'It was a woman who drove me to drink......'

‘And I forgot to thank her…!’

 

There is one thing our politicians know something about. Boozing.

 

I have forgotten how many bars there are in the House of Commons but it’s a lot. It is probably still the case that it is the only place where one can drink legally for 24 hours a day. It has produced some notorious topers, like the late George Brown, and no doubt still does.

 

Now the egregious Alex Salmond, Leader of the Caledonian Porridge Gobblers, is proposing a minimum price for alcohol, in a hopeless attempt to reduce one of Scotland’s traditions. What Scottish pastime will he attack next? Deep-fried Mars bars? Head-butting?

 

Just to show that he is not to be outdone in the ‘How to lose votes’ stakes, Cameroon is said to be toying with the same idea.

 

As it happens, the UK has the priciest beer of  the major beer-drinking nations, according to an Economist survey that has calculated how many minutes a person must work to earn the price of the amber nectar. In Britain it is about 12 minutes; in China only 10. The prize goes to the US with less than 5.

 

And the actual price is nearly the highest. Australia is just in the lead with a price of US$3.70 against the UK’s US$3.65. Nigeria is just 54 cents, which must be the cheapest Guinness on the planet.

 

So do these politicos really think we will drink less if it’s made more pricey?

 

For centuries the British have had a reputation for hard drinking and lascivious women. Shakespeare’s characters always seem to be quaffing something or other. Cruikshank, Gilroy and other cartoonists wonderfully illustrated the incredible amount of boozing that went on in London in Regency times.  The amount put away by the Pickwick Club would have felled a hartebeest.

 

Alcohol features heavily in our cultural and literary traditions.

 

Here is AE Housman:

 

‘Malt does more than Milton can

To justify God’s ways to man’.

 

And GK Chesterton:

 

‘St George he was for England,

And before he killed the dragon,

He drank a pint of English ale

Out of an English flagon’.

 

Keats:

 

‘O for a draught of vintage

That hath been cooled a long age

In the deep delved earth!'

 

Some Tennyson:

 

‘How goes the time?

‘Tis 5 o’clock.

Go fetch a pint of port!’

 

Coleridge:

 

‘And we should cry ‘Beware, beware

His flashing eyes, his floating hair.

Weave a circle  around him thrice

And close your eyes with holy dread.

For he on honey dew has fed

And drunk the milk of paradise’

 

And finally, Eden Philpotts:

 

‘Beer drinking don’t do half the harm of lovemaking!’

 

The Victorians, in their prissy way, tried to control it (only for the lower classes, you will understand).

 

Lloyd George introduced licensing laws during WW1 on the reasonable grounds that turning-up trollied for work in an explosives factory might be a tad –well -  explosive. The new laws were for ‘hostilities-only’. We had to wait for Maggie to loosen them.

 

So what is the prospect of the British giving up the fine old tradition of getting ratarsed now and again?

 

None. Booze is not very price-sensitive. Raise the price and people will simply spend less on non-necessities.

 

So Dave and Wee Jock may try to cut us back in these stressful times, like WC Fields – ‘Before breakfast I never drink anything stronger than gin!’

 

But there was a music-hall song that went

 

‘God damn their eyes

If they ever tries

To keep a poor man from his beer!’

The Grauniad: riding into the sunset?

Seeking to bring a bit of excitement into my humdrum life, I turned to the Annual Report and Accounts of the Guardian Media Group.

 

Over the years I have tried to discover the attraction of the paper for the besandled, Fair Isle pullover wearing, bearded muesli-gobblers who seem to make up the bulk of its readership. I never did. I found it unreadable – prejudiced, lefty and with some really unpleasant writers, such as Toynbee and Alubhai-Brown.

 

Of course, it has always been compulsory viewing for anyone wanting a job in the public service because the Grauniad has always had a half-nelson on job adverts for civil servants and the like. The Wednesday Appointments supplement is huge. That is how the public service came to be what it is today.

 

The figures are intriguing.

