Jeremy Corbyn – ain’tcha sick of him?

They never learn, do they!  For months before the General Election the media ran an unremitting campaign of vilification, mockery and misrepresentation against Nigel Farage. The more they did so, the more UKIP’s vote increased.

 

Now they are doing the same with Corbyn and each day his support in the polls grows, so that he now looks to be unstoppable, proving the old Barnum adage that the only bad publicity is no publicity.

 

He makes the front page every day. The current Telegraph has two headline pieces and 8 or 9 comment pieces

 

Of course, this may suit the Tories who envisage themselves to be the ‘natural party of government’ and in power for the foreseeable future, and the Lib-Dems who may see the fragmentation for the Labour Party that will surely follow as their opportunity for resurrection form the political grave.

 

The Parliamentary system demands an effective opposition to keep the Government in check. If Labour implodes, it is inevitable that back-bench Tories will start to make mischief, especially over the EU referendum.

 

As the proverb has it, ‘be careful what you wish for; you may receive it!’

 

 

Claire Short's chickens come home to roost............

The egregious Clare Short’s rant about the Chilcot inquiry almost certainly means that she is going to get roasted. Her come-uppance has been a long while in coming. No doubt Chilcot will make some reference to her threat to resign from the Blair Cabinet over war in Iraq and then voted to support it.

She first gained notoriety during the crisis in Montserrat when nearly half the island was destroyed  by the eruption of its volcano. The capital completely disappeared under volcanic mud. This included the only viable port. The airport was totally destroyed. Most of the good agricultural land remains in the ‘no-go’ area. The entire population of 15,000 was evacuated to the US and UK (it now stands at 5,000).

And how did the Secretary of State for International Development react to this disaster  in what was and still is a British Colony?

She refused to pay it even a short visit.

When faced with the need to construct a new airport, her Department selected a site after minimal local consultation, which the people said was in absolutely the wrong place. It is.

Her response to this was that ‘They will be wanting golden elephants next’, whatever that was supposed to mean. Not that she was very receptive to advice from any quarter. When she visited South Africa, her DFID advisor told me that she was the easiest Minister to brief ever. She never listened to anybody!

But her lasting achievement was the betrayal of white farmers in Zimbabwe with repercussions that will continue to be felt well into the future.

The Lancaster House Agreement that settled the new constitution had a clause that protected the private property rights of white farmers for the first 10 years. The Thatcher led government undertook  to provide the money needed to purchase their land for redistribution. The US Government provided funds to enable land to be redistributed on a ‘willing buyer, willing seller basis’.

By the end of the 10-year moratorium the promised Funds  had not materialized. Only £44 million had come through against a budget of $US 2 billion..

The new Labour Government ratted on the Agreement.

In a letter to the Zimbabwe Minister of Agriculture, Clare Short said that "we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe." She went on to write "We are a new government from diverse backgrounds, without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and, as you know, we were colonised, not colonisers."

She further informed the Zimbabwean government that the election of a Labour government “without links to former colonial interests” meant Britain no longer had any “special responsibility to meet the cost of land purchases

The inevitable consequence of this cynical repudiation of a binding agreement by Labour had its inevitable consequence.

Mugabe confiscated 4,500 white-owned farms without any compensation and  the main plank of the economy was ruined. Farmers were murdered if they resisted the confiscation of land which had been wild bush before they arrived. The whole economy became a total basket case, and the currency collapsed. The country was totally impoverished.

That is her lasting legacy.

Kiddy-fiddling; police hot on the trail

The police are back on the trail of claims of child abuse and worse which are of considerable antiquity and absorb such an amount of manpower resources that the Old Bill is quite unable to investigate petty crimes such as burglary.

 

Now they are after poor old Harvey Proctor, the former Tory MP for Basildon and Billericay. At a press conference, Harvey revealed that he was alleged to have been a member of a gang of big-shots who regularly raped, assaulted and murdered teenage boys in posh surroundings like Dolphin Square.

