Hopefully the PM Will Hold The Line

Boris Hangs Tough Against Europe

Will Not Be Ruled by EU Courts and Laws 

‘Australia-Style’ Relationship an Option

Victoria Friedman
Breitbart London

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that he will not allow Britain to be ruled by EU courts and laws after Brussels negotiator Michel Barnier implied that the British do not “respect” the bloc’s position.

The latest round of talks between the United Kingdom and EU ended a day early in Brussels on Thursday, with Britain’s lead negotiator David Frost saying that “significant differences” remained between the two parties. 

His EU counterpart Michel Barnier released a statement saying that “The EU expects… its positions to be better understood and respected in order to reach an agreement. We need an equivalent engagement by the United Kingdom.”

LBC host Nick Ferrari asked the prime minister if Mr Barnier is correct in his implied criticism that the British government does not respect the EU. Mr Johnson disagreed, both on a government level and a personal one.

“I’m not remotely disrespectful of Michel [Barnier] or the EU system which I know well and understand deeply,” Prime Minister Johnson said on Friday. “I just don’t think that it’s right for us to proceed on the basis of the European Court of Justice continuing to arbitrate in the UK, or us continuing to have to obey EU laws even when we’re out of the EU, or us having to hand over our amazing fish stock. So we’re not going to do those things.

Running A False Flag Up the Mast

Britain is Infected... By a Bad Case of Madness

Peter Hitchens
Mail On Sunday

Yes, you are right. We have gone quite mad. I know that many people are thinking this, but dare not say so.  I will be accused of all kinds of terrible things for taking this view – but that is another aspect of how crazy things are.

Yes, coronavirus poses a risk. No, our response to it is not intelligent or useful. In fact, I think it is increasingly damaging and will soon become more so.  The key word here is proportion. There is nothing wrong with simple, practical precautions.

I have for many years believed that door handles pose one of the greatest threats to health, and try never to touch them with the naked hand. I was taught from my earliest years to wash my hands before eating.

I am a health faddist. I work at a standing desk. For many years I have walked and bicycled wherever I can.  I often take the stairs rather than the lift. I can’t understand how anyone in my generation or younger can smoke, given what we know about it.  I regard sugar as a delicious poison to be avoided as much as possible. I drink little. I get up early and go to bed early.

I believe cars are heart-attack machines, noisy, smelly, ugly devices, which depreciate in the gutter while they are not stopping us from exercising and wrecking our lower backs.  Yet our country is so badly planned that few families can manage without them nowadays.

For these reasons, I reckon that my risk from coronavirus is quite small. If I catch it, and I quite possibly will, I doubt it will trouble me all that much.   The truth is, people with what are called ‘underlying conditions’, many of which follow decades without exercise, are in danger not just from coronavirus but from almost everything.

Glimpses of Sanity's Restoration in the UK

Al-Qaeda Member Turned MI6 Spy

‘Deradicalisation’ of Terrorists Doesn’t Work

Kurt Zindulka
Breitbart London


A former member of al-Qaeda turned MI6 spy said that there “is no such thing as a rehabilitated jihadist” and that efforts by the British authorities to deradicalise convicted terrorists will not work.

Aimen Dean, who joined the Mujahideen at the age of fifteen and was later recruited into al-Qaeda by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who helped mastermind the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York, said that he doesn’t “believe in deradicalisation”.

The former terrorist, who went on to work as a spy for the British intelligence service MI6, told The Telegraph that Islamist terrorists are “extremely treacherous” and that if they don’t confess and help to do “damage” to their jihadist cause of their own volition like he did, “you can’t trust them.”

“The only way [a jihadist] can demonstrate that they’ve renounced violent extremism is if they have sung like a canary and provided damaging intelligence on the networks that recruited them,” said Dean.

We Hope James Delingpole is Right

On the Brink of Brexit Victory

James Delingpole
Breitbart London

Finally, Britain stands on the brink of Brexit victory.

No, I don’t mean Boris Johnson’s new deal, which may or may not prevail.  I mean that the British people’s fury with the shenanigans of the liberal elite has reached such a pitch that nothing — neither the police nor our rule-makers nor our bent, parti-pris judiciary — is capable of stopping us prevailing in the end.