 

It has just made a loss before tax of £75.6 million. Its cash and reserves have dwindled over the years from £577.9 million ten years ago to £275.8 million now, a big chunk of this being invested in the hedge funds that it has castigated over the years.

 

It has invested hugely in the on-line version but there is no paywall. It is facing trouble with the unions because its voluntary redundancy scheme tanked.

 

Its main asset is not the newspaper but Autotrader magazine that makes good profits. If GMG decided to sell, it would probably make about £500 million, enough to cover the paper’s losses for a few years yet.

 

The problem is that fewer and fewer people buy the print edition. The on-line version is the third biggest in the world (after the Daily Mail – yes, that’s right – and the NYT, but the advertising revenues are grossly insufficient to cover the print edition losses. Circulation in 10 years has dropped from 410,000 to 216,000 despite the vast number of copies bought by the BBC! (But don’t get complacent – the DT circulation dropped by half in the same period, seemingly falling off a cliff when the Barmy Barclay Brothers took over; as did the Times).

 

It’s not going to happen any time soon; GNG can continue at this loss-rate for ten years.

 

It is always a pity when a newspaper ceases publication.

 

But I remember the days when the Manchester Guardian was the most respected paper in the land. Moving to London debauched it over the years. It has become an object of ridicule and derision.

Oi, you lookin' at my bird?

Just to show that I have a nicer side (so this won’t last long) I thought some might like this pic.

Mrs H rushed into the house yelling that there was a little dead bird in the garden.

Sure enough, there was this chaffinch fledgling flat out on its back, wings spread out, looking seriously dead.

I picked it up, held it for about 10 minutes, when my mystic healing powers kicked
.
It revived completely but when I went to release it, it sank its claws into my finger and refused to go; so I took this pic with my left hand.

When I gave the bird to Mrs H, it flew off immediately.

RIP, Brock the Badger!

At long last the Government has decided to bite the bullet (an apt expression in the circumstances) and authorise the culling of badgers.

 

I had expected the animal rights hooligans and assorted bunny-huggers to be out in force, but their protests have been strangely muted. True there has been a line-up of celebs who don’t have to get a living from the countryside, including the guitarist from a rock-band, a TV luvvie who presents a programme called ‘Springwatch’ (very badly – it is unwatchable, and mostly about him, not the birds and beasties), and that ancient monument David Attenborough.

 

The logic astounds me.

 

Their take is that it is OK to slaughter a fine animal because it has tested TB-positive, even though not showing other signs of actually suffering from the disease, but it is wicked to shoot a badger with bovine TB although it will end its days probably starving to death as it gets weaker.  A domestic pet would be put down to save it further suffering.

 

Leave aside the awful sentimentality, and concentrate on the real issues.

 

Upwards of 25,000 otherwise healthy cattle are slaughtered each year as bovine TB positive. They sometimes include irreplaceable rare breeds. The cost to the tax-payer of this cull is £90,000,000 a year.

 

The badger cull (an animal that few people have seen in the wild because it is nocturnal) will take out 1000 to 3000 over four years in each contaminated area, mostly the rich dairy country of the western counties. Most people would only have seen them as road kill – about 50,000 a year! Although a country boy myself, I have only seen one in the wild, and that was in a bird sanctuary!

 

Doing nothing is not an alternative. Either badgers in ‘at risk’ areas are eliminated or the domestic dairy industry will be decimated.

 

The French, who already flood us with CAP-subsidised milk, would be delighted.

 

 

The vile Euro Arrest Warrant; heading for the bin?

 Don’t hold your breath, but the days of the wretched European Arrest Warrant may be numbered.

 

Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; Dave may be getting something right at last.

 

He has until 2014 to exercise the UK’s opt-out rights on 130 crime and policing laws, which includes the EAW. It will also have the effect of rolling back the jurisdiction of another obscenity, the ECJ.