 

The gang is supposed to have included Edward Heath (well, it would, wouldn’t it!), Leon Brittan (ditto), and the Heads of MI5 and MI6, the former Chief of the Defence Staff Lord Bramall, and General Sir Hugh Beach. No doubt dotty old Lord Janner might expect a call from the Met in due course.

 

The fact is that Harvey and Ted couldn’t abide each other. HP was an acolyte of Enoch Powell and well to the right of the Tory Party.

 

HP was forced to resign from Parliament after being convicted and fined for homosexual offences that would not be offences today.

 

All this is alleged to have taken place around 30 years ago.

 

Then there is the complete farce of the police ‘enquiries’ into alleged paedophile activities by Ted Heath. No less than five police forces are involved.

 

This has been not merely absurd but outrageous. What possessed the Wiltshire police to hold a photo-call for the media outside Heath’s former residence if not simply grandstanding? Never mind ruining the reputation of a man who devoted his life to public service so long as plod can get the front page.

 

And yet Heath had constant 24-hour police  protection for the whole time that he was prominent in politics until his death. There was a police car outside his house at all times. I saw it every time I walked by his house in Salisbury.

 

So how come the Special Branch boys never spotted Ted sneaking off for a bit of kiddy-fiddling.

 

Then we turn to the interminable inquiry into child abuse at a children’s’ home in Jersey. It is alleged that Ted was at it there, too. Except that the only time he is known to have visited Jersey was in his yacht, Morning Cloud. He carried a large crew and yet we are asked to believe that not one of them noticed was Ted was up to.

 

The whole enquiry could have been a ‘Carry-on’ film script. The Jersey rozzers had got the idea that there were mass graves near the children’s home, so they started digging. It would seem that the original holes were dug as part of a location scene for a TV police series (Bergerac?).

 

Then they found some human remains that got them rather excited until it turned out that they had been there since about the 15^th Century.

 

Will we next hear that the Met is investigating the murders in London of two small boys and that the chief suspect is believed to be one Richard Plantagenet?

 

Maybe the police should be charged under Section 5 of the Criminal Law Act.

 

Wasting police time!

WW2; my part in our victory......

6^th April 1945. We were playing in the street with some mates when two        Wellington bomber passed almost overhead. My brother looked up just at the moment they collided. Moments later there was the sound of an enormous explosion. There was nothing recognisable as an aircraft. There was only an aluminium shower floating slowly to earth.

 

There was one parachute. Then the burning fuel from the plane caught up with it, there was a brief flare as it burnt up almost immediately and the airman fell free-fall about 1000 feet.

 

We were off a full tilt, running or on our bikes. But the first person on the scene was our school-friend Janet who lived on the opposite side of the road from the impact.

 

The main wreckage had fallen in a field just a few yards from our country railway station. Some debris had on  the line, closing it for quite a time, but by some miracle left the station building and waiting room untouched.

 

Janet stumbled across a flying-boot and then wished she hadn’t. It contained a foot!

 

By the time we arrived, the firemen were already damping down the wreckage and invited us to go away (or words to that effect). Callous little devils that we were, we gave no thought to the sudden deaths of perhaps eight or ten young men.

 

We were after loot, especially Perspex from the plane’s windows which we would carve into all manner of things, like rings and knuckle-dusters.

 

Epilogue. Searching for hard facts to support 70-year-old memories, I am indebted to David King, Chairman of the Aircrew Remembrance Society for the following information:

 

 

‘The Wellington Collision you witnessed accrued on the 6^th April 1945, both aircraft from 26 O.T.U. Little Horwood, Wellingtons, serial No. HE928, flown by F/Lt D L Wise, and serial No.LN540 flown by F/Of M L Hore’. He provide a map showing the point of impact together with a photo of one of the engines, which has been donated to Bletchley Park.

 

Nuclear Iran; what's the big deal?

The Iran deal may be Obama’s lasting legacy, but not if  the more Neanderthal members of Congress have their way.