For evidence, look no further than the glorious scenes at Canning Town Station in East London this week, when a sickly-looking pair of Extinction Rebellion milquetoasts were yanked from on top of a Tube train carriage by angry commuters and told exactly where they could shove their green revolution.

We don’t yet know the names of the heroes who acted in this way when the authorities stood impotently on the sidelines. (Let’s hope that the police don’t because they’ll probably arrest them).

We do, however, know the identity of at least one of the tofu-munching gimps who thought it would be a good idea to stop thousands of commuters getting to work that morning by preventing their transport from leaving the station.

His name is Mark Ovland and he’s a Buddhist teacher.  No, wait, scrub that. He’s even more useless than that. Mark Ovland is an ex-Buddhist teacher.  Ovland used to have a non-job.

Now he has given up even his non-job to become a full time climate protestor, which isn’t so much of a non-job as an anti-job: it doesn’t merely fail to add much to the economy, like his Buddhist teaching non-job did; it actively steals from the economy by preventing people from earning a living and creating value and trying to give their kids a better future.

But what does any of this have to do with Brexit?  It has EVERYTHING to do with Brexit.

Head in the Opposite Direction

To Succeed Boris Just Needs To Ask Himself ‘What Wouldn’t Theresa Do?’


James Delingpole
Breitbart London

Only a couple of days now before Britain bids a relieved farewell to the worst prime minister in history. But let’s give credit where credit is due: it wasn’t just Theresa May who was so sublimely useless; it was her entire administration.

Under Remainer Chancellor Philip Hammond, Britain’s tax burden has risen to its highest in over 40 years.  Amber Rudd, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, was heard as recently as last week not pleading to be spared exile to the backbenches (as she deserves) but rather strutting around like some prize hen as if she still owned the whole barnyard, clucking that any future Cabinet in Boris Johnson’s government should have a 50/50 gender split.

Environment Secretary Michael Gove is so committedly in thrall to green lunacy it seems there is nothing he will not sacrifice to Gaia’s sinister, pig-tailed avatar Greta Thunberg: the plastics industry, the British countryside, shooting folk, the millions more birds and bats that this Net Zero policy will help slice and dice — if Ed Miliband or Ed Davey had been running the department it could scarcely have been any worse. . . .

I could go on. But there isn’t space.

Huge Damage Done By Ideologically Driven PM

Police Celebrate End of Theresa May

‘Her Legacy One of Misery’, ‘Country Less Safe’, ‘Officers Will Shed No Tears’

Jack Montgomery
Breitbart London

Police officers across the country are celebrating Theresa May’s resignation, having been thoroughly alienated by the Prime Minister in her previous role as Home Secretary under David Cameron.
Theresa May presided over massive cuts to police budgets and manpower during her tenure, and made “taking on” the Police Federation which represents rank and file officers up to Chief Inspector one of her signature stances — although she seemingly enjoyed a more collegial relationship with politically correct senior officers, such as Metropolitan Police chief Cressida Dick.

As Home Secretary, Mrs May attended Police Federation conferences and publicly berated delegates for “crying wolf” and “scaremongering” when they claimed the cuts — abetted by the left-wing Liberal Democrats, who were in a coalition government with the Tories until 2015 — would destroy neighbourhood policing and lead to the adoption of a “paramilitary style” of policing.

Inspector Gadget@InspGadgetBlogs

Her first duty as Home Sec and PM was to protect the public. 21,339 fewer police officers in the face of huge increases in violent crime and numerous terror plots. Prisons wrecked, forensic science privatisation disaster, ditto probation. Utter disgrace.#TheresaMayResign

350

4:30 AM - May 25, 2019

These words came back to haunt her following the Manchester Arena suicide bombing in 2017, when it was revealed that a Greater Manchester Police Officer — who had been decorated as community policeman of the year by May herself — personally warned her that the course she was pursuing could enable a terror attack.