 

For reasons that may escape you, he will announce his proposals just before the Corby by-election in November,

 

The EAW was originally introduced to allow the speedy extradition of terrorist suspects. Like so many anti-terrorist laws, it has hardly ever been used for its proper purpose. Instead it has frequently been used for trivial ‘crimes’.

 

One of its malign characteristics is that the principle in international law of ‘double criminality’ was rejected. Under this principle the extradition application required that the alleged offence was a crime in both countries.

 

Since the EAW came into force a British person can be extradited for something that is not a crime under our laws, such as Holocaust denial. A particularly outrageous case was of the Australian returning home from the US was taken off the plane whilst in transit at LHR for this offence under a German EAW, a country that he has never visited. He was kept in jail for 3 weeks until a more sensible Judge freed him.

 

And as the Assanje ruling shows, the assumption that the EAW is only issued by a judicial authority i.e. a judge or magistrate exercising judicial powers, is no longer the case.  It can be issued by a civil servant working in a judicial department.

 

There have been some outrageous miscarriages of justice in extraditing people to countries where the administration of criminal law is corrupt or inefficient, and where the rights of the accused are minimal.

 

There was the infamous case of Andreas Symenou. He was accused of manslaughter after a brawl in a Greek nightclub. There was no evidence against him and the case was dropped. Unbeknownst to him, the prosecution appealed and he was duly arrested under an EAW. After 3 years in a Greek jail or under house arrest, the prosecution asked for an acquittal for lack of evidence.

 

Two British businessmen were extradited to Hungary on an EAW in 2005.  Seven years on, they are still awaiting trial. Habeas corpus is not big in Hungary (nor here after Blair).

 

In 1989, an English granny was acquitted of a drugs offence in France. She was unaware that the prosecution appealed in 1990. An EAW was issued in 2005 for an alleged offence committed 15 years before the EAW came into effect, an excellent example of the evils of retroactive law. The case was dropped 5 years later.

 

In recent weeks we have the case of a retired criminal court Judge being served with an EAW, together with his son and  two business colleagues for an alleged Mafia-related money laundering racket in Italy. The Judge promptly had a stroke and escaped the warrant, but the others have been carted off to spend the next 18 months awaiting trial in Rome’s most notorious jail under one of the worst criminal jurisdictions in Europe.

 

So go to it, Dave.  Let it not be another of your pie-crust promises.

Cable, claptrap and tax-havens.......

Cable is grandstanding again on tax havens, but then he is a bit of a single issue fanatic.

 

So I make no apologies for reposting my piece on this with a few updates.

 

We may soon expect to see more posturing and grandstanding about tax havens from St Vincent Cable and the LibDems generally (well, I got that right a year or so ago).

 

Unsurprisingly, there is no evidence so far that they have any idea what they are talking about. So here’s a brief tutorial for Vince, who seems to have a thing about the Isle of Man. Perhaps he hates kippers.

 

Offshore banks attract two main categories of customer – individuals who want to put their stash in a low or no-tax country, and companies that are based in same so as to minimise their tax liabilities, such as the firm that has a debt-collection contract with the UK Tax authorities.

 

The UK Government is between the upper and the nether millstone with companies. The Treasury proposals to clamp down on British multinationals avoiding tax by using tax havens were quietly withdrawn when companies such as WPP (the world’s leading PR and advertising company) smartly decamped to Dublin.

 

But the Government is in another bind; over the years most public buildings have been financed through PFIs – public/private finance initiatives which are really lease-back arrangements where the money is provided by the private sector and the Government is effectively a tenant (it keeps it off the balance sheet, you see) .

 

The £450 million Ministry of Defence offices are owned by a PFI outfit that is incorporated in Jersey and has a Dublin tax residency (Irish corporation tax is much lower). Even more embarrassing, the Home Office is owned by a consortium of financiers through a Luxembourg holding company and a parent registered in Guernsey. And the former Trade Minister was Chairman of an off-shore bank which has been investigated for laundering money from Pakistan, Qatar and Zimbabwe.  Allegedly.

 

Oh dear!

