Good news on oil - or is it?

Cheaper petrol –what’s not to like?

 

It will put more money in our pockets, reduce transport costs, make business and industry more competitive, and give the economy a further boost.

 

Brent crude is now down to around $60 a barrel with West Texas hovering at $53. Some pundits reckon on a fall to $40 before recovering to $80-ish next year.

 

The conspiracy theorists reckon this is a conspiracy between the US and Saudi Arabia to persuade Putin to drop his support for Assad.

 

Others say the Saudis are trying to undermine the American fracking industry, which has enabled the US to cut its imports by over 8 million barrels per day, equivalent to the entire output of Nigeria and Saudi combined. It will become a net exporter within the next four years and be independent of Gulf oil.

 

So the Saudi strategy just won’t work. Most of the shale output has been hedged for 2015, in addition to which  some producers can survive with prices as low as $50 per barrel and in some cases much lower. Costs will continue to fall as start-up costs are amortised.

 

It will weaken Putin’s grip as the energy-dependent economy of Russia begins to seize-up; prices are now well below production costs and it might be impossible to balance the budget or to fund his lavish rearmament programme. He may – just may – rethink his policy on the Ukraine (although it is just as likely that he will lash out in some way if he is cornered).

 

It will undermine Iran’s Middle East meddling.

 

It will encourage the current bull market in equities.

 

Only it’s not all good news

 

It’s not just oil. Other commodity prices are going south rapidly –iron ore, gold, copper, platinum, sugar, cotton, soybean and most others. This is not such good news.

 

It is a pretty good indication that the world economy is slowing down; the falls are in real money, not just relative to other price levels.. Demand has fallen for energy, minerals and food products as economies have contracted. GDP forecasts have been revised downwards in most countries, including  the big player, China. This is particularly bad news for China’s main commodity suppliers, such as Australia.

 

There are other reasons.

 

QE has pushed-up commodity prices. The Fed is on the brink of ending QE and tightening monetary policy. This signals an increase in the $ interest rate, in which world commodities are priced. High interest rates are an incentive to pump or drill now because it is not good practice to hold large inventories.

 

Rising interest rates encourage portfolios to shift into other asset classes. This is good news for people who depend on bank deposits for a slice of their income and who have been badly hit over the last few years. It is not so good for people with heavy mortgages.

 

And we must not overlook Britain’s own oil industry. Tax revenues will fall even further. As many as 15,000 jobs may be lost. Further investment in North Sea oil will dry up.

 

On the broader front, it may cause further instability in countries already beset with Islamist threats – Nigeria, Libya, Egypt, Algeria and the Sahel. Cash-strapped Oil Sheiks might no longer be able to buy-off the Islamists. In addition, Venezuela is imploding and Brazil, heavily dependent on energy exports, is groaning under a mountain of debt accumulated during the good times.

 

The oil producing countries are bleeding money. To break-even, Russia needs  $105 pb, Venezuela $161, Nigeria $126, and even Saudi requires $98.

 

All this may threaten already fragile world security, when even Saudi is under threat. Northern Nigeria is highly likely to become a Boko Haram stronghold, spreading terrorism further across West Arica. Saudi is betting that that this regional economic shock can be contained for another two years. It would be unwise to take the bet.

 

So the plunge in oil prices is more of a curate’s egg than a total blessing.

 

 

 

Simple torture...........

The ‘perfect storm’ over CIA torture is showing no signs of abating.

 

The NYT carries both comment and a raft of letters, a surprising number of them attempting to justify torture on the spurious grounds that ‘if it saves one American from being beheaded….’ Which it won’t.

 

One English correspondent who claims to have been ‘born in 1944 when V1 rockets were falling on London’ says that enemy prisoners were tortured by the British, as if being a small baby at the time adds credence to his view.