“I have worked in inner city Manchester for 15 years,” Inspector Damian O’Reilly told the then-Home Secretary in 2015.  I felt passionate about what I was doing but in 2010 I had to leave. I couldn’t take it any more because the changes that have been imposed have caused community policing to collapse.

“Intelligence has dried up. There aren’t local officers, they don’t know what’s happening. They’re all reactive, there’s no proactive policing locally. That is the reality ma’am.”

“Neighbourhood policing is critical to dealing with terrorism. We run the risk here of letting communities down, putting officers at risk and ultimately risking national security and I would ask you to seriously consider the budget and the level of cuts over the next five years,” he urged.

The Manchester attack was indeed followed by “paramilitary style” policing, with officer numbers bolstered by having armed, uniform soldiers patrol the streets alongside them.

WiltsPolFed@WiltsPolFed

As Chair I would like to say my goodbyes to @10DowningStreet. You were a poor Home Secretary and a worse Prime Minister. Your efforts to destroy the police have been, thankfully, as unsuccessful as everything else you meddled with. #police #cryingwolf #yippee

191

2:18 AM - May 25, 2019

The Greater Manchester Police branch of the Police Federation was particularly scathing when news of Mrs May’s long-awaited resignation finally broke.

Chairman Stu Berry said that there are now 21,339 fewer police officers and 15,894 fewer members of police staff than in 2010 — despite the general population exploding and violent crime climbing dramatically — and suggested that “officers will shed no tears at her departure” in a statement published on social media. 

“I feel that I cannot varnish my words following Theresa May’s decision to leave office. During her time as Home Secretary she decimated the Police Service to near breaking point and significantly reduced the service we provide to the public,” Berry said.

“Her legacy is one of misery for thousands of people. This country a less safer place [sic] due to her ideology as serious crime statistics soar in every major town and city in this country. Our members and the Public we serve will continue to suffer the consequences of her dogma for decades to come,” he insisted.  The emotion that she exhibited today were tears for her own self-made demise. It is a shame that she did not have similar empathy for countless victims of crime that could have been avoided.”

The End of the Conservative Party Beckons

Where To From Here?

Finally, Theresa May is resigning.  She has been marked down as the worst Prime Minister in UK history.  No doubt commentators and, eventually, historians will put forward their analysis and views of May and her tenure.

From an outsider's perspective, a comparison with Neville Chamberlain seems apt.  Columnist Madeleine Kearns obliges:

Compromise is indeed the stuff of life. But it is not the same as weakness. In April 1938, Neville Chamberlain, in responding to the threat of fascism on the continent, sought out a number of “compromises” that, if enacted, would have proven disastrous. In an attempt at “peace with honour,” he conceded to almost all of Hitler’s demands. Of course, the EU isn’t quite Hitler. And, thankfully, Brexit is hardly a world war. But it is the greatest peacetime issue of the last century. Westminster knows this only too well, as I wrote in October last year in a profile on the former foreign secretary and Brexiteer Boris Johnson:  

'In the Palace of Westminster, next to the bomb-damaged Churchill’s arch in Members’ Lobby, are four bronze statues that tower over some smaller busts of lesser-known prime ministers. The looming figures are David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Margaret Thatcher. Pointing to the latter two, a trusted Johnson aide told me, “We are living in as decisive times as these. And we need a prime minister of such stature.” Not Boris, surely! some will protest, knowing full well that Britain could do much worse. And already has.'

 It remains to be seen what will happen.  Will Brexiteer Boris become the new leader of the Conservative Party?  If so, how will he chart a course going forward with the Brexit Party?  Again from the outsider's perspective, it seems to us that the Conservative Party may well end up being a remnant of what it once was.  Like the UK Liberal Party of today.

The Greatest Con Of The Modern Era

Ten Years of the Climate Change Act

History’s Most Expensive Virtue Signal

James Delingpole
Breitbart London


It’s the tenth anniversary of the most stupid, pointless and wasteful piece of legislation ever passed in British parliamentary history: the 2008 Climate Change Act.

If you want to loathe and despise the political class even more than you do already, I heartily recommend a read of the damning report that Rupert Darwall has compiled for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Keep a bottle of whisky and your service revolver handy for when you’re done.