 

The OECD and other meddlers having been pressing the offshore governments for some time over the issue of ‘transparency’ i.e. disclosing confidential customer information to thieving politicians The big tax evaders will go to the no-transparency jurisdictions like Panama, Singapore etc. And do these nitwits seriously believe that Switzerland and Lichtenstein are going to kill the golden goose to satisfy political windbags in Europe and the US?

 

If Obama is looking for a place to start, how about the State of Delaware? Does he know that, according to a piece in The Economist, several US States have large tax-haven business? In Nevada, for example, there is one off-shore bank for every six people. No accounts or details are either sought or published. There is no tax on interest earned by non-state residents. So there you have it; complete secrecy and no tax. Perfect!

 

And would it surprise you, Vince, that the UK is the second largest tax haven after the US? Or that 90 of the world’s 100 largest corporations have off-shore bolt-holes?

 

Here is how to do it. Open the Internet. Create a company in about 20 minutes. Register nominee directors and shareholders. Issue bearer-shares. That’s all there is to it.

 

What kind of sanctions will be imposed on Panama where blind trusts abound and where (like Switzerland and Lichtenstein) disclosure of banking information is a criminal offence?

 

Does Vince really believe that there is a huge pile of dosh in the Cayman Islands?

 

The reality is that the off-shore banks and ‘investment vehicles’ are  brass plates on the wall of  firms of accountants. The money is instantly recycled back to the City, Wall Street etc. That is how Darling managed to steal £830,000,000 of deposits in KSF Isle of Man. The City makes a bundle out of handling the transactions and the Revenue collects big-time.

 

On the topic of KSF, most of the depositors were repaid in full from the compensation scheme. The maximum is £50,000. Not exactly fat-cat tax avoiders. Many ordinary people have off-shore accounts because they are expats without a UK residential address and therefore can’t hold a UK bank account. One poor chap put over £1,000,000 into KSF a couple of days before the Darling larceny. He had just sold his farm in UK on moving to the US, so he had no UK residence for a bank account.

 

Switzerland et al will jerk everyone around until the politicians find some other diversion from the real issues of how to put the Humpty Dumpty economy back together again, since they clearly have no ideas. Meanwhile, billions will be flowing out to Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore. Why the authorities have so little understanding of how you avoid their unpleasant attentions is beyond my ken. When you discover oil under the back garden and have gazillions to shift, the procedure is quite simple.

 

You form a limited company in the Seychelles. The amiable regime there does not require a company to reveal its directors or shareholders or to submit any accounts, merely to re-register annually. You then open a numbered bank account in Switzerland at modest cost in the name of the company. You transfer all your well-deserved moolah to the account. There is now no paper trail between you and your money is safe from Westminster benefit cheats.

 

Job done and trebles all round

'That was the week, that was....'

 

Back in la-la land, the UK media is giving plenty of coverage to the slow-motion train-crash that is Mitt’s campaign. It seems to me that the O camp need do little but sit back and let Mitt make the bullets for them to fire.

 

But it looks as if O himself has a big problem with the emerging horrific story of the murder of the Ambassador.

 

We have obviously been fed a lot of porkies by the spinners from the White House. First we were told that he had been killed instantly when a RPG hit his car as he was going to a safe house. Then we were told that he was asphyxiated when the consulate was torched and take to hospital where a doctor tried to revive him. Now it is clear from a video taken at the scene that he was dragged from his car, murdered, and his body paraded round.

 

Now O is faced with ‘What are you going to do about it?

 

The Israelis would already have done ‘it’.

 

But are we seeing a wind of change in Islamistan?

 

The Economist today felt that the President of Libya did not have either the force or the bottle to tackle the militia responsible for the murder of the Ambassador. As it turned out, his action was not needed because the people themselves threw the villains out into the wilderness. There were  many placards mourning the Ambassador.

 

The latter reminds me more of General Gordon than Lawrence of Arabia. He was more driven by conscience and righteousness than by strategy. He was probably looking for martyrdom and he certainly got it. His legacy was to mire us in Middle Eastern politics for the next 100 years.