 

Well, I was brought up during WW2. I had some personal experience of POWs. Every day for about two years truck-loads of first Italian then German POWs were delivered to my village to build new housing estates as ‘homes fit for heros’. There were no guards. They fraternised openly with the locals. They made toys for us small boys. In the evening the trucks took them back to their camp.

 

In later life I met a fomer POW in Germany. He had been taken prisoner by the 8th Army in the Desert Campaign. He told me that the next three years were the happiest of his life. He had been sent to work on a farm in Essex, lived there, and was treated as one of the family.

 

A while back there was a TV documentary about a Yorkshire village at Christmas 1945. There was a strict ‘no fraternisation’ rule. The villagers ignored this and invited all the POWs to their Christmas dinners, albeit somewhat meagre because of food rationing.

 

In the past 70 years there has not been a single recorded complaint, claim or allegation of torture, although there were hundreds of thousands of Axis POWs in Britain.

 

British intelligence does not do torture. They get their information by more effective methods – guile, deceit and cunning.

 

Senior German officers were not imprisoned at all. They were lodged in comfortable houses where Intelligence was happy to listen to their bugged conversations. The prison camps were also bugged and a vast amount of intelligence was gained. POWs were quite happy to discuss their roles in the Holocaust with their fellow Germans, not appreciating that the intelligence service contained a substantial number of German-speaking Jewish refugees.

 

There is no justification for torture at any time under any circumstances.

 

For starters, it is illegal under both domestic and iternational law. No exceptions, no excuses.

 

For the ‘Land of the free home of the brave’ to condone torture diminishes it morally and brings it into hatred, ridicule and comtempt. The US loses its respectability and standing in the world, and makes its claims to be the defender of democracy seem absurd and hypocritical.

 

And if this is not good enough for the defenders of torture, here is another good reason not to be tempted to use it.

 

It doesn’t work.

 

The victim of torture will tell his tormenters whatever they wish to hear, regardlessof whether it is true or false, simply to get the pain to stop.

 

Even the head of the Spanish Inquisition recognised this when he said that some would say almost anything to get mercy and others would say nothing and die.

 

 

 

 

Alex 'Wee Eck' Salmond: the mummy returns!

‘It is never difficult to tell the difference between a Scotsman with grievance and a ray of sunshine!’

 

Not to put too fine a point on it, the English are pig-sick of the whining, whinging Caledonian oat-crunchers, with their never-ending catalogue of grievances, constantly complaining about how badly they are treated by the Sassenachs and at the same time stuffing their sporrans with English money.

 

The SNP has flatly refused to accept their hammering  in the nauseating referendum. Brussels-style, they want to keep having referenda until they get their demanded result.

 

Nor are we to have a welcome period of silence from Wee Eck. Stepping down from leadership of the SNP was not an act of contrition, far less an admission of defeat. It was tactical.

 

He is calculating with good reason that the SNP will end up with 52 seats, wipe out Labour and hold the balance of power in the next Parliament, doing dirty deals to help secure a Labour Government which has been soundly rejected by the English. His price will not be merely a vast extension of powers to the Scottish Assembly that has so far proved incapable of effectively exercising the ones it already has.

 

It will be Labour support for yet another Bill to authorise yet another referendum.

 

So we have the bizarre paradox of Dave needing a victory by Labour in Scotland, which may well be achieved via the obnoxious personality of the new SNP leader. His alternative strategy to defuse the Scottish question by creating an English-only polity  is addle-pated. It will not answer the West Lothian question because banning Scots MPs from voting on English issues would result in the Government having a majority on some issues and not others. His ideas would need a federal state and the destruction of the British constitution; that is just not going to happen.

 

And yet he goes on believing that defanging SNP in Parliament after they have decimated Scottish Labour will result in a permanent Tory majority in the Commons. He is delusional.

 

So here’s how Salmond can win referendum Mk 2. Open it to the whole of the UK. There is perfect justice and logic in allowing the nation at large to decide whether to be broken up for the simple reason that it affects this and all future generations of the entire British people. There will be a massive ‘yes’ vote from England, saving all that Barnett-formula money and leaving the Scots to wax fat on ‘their’ oil $50 a barrel.