Darwall describes the Climate Change Act (CCA) as “history’s most expensive virtue signal.”

Unlike, say, the Paris Climate Accord — all of whose carbon emissions targets are entirely voluntary — the CCA imposes on Britain a legally binding commitment to ensure that its CO2 emissions in 2050 are at least 80 per cent lower than in 1990. (Originally the target was just 60 per cent. But then the children got overexcited.)

The costs of meeting this entirely arbitrary target have conservatively been put at between £324 billion and £404 billion. But that was ten years ago and anyway, Darwall believes this is a wild underestimate by mendacious politicians and civil servants who know that if the true costs were ever acknowledged the public would never forgive them. He reckons that as with Germany’s similarly disastrous Energiewende, the costs may eventually exceed £1 trillion.

As a result, British industry now suffers the highest energy costs anywhere in Europe.

Sleepwalking Into Vassalage

The Brexit Crisis

By The Editors
National Review Online


After what seem like years of a phony war, British and European Union negotiators finally agreed on the terms of Britain’s departure from the EU earlier this week, and Theresa May announced it in the House of Commons. The deal covers more than 500 pages of legal and bureaucratic prose, and few but the negotiators have read it in full. But those who have say that it confirms the earlier leaks: After leaving, Britain will continue to be subject to EU rules and regulations more or less indefinitely but, as a non-EU-member state after March, the country will have no say or vote in designing them.

It doesn’t sound like a very attractive package, but May argues that this deal fully achieves the Brexit that the voters chose two years ago. It’s hard to square this claim with the “red lines” she vowed a year ago never to cross:

• Deal: Britain will sign on to a “common rulebook” of regulations that will in fact be the EU single-market rulebook.

Red Line: Britain will leave the Customs Union in order to sign free-trade deals with non-EU countries such as the U.S.

• Deal: Britain will stay indefinitely in a customs union with the EU, which will make it impossible to negotiate free-trade deals with others, and Britain will only be able to leave it by agreement with the EU and with the consent of an international arbitration body.

Red Line: Britain will be out of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

• Deal: Britain will be subject to ECJ jurisdiction on regulation and trade matters, and U.K. courts will take account of its rulings.

May nonetheless is sticking to the line — which she has firmly, indeed obstinately, defended in two parliamentary appearances this week — that she has achieved the Brexit deal she wanted all along. Battle lines are therefore now being drawn in U.K. politics for and against both May and the deal.

Nice and Toasty

Britain's Climate Improves

James Delingpole
Breitbart London

Global warming has made Britain’s climate slightly more mild and pleasant. This is the shock finding of a study likely to send paroxysms of terror through the alarmist “science” establishment as it finally realises the game is up and that the evidence just doesn’t support its fantastical scare story.

The study was conducted by Paul Homewood for the Global Warming Policy Foundation.  Using data from the UK Met Office — the same institution relied on by the alarmists for their scare stories — Homewood has found that global warming has made next to no difference to Britain’s climate.

His conclusion:  part from being slightly warmer, the UK’s climate appears to be little different to the past.

The study was prompted by a highly alarmist UK Climate Change Risk Assessment report, published in 2012 by the UK government’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), warning that ‘climate change’ would lead to more extreme weather events in Britain.

DEFRA’s report warned:

Events such as heatwaves, flooding and droughts will become more severe. By the 2080s, average summer temperatures will rise by up to 8◦C, winter rainfall will increase by up to 70%, and summer rainfall will fall by up to 60%. Sea levels could also rise by up to 70 cm by 2095.

But Homewood’s report — titled DEFRA versus the Met Office — shows that there is no-real-world evidence to support these predictions.

Trump's Foreign Policy, Part II

A Kernel of Truth

A seasoned New Zealand politician cum diplomat has acknowledged that the proposals of British PM, Theresa May for a soft Brexit are troubling.  Lockwood Smith is arguing that President Trump has put his finger on the problem.

Some Truth In Trump's Warning
Claire Trevett
NZ Herald

Former High Commissioner to London Sir Lockwood Smith says US President Donald Trump's comments about the Brexit deal on a visit to the UK had a kernel of truth to them and he was echoing concerns held globally.