 

Andrew Mitchell has dropped himself in deep merde by cussing the Downing Street cops because they wouldn’t let him take his bike into Downing Street. For Gawd’s sake, No. 10 is only a step from the security gate. Why could he not have left his bike with the bobbies? And why is the Bill complaining? One of them may well have made a bob or two by selling the story to the meeja. It will all be forgotten by 2015

 

Andrew has the reputation of being a hard case, which is why he was made Chief Whip – to put a bit of stick about. I guess he will watch his Ps and Qs hereinafter.

 

There is talk of ‘resignation’. I doubt it. The Muppet who messed-up the Murdoch Sky takeover, a far worse offence, got a bigger job!

 

And the proposed merger between BAe and EDAS is turning into a wonderful power-game. It would create by far the world’s biggest aerospace/defence operation, with 220,000 employees, far bigger than Boeing. The Pentagon is said to be rubbing its hands at the prospect of a bargaining chip against the US manufacturers. Congressmen will no doubt start chewing the carpet at the very thought of Johnny Frog getting an ‘in’ to US defence contracts. French, German and Spanish politicians will be aghast at the prospect of the new giant being de-politicised when the Government lose their golden shares.

 

Finally we have had the hilarious silly-season ruckus over the Royal Boobs. The house belongs to Lord Linley, Wills’ uncle. It is so far away from the point where the pic was taken that it is difficult to see it at all. (The more serious security issue is that it could have been a sniper rifle instead of a telephoto lens).

 

So we had the Red Tops spitting with indignation, they who on average produce 10 bristols in every issue.

 

'We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality'.

Muslims, mobs, murder & misinformation........

 

The US intelligence services continue to swap ignorance over events at our missions abroad. Our President claims the Benghazi and Cairo attacks were spontaneous on one day and were planned on another. Our Ambassador to the UN assures member nations that the demonstrations were only in reaction to an anti-Muslim film trailer that went viral while our Secretary of State is forming a panel to investigate the Benghazi attack to learn the real truth.  Was it not Hilary Clinton who said, regarding the uprisings in Libya, that we need to find out who the rebels are? It would appear as if she still does not know.

 

I suspect the two ex Navy Seals who were killed during the same incident as Ambassador Stevens were contracted to identify internal Libyan and foreign terrorist cells operating in the country. Even the US admits they were not there to protect the Ambassador. Nor were they State Department employees. One can but wonder why the Ambassador was even in Benghazi after having reportedly been party to intelligence that a move on Benghazi was afoot.

 

And what about the Ambassador? Initially, he was said to have been wounded and was taken by Libyans to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead from smoke inhalation. Subsequently Stevens was reported to have been sodomized and later dragged through the streets of Benghazi.

 

When the book comes out, and there will certainly be one, we may finally learn more about the Ambassador and the events surrounding his and his staff's demise at the hands of terrorists. He appears to have suffered from a Lawrence of Arabia complex whereby he alone had the talent, charisma and sensitivities to resolve ancient local and regional disputes among the Arab and Berber tribes.

 

Egypt is another story. In spite of initial claims that the anti-Muslim film was written and produced by an American claiming Israeli Jewish heritage, the real culprit was a Copt by the name of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula also known as Sam Bacile. It would appear as if Nakoula has a serious axe to grind with Egyptian Muslims who he accuses, correctly, of persecuting his fellow Copts. Hence, Nakoula produced the film to get back at the Egyptian Muslims. Judging from his personal history as a fraud and criminal, Nakoula had no regard for the incendiary reaction the film would inspire in the Muslim world. His personal vendetta was more important then its consequences.

 

Sadly, our beloved Egyptians, who I always viewed as the intellectual head of Islam and who were always first in moderating extremist Islamic views, have disappointed us. On the other hand, the theory that foreign terrorist cells in Cairo hijacked what was intended to be a peaceful demonstration, could be correct. No doubt that are foreign cells stirring up trouble among Cairo's faithful. The role and importance of these cells has yet to be determined. What is clear is that Egypt has ruined generations of good will gained through practical diplomacy and is now relegated to the heap of ex-Arab Spring states whose future is a reversion to fundamental Islam.