 

And yet whichever way you look at it, the agreement is both tough and as good as the West is likely to get. It has provisions which are not only the most stringent ever imposed on a nuclear-ambitious nation, but are likely to have the positive result of re-admitting  Iran to respectable society and putting an end to the ‘Great Satan’ nonsense that has bedevilled US/Iranian relations for a generation.

 

And yet there is little in the media about the detail.

 

First up, Iran will have to destroy 98% of its enriched uranium and all the weapons-quality uranium, remove two-thirds of its centrifuges and all its advanced centrifuges, stop all enrichment at its Fordo nuclear plant and moth-ball its plutonium reactor

 

Until the IAEC is satisfied that there has been total compliance, all economic sanctions will remain in force. All facilities are liable to spot checks and monitoring at any time.

All these steps must be completed to the satisfaction of the International Atomic Energy Agency. If the Iranians are caught red-handed breaking the terms, there are ‘snap-back; provisions whereby sanctions would be automatically and instantly re-imposed without the need for agreement between the sanctioning nations.

 

The naysayers contend that the predicted leap-forward of the Iranian economy when not burdened with sanctions would enable Iran to push forward an even more ambitious nuclear programme after the agreement expires in 15 years. Perhaps, but realpolitik says that the other signatory nations will not agree to extending sanctions now that there is an agreement that they regard as acceptable regardless of the largely ill-informed views  of grandstanding right-wingers in Congress.

 

The latter also contend that greater prosperity would enable Iran to increase its financing of terrorism. Again, this may be so but one might say ‘Well, what else is new?’ If there is no agreement Iran will continue to finance terrorism regardless. A more likely scenario is that the Iranian people are tired of the deprivation and suffering resulting from sanctions and will demand a return to normality and well-being that relief would bring and which is long overdue.

 

If the antis in Congress have their way, Iran will simply accelerate its nuclear programme, and the US will be left isolated and humiliated.

Never has ‘carpe diem’ seemed so relevant.

 

Calais cock-up.......

Ah, sweet mystery of life; why is it that the Masters of the Universe look for difficult solutions when facing simple problems. The solution to the migrant disaster in Calais is simple.

 

The West Africans are economic migrants. They have no business trying to come to the UK from countries such as Nigeria, one of the richest in the world (admittedly most of it is stolen by the elites, but that is not our problem). Many are French-speakers who seem not to be welcome by their former colonial rulers, who in any case are far less generous than the soft British when it comes to jobs, housing, and hand-outs.

 

It the French are not willing to accept them, they should invoke EU law and send them back to their first port of entry into Europe, which is almost certainly Italy from whence the authorities have been quietly helping them over the borders of other countries.

 

The alternative is to air-lift them back to their native lands. Whatever the French decide, the fact is that it is a French problem, not ours, and we are not taking any illegals.

 

So much for the West Africans. What about the other illegals, from Syria and Somalia?

 

Another matter altogether. They are refugees and the countries to which they flee have obligations under the UN Convention on Refugees.

 

 A refugee is defined as  "A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it’.

 

That seems to be a pretty good description for Somalis and Syrians. The fact that they are ‘illegals’ is irelevant. The Convention goes on to say that

A refugee has the right to be free from penalties pertaining to the illegality of their entry to or presence within a country, if it can be shown that they acted in good faith- that is, if the refugee believes that there was ample cause for their illegal entry/presence, i.e. to escape threats upon their life or freedom, and if they swiftly declare their presence.  The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of article 1, enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence. (Article 31).

 

So sending them back, as the Standard 6 noise-makers advocate, is not an option. But there is another more positive solution at least partially.

 

We now appreciate that the Syrians are frequently educated and professionally-qualified. Unlike Africans, these are not people who have been exposed to our concept of civilization for two or three centuries. They come from one of the cradles of civilization. Many speak flawless English, as we have seen from TV news interviews.

 

So we should get amongst them and cherry-pick those who could be economically useful. Our own economy is suffering a chronic and serious skills-shortage.

 

But Germany needs 200,000 immigrants to make up for its declining population. As ‘Stonewall’ Jackson is alleged to have said ‘Blessed is he whose cause is just; but thrice blessed is he who gets his blow in fust’.