 

Scots wha hae wi Alex fled!

The BBC and Brand: what's it all about?

What is it with the Beeb and Russell Brand?

 

Two interviews in fairly quick succession on the flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight. What had he to contribute? Reports suggest that both sessions could only be described as pathetic.

 

Then Question  Time, which the BBC had trailed as being Brand vs. Farage (the other panellists must have been well-pleased with that billing!)

 

Presumably, QT is aimed at a serious and intelligent audience. On neither count does Brand qualify. He has the political nous of a thick 12-year old.

 

Now we hear that he is producing a BBC documentary on drug-rehab (for which he may indeed be well-qualified).

 

And just who is this guy? There is a totally false rumour that he is a comedian. A long time ago I had the misfortune to watch him, but only for a few minutes before nausea took over. About as funny as herpes and worse than his contemporary, the wepellent Wossy.

 

And what are his qualifications for making informed and meaningful contributions to a debate on the state of the nation?

 

He has recently inflicted a book (by a vanity publisher?) upon the long-suffering literati that was rubbished by the critics as being silly beyond words. It seems that his knowledge of economics is slightly short of zero. His political stance is 1960’s agitprop. His beliefs can be summed up in six words – ‘bash the banks, screw the rich’. This is perhaps rather hypocritical coming from someone who is not exactly short of a few drinking-vouchers and who pays an enormous rent to a tax exile.

 

The received view is that he has a lot of political capital amongst the chattering classes in the Westminster village. However much he tries to portray himself a  radical hippie he is a thoroughly Establishment figure. He is against elites, but he is one of them. He claims to speak for ‘ordinary’ people, but, with his New Age nonsense, hairiness, and charity-shop dress style  his real constituency is students at the University of Stretchford, the Green blob, and dystopic liberals.

 

A period of silence would be welcome.

 

 

 

Merry Xmas from the Golden Cupids, Chiang Mai

‘Send Newsnight to the knackers yard’

This is the title of Stephen Glover’s splendid hatchet job in this months ‘Oldie’ magazine. It is a curtain-raiser for the storm currently engulfing the BBC over lefty-bias. ‘Hurricane’ more like. The Telegraph goes for the jugular. The Sun has ripped apart the Beeb’s finances, exposing amongst other bad practices, the use of licence payers’ money to fill the multi-million hole in the pension fund instead of increasing employees’ contributions. The Commentator baldly states that the BBC is beyond redemption and should be humanely put down.

 

Glover reminds us of the Lord McAlpine scandal when Newsnight wrongly outed him as a paedophile. A new editor was appointed, one Ian Katz. His previous was deputy editor of – guess what? – yes, The Guardian. He is in good company. The political editor Allegra Stratton and the investigations editor Nick Hopkins are of the same provenance.

 

The audience is going south at an alarming rate.

 

In 2001, it was over one million nightly. By last April it had fallen by nearly half. Paxo himself has described it as ‘made by thirteen-year olds’.

 

And why was the attention-seeking loony-lefty Russell Brand interviewed twice in fairly quick succession? Could it be that the editor thought that he represented the young metropolitan lefties who need to provide the future audience when he is in the forefront of the lunatic fringe?

Plebgate panto........

‘Never go to law’, was the advice of my old law tutor, ‘The winner is out-of-pocket and the loser is irretrievably ruined!’ And nowhere does this apply with greater force than to defamation actions. They are a licence to transfer large quantities of wonga to m’ learned friends.

 

Few will now remember the vastly entertaining case of Jani Allan, the Johannesburg Sunday Times journalist, who was alleged by Channel 4 to have had an affair with Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of the extremist AWB party.