 

Who would have thought that Tunisia would have joined in the fray? The only bastion of religious tolerance, tourism, culture and commerce in North Africa has gone the way of Libya and Algeria. Nor, according to some reports, is Morocco far behind in reversion to type. To be sure, the French are not helping by printing inflammatory cartoons of The Prophet. What in the world ever prompted some second rate publication to do such a thing?  Especially after the experiences with cartoons in Denmark and the assassination of Theo Van Gogh in Holland for anti Islamic remarks and, most of all, the fatwa issued against Salmon Rushdie for his Satanic Verses. Such behavior might be expected from Hollywood, but certainly not from France.

 

Now there is a worldwide appeal for an international law against blasphemy.

The Great Aid Robbery...

Andrew Gilligan had a fine piece in the DT about the foreign aid racket (and we now reveal that both Haymakers are Development Consultants).

 

He reveals that last year, DfID paid almost £500 million to ‘consultants, many of whom get 7-figure incomes, putting them in the same bracket as bankers without the risk. Worse, much of this money went to foreign firms.

 

The boss of one firm got £1.3 million. Another went home with £2.1 million. Salaries over £250,000 are commonplace.

 

An outrageous aspect is that these ‘consultants’ don’t actually do any work. They sit in offices waiting for the invitation to tender. They then write a Technical Proposal and a Financial Proposal. If they get the contract, they then employ a freelance consultant to do the work in Nigeria or India or wherever.

 

So do the guys in the field share in this largesse?

 

Nope!

 

They get a daily fee of around £400 (about the same as the hourly fee of your lawyer). They might also get a daily subsistence allowance that will just about pay for a middling hotel and meals. If the job is in a pleasant place, such as Cape Town or Jamaica the boss will make ‘liaison’ visits which will involve a lot of lunches and dinners with Government.

 

I once had one whose name was Tull. We called him ‘Gull’ – flies over, squawks, sh..ts on you from a height, and flies away.

 

A while back, I was in the enviable position of being on direct contract to the Office of the Prime Minister where a large part of the job was to draft Terms of Reference for consultancy contracts and then evaluate the bids. It was commonplace for the Financial Proposal to specify a rate per head of $2000 a day and pay the guy actually doing the work about $400. Not a bad margin!

 

I priced one such contract at $600,000. The tender price was over $3 million! In the accounts of another there was a sum for ’reimbursables’, expenses incurred in the field reimbursed to the person actually doing the job. In one case that I vetted I knew that not one penny was reimbursed; it was all trousered by the firm.

 

The aid budget is set to rise by£ billion a year – that’s right, billion! DfID is shovelling money out of the door to meet its spending targets, so evidently it is not too fussy about where it goes. Take it from me, DfID has always been concerned with inputs, not outcomes. I once suggested that it should conduct performance audits in later years to see whether a project had actually done any good. The response could have come straight from ‘Yes, Minister’

 

The greatest scandal is that it doesn’t meet its own objectives; it doesn’t do any good, consultancy firms apart.

 

 

Muslim mobs: trying to make sense of it all.........

 

I have been reflecting on what causes mindless outbreaks of violence in Muslim ( not only Arab) countries, with the deaths of innocent people, mostly fellow Muslims, and the destruction of property. To we Westerners it strikes us as repellent, depraved, and barbaric. It exemplifies Muslim backwardness.

 

But it is more complex, and to get a handle on it we need to delve back into history to try to get an understanding of the Muslim psyche.

 

From about the 8th to the 16^th Centuries, Islam dominated the known world. It was the centre not just of military and political power but also of learning – in mathematics, navigation, astronomy, medicine and much else besides. It very nearly took over the whole of Christendom.

