddell) that created a sclerotic economy that resulted in incomprehensible number of people never having a job or a sniff of one. It was Labour and its inane social engineering – and its cynical determination to create a servile, client state, extending the ‘payroll vote’ from parliament to the constituencies – that created a society in which an incomprehensible number of people have never had qualifications for a job. It was Labour that created a society so overregulated and overtaxed – taxed to pay for idiocies and idiot regulators, mostly – that it can no longer create jobs.

As for the idea that ‘Tory (or Coalition) cuts’ have invoked this judgement, Balls. And Yvette. There haven’t been any sodding cuts in any real terms. There has been some minor resistance to forever expanding the rate of spending. And all of this, every bloody tuppence of it, is the result of thirteen unlucky years of fatuous Labour policy and economic illiteracy. The first looters were the Labour governments.

If the thieves and thugs had been motivated by the false Leftist narrative that misrepresents the last decade and a half and now lies blatantly about the present and the economic future created by their misdeeds – as, in part, reputedly, the equally criminal thieves and thugs guised as ‘protestors’ earlier this year were – then Labour’s lies were to blame for this intolerable crime spree. As they are victims – insofar as they are victims of anything – of the lies of Labour already, not least the thumping lie that man can be reduced to parasitism on his fellows and remain a man for a’ that, without losing his self-regard and, ultimately, his ‘manse-bred, Ah’m frae Fife, moral Brrrrrrrounite compass’, the root cause of the present disorders is in any case, as one might have known, the Left and its pathological dishonesty.

When – once order is restored and punishment is meted out to the thugs and thieves – we turn to addressing, with wringing hands, the ‘root causes’, we may start with the Left and its poisonous, inherent mendacity.