 

There was much titillating evidence about her having had a bit of extracurricular with him at the Voortrekker Monument (actually it was the Paardekraal Monument in Krugersdorp, far less fun than discussing Africa on the steps of the Afrikaner holy of holies with a ‘pig in a safari suit’ as the fragrant Ms Allan called him). There was detailed evidence about the holes in Terre’Blanche’s underpants which added to the gaiety of several nations.

 

With George Carmon on one side and Peter Carter-Ruck on the other this was going to be the clash of the titans and very, very expensive. Jani had made lots of money from her journalistic notoriety. She lost the case and all the money.

 

When Botham and Lamb left the cricket field to sue Iran Khan for libel they were bowled out for £500,000, and had to join the rubber-chicken circuit to pay the costs.

 

So whatever possessed Andrew Mitchell to go after The Sun for libel?

 

Up to that point he had effectively won the Battle of Plebgate. One copper had been jailed, four were sacked, and two resigned. There was common acceptance that he had been stitched-up by the Met.

 

Having been our best Minister for Foreign Embezzlement, he has now ruled himself out of any political resurrection.

 

The real winner was Political Correctness. The offending word was not ‘f*****g, but ‘pleb’. It is absolutely not done to use belittling language to sensitive souls like the Old Bill, even if true. Foul language? No worries, just like the case of the footballer who was done for calling another player ‘a f*****g black c**t’, not because of the foul language but because of ‘black’ – which happened to be the only true word in his rant.

 

But as is well-known, footballers are anti-racist Guardianistas who will stamp on any expression of racism unless made about a white player, as when they threatened to refuse to pay the fee of the entertainer at their annual bash for using the word ‘n**ger. The offender was Reginald D Hunter, the brilliant American who is very black.

 

Now we have the David Mellor panto. Well might the public say ‘who he?’  He was chiefly famous for toe-sucking but not much else besides.

 

Being somewhat tired and emotional he used a bit of colourful language to express his disapproval of his taxi driver’s performance. As we know the Black Cab fraternity are shrinking violets unaccustomed to even the occasional ‘oh bother’, never mind a bit of effing and blinding. The meeja, which also thoroughly disapproves of anything remotely resembling profanity, has been squeezing the last drop of juice out of this non-story for days.

 

As a bonus, Mellor was with his titled squeeze, Lady Chobham, so Grub Street could add ‘toff’ to ‘snob’!

 

As for Lady Thornbird and the white van man, she richly deserved her fate. For using the idiot’s current plaything, Twitter.

Does religion make war, not peace?

Mention Middle East mayhem or any other large-scale violence going on in the world and the Saloon Bar Philosophers are bound to blame ‘all that bloody religious nonsense’.

 

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

 

The carnage over the past two millennia, all in the name of religion, almost defies belief.

 

Christians spent the first 1700 years slaughtering each other in the name of Jesus Christ, the advocate of peace and brotherly-love. Dissenters were burned at the stake, tortured to death, hanged, crucified and otherwise done to death in frightful ways. The Spanish Inquisition became a byword for state-sponsored violence against those who were thought not to cling wholly to the diktats of the Vatican. We shall probably never know how many were killed for ‘the peace of God that passeth all understanding’.

 

The 17^th Century European wars, supposedly in the name of religion killed 35% of the total population.

 

Sunni and Shia continue to this day with their spasmodic  civil war that has been the pattern for at least 1200 years.

 

The history of the Jews is a 2000-year history of attempted genocide.

 

Catholic v. Protestant; Hindu v. Muslim; there has been no shortage of contestants

 

Religion certainly has a great deal of ‘previous’ but there is the question of whether it has been the cause or the pretext.

 

There is a thought-provoking review in The Oldie magazine of a new book, ‘Fields of Blood; Religion and the History of Violence.

 

The main theme is that religion has been made a scapegoat for man’s inherent violence.

 

It must be a powerful argument that religion is used as an incitement to hatred, which is the undoubted case in Islamic terrorism, but it is another to say that religion is the cause when it is more likely to be the sense of humiliation and inadequacy that exists in the Arab world, and therefore jihad becomes an Arab phenomenon, not a religious uprising. It scarcely exists outside the Arab world. Terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan is tribal rather than religious.