 

Then came the Crusades, the expulsion of the ’moors’ from almost the whole of Europe, a reversal of military and political power, and the Renaissance that shifted the epicentre of intellectualism and learning to the West.

 

The Islamic empire then turned inwards upon itself. The men with the beards took over from the men with the swords. The Koran and religiosity stifled intellectual life. Printing was banned. Science was seen as heresy. It continues to this day; more books are published in Greek than in Arabic -  not so much the Ottoman Empire as the Obscurantist Empire. Arabia was constantly humiliated by imperialism, whether political or economic.

 

The result has been an inferiority complex compounded by the extreme difficulty with which Islam accommodates modern life. Islam has never had a Reformation, so it is stuck in the 7^th Century. The religion requires that it is accepted unquestionably, and any deviation can have dire consequences, as we well know.

 

This leads to unreasoning outbursts of rage when the mob is sufficiently incited. Which brings me to a set of conclusions.

 

There is little doubt that there has been nothing spontaneous about the violence. It is an outcome of  deliberate scheming and incitement.

 

The wretched film has been in circulation for months. And yet it only attracted attention in the run-up to 9/1 (the perpetrators of which were Mossad, according to the Islamist line).  It has recently been dubbed into Arabic. There is evidence that it has been extensively tampered with. It has been shown repeatedly on two hard-line Islamist TV channels. The Cairo mob asserted that it had been shown  ‘US State TV’, which does not, of course, exist.  

 

Remember the Danish cartoons furore?

 

This was provoked by a collection of cartoons that had never been published. It cost 100 lives and widespread damage.

 

Cui bono?

 

Well, it is almost political cliché that in relatively unsophisticated societies a demagogue’s route to power should include control of the mob. Ayatollah Khomeini, for example, scored very nicely from his fatwa against Salman Rushdie. There is nothing spontaneous about any of these outbreaks of violence. They are deliberately planned and incited by grandstanding politicians.

 

Is this all a major threat to the West? Maybe.  It is certainly a self-destructive threat to Islam.

Kate, Ambassadors, and 'security'.......

What is it with security?

 

Since 9/11 many of the freedoms that we used to take for granted have been taken away from us in the name of ‘security’, and yet it continues to fail miserably.

 

Take the latest hoo-hah over the Royal bosom.

 

We are told that the offending pix were taken from far away on a public road by a paparazzo with a powerful telephoto lens.

 

It could as easily been a telescopic sight on a sniper rifle.  What on earth were the Royal Protection cops doing to allow her to be exposed to danger in this way in this day?

 

Then there’s the absurd case of Prince Harry.

 

We have seen the pictures of a mobile phone which is actually a murder weapon containing four .22 rounds. How come the security bods didn’t frisk the girls before allowing them into Harry’s room? They would have enjoyed that! Perhaps they were more worried about being accused of sexual harassment, which security shakedowns always are.

 

Which brings me to the murder of the Ambassador and attacks on other American Embassies.

 

Some years ago I had occasion to visit the US Embassy in Islamabad. It is built like a fortress. It has massive outer and inner blast walls that tower in the air. Once you have managed to gain access through the entry door, there’s a whole series of checks to get through automatic security doors before even getting to the reception desk. There are marines toting automatic weapons at every corner.

 

On one occasion, the mob tried to torch it (because of ‘The Satanic Verses’, I was told. When pointed out to my guide that Rushdie was Brit, my guide replied ‘Yes, but we don’t like the Americans!’).

 

The marines opened fire, killing a number and that was the end of that.

 

The US Embassy in Kingston Jamaica is built like a fortress, although there is little by way of a terrorist threat there (just as well; many of the staff are accommodated across the road in a single apartment block that would be a prime target for a big bomb). When I last passed it, a huge security wall was being erected.

 

So how come the mobs appear to have gained relatively easy access to US Embassies in some of the riskiest cities in the world? Why was there an insufficiency of armed marine guards?

 

I note that O has now sent a couple of destroyers (eh?) and more marines to trouble spots.

 

Something about stable doors……….?