In an interview with The Sun that ran as Trump arrived in the UK last week, Trump said the proposals in the Brexit White Paper could imperil a trade agreement between the UK and the US.  "If they do a deal like that, we would be dealing with the European Union instead of dealing with the UK, so it will probably kill the deal."

After meeting with British PM Theresa May, Trump backpedalled somewhat saying May and advisors had reassured them it would not, and he was fine with whatever step they took.  Smith told Q+A that Trump's interview with The Sun was "outrageous" but he was right to flag concerns around Brexit and the proposed trade arrangement with the EU.

New Zealand is one of the countries first in line for an agreement with the EU and Smith said Trump's view on the white paper proposal was a global concern.  "What one's got to sift through is what he did say that actually made some sense and the issue is we need the UK to become a global player.  Trump has pulled the US out of being the leader, say, on global trade. And we need the UK to step up."  He said it was questionable whether the White Paper made that possible.

"A half-way house is not going to work. They've got to see that they've got to actually leave the EU and negotiate a real world-leading FTA with the EU."  Smith was High Commissioner to London until 2017 and is a former Trade Minister.  He is now on the influential Legatum Institute's trade advisory group which is advocating for a "hard Brexit" when it comes to trade.

He had met with former Foreign Minister Boris Johnson a few weeks ago before Johnson quit in protest at the White Paper proposal.

A Historical Vignette: The Cost of National Pride and Vainglory

The Post-War English Disease

One of the conundrums of British history post World War II is why the country's economy sloughed along in the doldrums for twenty years or so after the war ended.  We have forgotten how long rationing lasted in the UK post 1945.  In comparison, the economies of France, Germany, Holland boomed in fairly short order.  Yet, the economy of triumphant Britain languished in a noisome backwater.  Why?

After war's end the only way forward

. . . was for the British to impose on themselves unprecedented conditions of restrain and voluntary penury--which accounts for the much remarked upon feature of those years: that proud, victorious Great Britain seemed somehow tighter, poorer, grayer and grimmer than any of the erstwhile defeated, occupied and ravished lands across the water.  Everything was rationed, restricted, controlled.  [Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage Books, 2005), p.162.]

All this, mark you, was in a country which was not invaded.  For many, the post-war conditions in Britain were worse than the actual years of conflict. 

This was the age of austerity. . . . (A)lmost everything was rationed or simply unavailable: meat, sugar, clothes, cars, gasoline, foreign travel, even sweets.  Bread rationing, never imposed during the way, was introduced in 1946 and no abandoned until July 1948. . . . Street scenes in post-war Britain would have been familiar to citizens in the Soviet bloc--in the words of one English housewife, recalling ehse years, 'It was queues for everything, you know, even if you didn't know what you were queuing for . . . you joined it because you knew there was something at the end of it.' [Ibid.]

It seems incredible that Germany was recovering its infrastructure and economy faster than the UK.

Radio NZ and Peter HItchens

Kim Hill talks to Peter Hitchens about Brexit

. . . And lots of other matters

https://adamsmith.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/rnz-saturday-kim-hill-talks-to-peter-hitchens-about-brexit/


A fascinating and entertaining discussion. 

JT

Chicken Littles All

British Factories Post Best Year Since 2014

Hours After MSM Claim UK In Worse Shape Than Greece

Jack Montgomery
BreitbartLondon

Bloomberg has had to report that British factories are putting in their best showing in five years — hours after claiming Brexit Britain had fallen behind Greece to become the “Sick Man of Europe”.
The initial report, which claimed Greece is “growing faster than Britain and is outperforming it in financial markets”, was embraced by the usual suspects in the so-called ‘Remain Resistance’, who have been eager to highlight any negative coverage of the post-referendum economy in order to claw back some of the credibility they lost after the “immediate and profound shock” they predicted before the Leave vote failed to materialise.

The outlandish claims may have been a bridge too far, however, with even neutral commentators being prompted to come out and rubbish them.  “The comparison [between Greece and Britain] is irrelevant bordering on the absurd but, for the record, on the official figures published to date, Greece is not growing faster than [the] UK,” remarked BBC interrogator-in-chief Andrew Neil.  “It might in 2018/19. But then it has a lot of ground to make up, having lost almost 30% of its GDP.” . . . .