 

Mankind are social creatures and this is surely more fundamental in causing conflict than religion per se. We form groups based on language, location, customs, family, tribe, pigment, religion and eventually as distinct races and cultures. Anyone who is not a member of the group is a mistrusted outsider, whether from the next village or another continent. Religious belief is probably the most powerful motivating force for extreme action; if our God is right the other must be Satan. Modern ‘religions’ embrace anti-Semitism, racism, nationalism, Communism and a whole raft of ‘isms’.

 

But no major war in the last two centuries has had religion as its main cause. They have all been based on territory, possession, power, wealth, domination; plus, of course, the deranged ambitions of dictators from Napoleon to Hitler.

 

In the final analysis, it is not about religion. It is about domination.

 

"The fault, dear Brutus, is ………in ourselves."

EU: 'The End is Nigh'....but how long, O Lord, how long?

The EU is  like an old bull in the corrida de toros, staggering around full of barbs from the toreros knowing that the matador will finally put it out of its misery but unsure when. And yet however long this takes, the end is inevitable.

 

In all probability the collapse will begin with the Euro. The entire Eurozone economy is becoming a zombie.

 

Growth in Germany, the engine of Europe, has almost ceased. Their budget surplus is the highest in the world; domestic demand is moribund; the population is both aging and declining; public investment is totally inadequate with inevitable deterioration of infrastructure like roads, bridges and canals.

 

France is a basket case.

 

The Club Med stagers from crisis to crisis and has horrifying unemployment, especially among the young.

 

So who will be the matador? Step forward the unlikely figure of  the Pope.

 

In an astonishing address in Strasbourg, he castigated what he (and many) see as the EU’s failings.

 

He said ‘In recent years, as the European Union has expanded, there has been growing mistrust on the part of citizens towards institutions considered to be aloof, engaged in laying down rules perceived as insensitive to individual peoples, if not downright harmful. In many quarters we encounter a general impression of weariness and aging, of a Europe which is now a “grandmother”, no longer fertile and vibrant. As a result, the great ideas which once inspired Europe seem to have lost their attraction, only to be replaced by the bureaucratic technicalities of its institutions’.

 

He stuck in another barb.

 

He referred to ‘certain rather selfish lifestyles, marked by an opulence which is no longer sustainable and frequently indifferent to the world around us, and especially to the poorest of the poor. To our dismay we see technical and economic questions dominating political debate, to the detriment of genuine concern human beings.  Men and women risk being reduced to mere cogs in a machine that treats them as items of consumption to be exploited’.

 

Two more toreros have entered the corrida.

 

First up, Prodi, the former Brussels Mr Big.

 

He says that Britain is already in a state of withdrawal. Its clout in Brussels is at a very low ebb, partly because of Cameron’s inept diplomacy. The outcome has been that the smaller nations that formerly allied with the UK are now clustering around Germany. The political and economic shambles in France  has left only one player in the Premier League. The reality is that there is now a German Europe, when the original intention was a European Germany.

 

Brexit is likely to cause the whole rickety structure to fall apart like a dilapidated old building; no sudden collapse but a crumbling away so that it becomes uninhabitable. It will not be another Holy Roman Empire that lingered on for centuries.

 

Next, the admirable Owen Patterson, arguably the most able Minister in Cameron’s entourage (which may be why he was sacked).

 

His standpoint is that Britain wants nothing to do with ‘ever closer union’; its future is outside the federalising thrust and we must seize back control over treaty-making. Britain is no longer represented on international bodies which control and regulate much of the world economy. The EU is in charge. He rightly says that Britain should have its seat at the table.

 

He advocates a return to a Europe of the single market, with free trade and effective trading arrangements, and abandon the political aspects of the EU.

 

This all sounds like a case for Brexit. If this comes to pass, as seems increasingly possible, the whole construct will start to disintegrate.