"You Considered Yourself Lucky"

Outwardly Wealthy, Desperately Impoverished

Here is a description of what it was like to live in a council house in Britain in the nineteen fifties. Remember that council houses were often found on special housing estates where houses sprung up like mushrooms after the war in an effort to house people--many of whom had lost their houses or accommodation through the Blitz.  In other words, they were relatively modern houses for their day.

The front door opened directly on to the pavement and you walked straight into the front room, which was only used on special occasions.  My mum said it was 'to be kept for best'.  You then passed into the living room, where there was a dining table and chairs and a couple of armchairs around a big black coal-fire stove.  A huge black kettle, full of hot water, would always be resting there.  The living room was also the setting for my Friday night scrub-down in an old tin bath . . . . A door opening on to the stairs took you up to two bedrooms.

There was no bathroom or indoor toilet.  If you were caught short during the night, you used a chamber pot under the bed . . . . . Downstairs, the room at the back of the house had a gas stove and a large sink where clothes were scrubbed clean by hand.  The back yard was shares with three other families and the only toilet was at the end of the yard, with a bolt on the inside of a rickety wooden door.  [Quoted in David Kynaston's Family Britain 1951-1957  (New York: Walker and Co, 2009), p. 165.]

To the superficial modern Western mindset, such living conditions today would be regarded not just as appalling,  but a breach of human rights.

Knowing One's Place

Class Consciousness

The British class system--as it once was--remains an oddity.  In 1950 a South African, Dan Jacobson arrived in Britain from South Africa.  He described the "silent language" by which people measured others and by which they, in turn, were measured.  There were "tells" by which people were measured for their membership of a social class.

Jacobson called it a "kind of detective work"

 . . . that reminded him of 'an insect stroking an object ahead of it with its feelings, or of a cat sniffing a person's shoes'--and that the process reflected a society 'deeply obsessively divided by a host of invidious, criss-crossing "social indicators" that would go a long way towards determining relations between its members'.  [David Kynaston, Family Britain: 1951--1957 (New York: Walker and Co, 2009),  p. 135.]

Kynaston agrees that Britain in the 1950's was most certainly a society of class consciousness.  He adds that in a survey of 11,000 respondents to a 1950-51 questionnaire, 90 percent of people assigned themselves to a social class--and to their class separation from others.   Such a phenomenon or reality is indeed foreign to the colonies: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The ubiquity of class and class consciousness remains hard to credit.

Some Social History

The Age of the "Rings" and Their Influence

We have been working our way through David Kynaston's magisterial Family Britain, 1951--1957 (New York: Walker and Co, 2009.)  On page 404, dealing with events in the summer of 1954, we came across the following curio:

George Allen & Unwin published The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Naomi Mitchison, along with Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis, had already contributed praise to the dust jacket, and now they wrote appropriately laudatory reviews.  "Like lighting from a clear sky," declared Lewis in Time & Tide, while Mitchison in the New Statesman called it "a story magnificently told, with every kind of colour and movement and graveness."

Most reviews were positive, though not uncritically so.  "Whimsical drivel with a message?" asked J. "W. Lambert in the Sunday Times.  "No," he answered.  "It sweeps along with a narrative and pictorial force which lifts it above that level."  He did, however, note that it had "no religious spirit of any kind, and to all intents and purposes, no women".  The Daily Telegraph's Peter Green claimed that the prose style "veers from pre-Raphaelite to Boy's Own Paper", albeit conceding that the novel had "an undeniable fascination".  And in Punch, where under Anthony Powell's literary editorship it received the briefest of reviews, Peter Dickinson frankly stated: "I can think of nothing in the book to account for the fact that I find the whole thing absolutely fascinating, despite some of the most infuriating writing."

The most heavyweight critique came from a major literary figure, the Scottish poet and critic Edwin Muir.  "To read it is to be thrown in astonishment," he gladly conceded in the Observer, but insisted that in terms of "human discrimination and depth" there was a fatal shortfall: "Mr Tolkien describes a tremendous conflict between good and evil, on which hangs the future of life upon earth.  But his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immutably evil; and he has no room in his world for a Satan both evil and tragic."