 

And all this is coming from a senior Tory, not from Nigel Farage.

 

We live in interesting times!

 

The Tories need White Van Man..............

Maggie Thatcher had it just right; she knew exactly the voter that she should appeal to. He was dubbed ‘Mondeo man’, typified by the Essex diamond geezer who had set up his own business, and  did well under the Tories. Another phenomenon was the ‘barrow boy’, the young guy from East London, Basildon, Southend who became a dealer in the City after the ‘big-bang’ (another Maggie revolution) sent the 3-hour lunch traditional city-types into history.

 

Their standard tipple was champagne instead of lager. They drove Beemers. They were working class, sons and daughters of dockers and Dagenham wage-slaves. But they had ambition, drive, guts, and a risk-taking mentality.

 

Two Thatcherite measures were revolutionary in that they created a new class of proletarian capitalists, the ‘property owning democracy’.

 

The first was the sale of council houses at heavily discounted prices. It brought home-ownership to millions who earlier could only have dreamt of it. The economic effect was immeasurable, giving a valuable asset to people who formerly had none. It slashed the deficits on Councils’ housing revenue accounts. Many sold expensive inner-city properties when the moratoria on re-sale expired, and bought nicer houses in the suburbs; social mobility in action!

 

Now first-time buyers have been virtually forced out of the market by the failure of Government housing policies leading to rapid price-inflation.

 

The second was the opportunity for ordinary people to become small shareholders when they got preferential treatment in the ‘Tell Sid’ privatisation of nationalised industries. It’s a mystery why Cameron failed to do this with Royal Mail.

 

1980 to 1990 was a golden, exciting age. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; but to be young was very heaven’.

 

But more than 20 years ago I predicted that a political vacuum was being created post-Maggie by the abandonment by all parties of the great mass of predominantly white, working-class people. The emphasis switched to the rights – real or imagined – of minorities ((a former Mayor of London vouchsafed that if you bribed enough minorities with council grants you ended up with a majority).

 

By 2000 or thereabouts politicians with working class backgrounds were becoming an endangered species. The old sons-of-toil who had worked on the factory floor or down the pit, and had served during the war, were the victims of change and time and were mostly displaced by college boys. Middle-class Labour councillors would prescribe all-in wrestling as the entertainment of choice at the local theatre for ‘our people’, when actually the man from the Ford Tractor factory wanted something rather more cerebral and his little daughter wanted the ballet.

 

(Incidentally the Essex Farmers Hunt was heavily biased towards second-hand car salesmen made-good, people in ‘tyres’, small builders and so on. The wrong target for the class-warriors).

 

Under Brown, when regulation of the City was almost scrapped, the professional spivs moved in from around the globe and we went into freefall in  2008.

 

Governments have pursued causes fashionable amongst the Notting Hill elites, such as banning fox hunting, and  smoking just about everywhere, gay ‘marriage’, whilst the economy went to hell in a handcart, unemployment rose uncontrollably, retirees saw their investment incomes collapse when interest rates went south, pitiful educational standards produced a generation of illiterates, and the NHS veered between crisis and scandal.

 

They fostered the great myth of the ‘multicultural society’. We will long suffer the consequences of that misguided price of social engineering.

 

And involved Britain in a pointless war in Afghanistan, the longest continuous conflict ever whilst slashing the defence budget to pay for a 37% increase in foreign aid.

 

Immigration has only recently become a respectable topic of conversation amongst the chattering classes, who have belatedly woken up to the fact that it has become a major political issue, especially amongst those who, unlike the elite, have to live with the consequences of a flood of aliens.

 

The Tories must appeal to ‘white van-man’.

 

Too many politicians are recruited from people of the wrong sort. They represent a class that has no means of understanding the concerns of what used to be known as ‘People of the middling-sort’, the aspirational working-class family who want to get on.

 

Today, politicians of all stripes are almost wholly alienated from the people. They have no idea whatsoever what it is like trying to bring up a family when jobs are uncertain, education is questionable, law-and-order tends to fix on criminalising ordinary folk with a whole spate of new offences that would have been regarded as either risible or oppressive a decade earlier. Hate speech, indeed. Smoking in the pub.

 

The Westminster village where the political elite lives – not just politicians but their camp-followers in the media, lobbyists, PR hacks and the rest - is like a US ‘gated community’. Its denizens know little and care less about what happens outside the gates.

 

But, as the old cliché would have it, ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. UKIP is filling it.

 

 

 

 

Jihadis, passportss and piffle.....

Cameron should be dubbed ‘Taurus’, he is that full of bull.

 

From the beginning, he has spread it around like a farmer in spring. We had the promise of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. More recently we have had his grandstanding on the €2 billion increase in the membership fees to the Euroclub – ‘No way will I pay this by December 1^st’.. Meaning ‘I’ll pay up after the Rochester by-election’.

 

Nobody believes for a moment that he is going to win the argument over EU immigration. Or that he will get concessions from Brussels that will provide a respectable platform for staying in the club, or, indeed, that a plausible, genuine referendum will be held at all. People still have bitter memories about how they were bamboozled by Heath.

 

Now we are told that he is going to prevent British-born jihadi recruits from returning from Syria and Iraq by issuing ‘temporary exclusion orders’ which will cancel their passports and put them on a ‘no-fly’ list.

 

In other words, he will make sure that they are kept in the bosom of ISIS so that they can become fully-trained explosives experts instead of mere cannon-fodder. They can then return to Britain on forged passports, and the security services will have thereby lost track of them.

 

The obvious alternative is to detain them on their return to the UK for prosecution, or restriction on movements, or sent for deradicalisation.  Not beyond the capability of the immigration authority, now that the disastrous Border Agency has been dumped and  Mrs May put in charge? Stopping them from going in the first place when there are good prospects that we will be relieved of the problem by them getting killed is not necessarily the perfect answer.

 

The ban will last for two years. During this time suspect jihadists may be interviewed by police. This might necessarily be in Syria or Iraq, since they will not be able to travel to somewhere a tad safer. Any volunteers?

 

As for confiscating passports, Cameron’s ‘smack of firm government’ is further bull. There is no right to be issued with a passport; it is the Home Secretary’s prerogative to issue, refuse, or withdraw a passport. The government also has power to prevent people from travelling abroad in certain circumstances, and the police have been given extra powers to seize passports. This power is used quite frequently; the demented Islamist Anjem Choudary has just expressed a fervent wish to go and live in the Islamic State. He can’t because Mrs May has confiscated his passport, when she should be paying his air fare. Business class.

 

Then there is the tricky problem of dual passports. Lose one, use one!

 

And the three Canadians recently murdered in the name of Mohammed died at the hands of jihadis who had been refused passports.

 

Lefty lawyers such as Michael Manley have said that this would make people stateless, contrary to international law. Complete nonsense. A passport is not a certificate of citizenship. The main criteria are birth or blood, except when citizenship is acquired by e.g. naturalisation. Loss of a passport is not loss of citizenship.

 

The problem that Dave ought to be addressing is what to do with returnees.

 

If they come back secretly, under the new Counter Terrorism Act they will face 5 years in jail solely because of that.

 

It is estimated that 500 young Muslims have travelled to Syria, 30 have been killed, and 250 have returned home, most of them probably chastened and disillusioned. The Danish, German, and Swedish answer is to ‘deradicalise’ them – reverse brain-washing. In the UK there is a programme, Channel, that runs rehabilitation programmes. There were around 1300 referrals last year. In contrast, there have been only five successful prosecutions.

 

Returnees might not be the main problem. ISIS has called for domestic jihadis to spread terror such as the fouled Remembrance Day plot. There has been no obvious Government response to this.

 

The Government is all bark and no dog.