Commercially, the book flourished, being reprinted after six weeks, ahead of the publication in mid-November of The Two Towers, second in the sequence.  It was not yet a cult, though, nor--away from the public prints--was it everyone's cup of tea.  "Don's whimsy" was the private verdict of Angus Wilson, to whom in his own mind the future belonged.  [Op cit, p. 404f.]

It is interesting to look back after over half a century of the trilogy being in print and see the enormous impact it has had on millions of millions of readers (and, latterly, movie goers).

A Realigning of the Chess Pieces

Trumpism without Trump in the U.K.

Theresa May shares much of his agenda, but she’s outfoxing her opponents on all sides and gaining in popularity.

By Michael Brendan Dougherty
National Review Online

Donald Trump began fumbling the ball almost as soon as he ran away with it. The political revolution that was Trumpism is on hold for now, while the White House undergoes a series of scandals. All for reasons that are specific to Donald Trump: his lazy personnel decisions, his egotism, his inability to focus or master the forces that govern the Republican Congress.

What if you could have Trumpism without Donald Trump? That is, what if you could take the same basic issues — sovereignty, immigration ruled by law, and economic policies meant to promote social stability — and get rid of Trump’s moral turpitude, personal indiscipline, and the most noxious and divisive parts of his rhetoric?

Well, it would look a lot like the campaign being run by the Tory party under Theresa May. That is, it would look like an electoral juggernaut with revolutionary potential. . . .

Alternative Multiverses

Theresa May's Inheritance

It seems like yesterday.  Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher, Churchill redivivus, leading Britain to victory in the Falklands War.  Yet, at the same time for many, it has faded in memory.  What was it all about, again?

It turns out that a major sea change had taken place in British society: in 1979 a Gallup poll had shown the British to be the most pessimistic of thirty-one countries surveyed; in 1983 [just four years later] they were the eighth most optimistic.  If you were going to pick one event, or sequence of events, which turned the tide in popular sentiment it would have been the Falklands War.

Robert Tombs, towards the end of his magisterial, The English and Their History [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015] reflects upon the aftermath of the Falklands War and its impact upon the British people.

The first impact was that it did not unite all.  Most significantly it drove the Left and Thatchers critics into the grounds of extremist sentiment, where many now dwell, ideologically separated from the the bulk of British people.  This group has continued, and are now living in a parallel universe--at least for the present.  Who knows what the end game for them will be.

Tombs describes this parallel universe as it was developing in the eighties in Britain.

The Star Chamber Back in Business

BBC mocks Christian MP for keeping Lent

The Barnabas Fund

It would be hard to imagine the BBC mocking a Muslim MP for keeping Ramadan. Yet last week the actions of a Christian MP were questioned and even mocked on television because she came straight to parliament from a Church service marking the start of the Christian fasting period of Lent.

Carol Monaghan the SNP MP for Glasgow North West came straight from an Ash Wednesday service, where traditionally a small ash cross is marked on the forehead, to a parliamentary committee. When a colleague asked what was on her forehead her explanation was met with the protest “but this is going to be broadcast”. As The Spectator put it:  

“To her credit, she kept her ashes intact, explaining: ‘I think they just thought I didn’t want to be embarrassed – but I was not going to rub it off. Many religions have visible symbols and Christians should not feel any embarrassment in either practising their religion or in the public display of religious symbols.’

Had the matter ended there, we might lament the discourtesy shown to the Glasgow MP and move on. Instead, the BBC ran a story about Monaghan’s forehead on its website under the breathless headline: ‘MP Carol Monaghan “not embarrassed” about display of Christian faith’. The BBC Politics Facebook page posted a picture of Monaghan wearing her ashes and asked its followers: ‘Was it appropriate for this MP to go to work with a cross on her forehead?’”

In fact, the BBC article even questioned whether it was legal for Mrs Monaghan to publicly display a cross on her forehead in her workplace i.e. parliament.