Gotterdammerung for Mugabe?

Is it too much to hope that reports from Zimbabwe of an uprising by Mugabe’s ‘veterans’   means that Götterdämmerung has finally arrived for Comrade Bob and his thieving, murdering henchmen?

 

Their legacy is a state that no longer exists in any recognisable form, total financial ruin, and starving children in what was formerly the breadbasket of Central Africa, and the wealthiest country in the region.

 

So what went wrong?

 

There are contemporary commentators who blame it all on Dr Owen. But he had absolutely nothing to do with the peace agreement of 1979. He was out of office following the Thatcher landslide earlier. He was only one of a succession of leading British (and American) politicians who failed to solve the UDI conundrum.

 

Peter Carrington, the architect of Lancaster,  is described in a recently published book as  ‘morally vacuous, scheming and duplicitous’. In reality, it was he more than anyone who by deft diplomacy solved a problem that had defeated successive British governments since 1965

 

The Lancaster House Agreement was elegantly and subtly drafted to give something for everyone but not everything to anybody.

 

Crucially, it decreed a completely new constitution based on ‘one man, one vote’, which previously the white parties had flatly refused to consider on the belief that giving the vote to unsophisticated and uneducated people was a recipe for total collapse.

 

However, it also created 20 reserved ‘white’ seats until 1987.

 

Crucially, compulsory land redistribution was deferred for ten years; until then the issue would be dealt with on a ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ basis. The British and American governments established a compensation fund, and in the first year 70,000 of the landless were resettled.

 

The fund was US$2 billion, but by 1997 only US$44 million had been spent.

 

Then the wheels came off.

 

1997 saw the Blair conquest. Appointed as Minister for Overseas Development was the egregious Clare Short, arguably the worst person ever to occupy that post against some pretty stiff competition.

 

Quite out of the blue she reneged totally on the essential land compensation agreement. She wrote to the Zimbabwe Government saying 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”. In short, racist white colonials are not getting any British money!

 

Mugabe was under great pressure from his ‘veterans’ for their share of the spoils of war; and so began the farm confiscations that are now almost complete, as is the total destruction of the economy.

 

He may have played the lead role in this continuing tragedy, but he did not cause it.

 

The real villain is back in the obscurity from which she should never have emerged.

 

Brexit: waiting for Armageddon

And so to Brexit.

 

‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive…..’

 

To the evident astonishment of the establishment the world was the same on 24^th June as it was on 23^rd. Brexit did not suddenly consign us all to a post-EU Siberia.

 

The media got it wrong, as did the pollsters (no surprise there, then). At the end of the day, they mostly climbed aboard the ‘leave’ bandwagon, apart from the BBC which clung to ‘remain’ even as the ship went down.

 

They predicted the immediate collapse of the UK economy, since when the FTSE has roared away. Incomes are rising, especially for the lowest paid. The number of people in employment is at a record level. Unemployment is about as low as it gets.

 

‘But’ they say ‘The GBP has tanked against the USD’. About the same level as 2001.. ‘And house prices are falling’. In London, perhaps, where the average house price is 6 times that of Liverpool. The downside of falling prices is that it slows the construction industry, but the upside is for first-time buyers who ae unable to get on the housing ladder.

 

At exactly the same time as the commentators were telling us that the economy was in freefall and we were all doomed, the Bank of England was announcing that Brexit had had no marked effect on the economy.

 

But an unexpected outcome has been the virulence from the ‘stayers’.

 

Here is the view of a student who has yet to contribute anything to the society that has given him his advantages at the expense of taxpayers comprising the white geriatric morons who voted ‘leave’.

 

‘The pale, old, white and stale majority with one eye on ruddy-faced patriotism, have opted for isolation over unity’.

 

This is Giles Coren of the Times as reported by ‘The Oldie magazine’:

 

‘The wrinkly bastards stitched us young ‘uns up good and proper. From their stair-lifts and Zimmer-frames, their electric recliner beds, and their walk-in baths, they reached out with their wizened old writing hands to make their wobbly crosses and screwed their children and their children’s’ children for a thousand generations’.

 

Well, young men, if you had got off your arses to vote the result may have been more to your liking. The over-50s knuckle-draggers did just that.

 

And no, they are not a bunch of geriatric racists who were voting against immigration. The polls show that the main issue was the nature of the EU itself, loftily undemocratic and run by an arrogant bureaucracy. The British do not take kindly to being bossed around and told what to do by jobsworths, especially foreign ones.

 

Taking over TIGMOO!

With all eyes on the Tory shoo-in, the chatterati are not noticing what is going on in This Great Movement of Ours.

 

Corbyn and comrades dream of yesterday, the golden age when Red Ken was busy destroying the GLC, and providing pubic largess to every group of loonies looking for cash, on the principle that if you get enough minorities in the bag , you have a majority

 

These are nasty people. They have no wish to get a Commons majority. That is far too bourgeois. They want to ensure that every part of the body politic is controlled by Corbyn’s Commissars and fully compliant with the Communist Manifesto. The strategy is to infiltrate Trade Unions, local councils, fellow-travelling Socialist strongholds like the NUT.

 

They hark back to the glorious days of the 60’s and 70’s, when Governments danced to Arthur Scargill’s tune. Red Robbo could bring an entire industry to a standstill, Del-boy Hatton brought Liverpool City Council to the verge of bankruptcy, and the heavy industrial areas became rust-belts.

 

Revolutionaries? They are as reactionary as it is possible to get

 

Momentum is the offspring of Militant Tendency. ‘Entryism’, Trotsky’s concept of taking over a political party and subverting it from the inside was the method. Corbyn knows all about it; he was one of the originals forty years ago, when ‘loony left’ had become a cliché.

 

The target is the Labour Party itself; by taking over local branches they can control the party. They know from experience how easy it is; party members rarely attend meetings in any numbers, so outvoting them is no big problem. Then to the main task of deselecting sitting MPs and replacing them with the ideologically pure. Their dream would be the abolition of fixed-term parliaments; no more General Elections!.  In the world of Marx and Trotsky, the party never gives up power.

 

There is nothing remotely new about Corbynism

 

It’s just déjà vu all over again!

How to get on in politics. Fail!

‘Few things in life are more agreeable than seeing your neighbour fall off his roof’: Confucius.

 

‘Tory leadership: Theresa May warns EU migration could rise in the wake of the Brexit vote’. Telegraph headline.

 

If she is still in place after the leadership contest, this is a racing certainty based on her form.

 

Last year, immigration hit 630,000. This was a slight improvement on the previous year when the figure was 641,000. When she took over in 2010, the total was 591,000, which at least shows a certain consistency even if totally contrary to Tory manifesto promises of ‘tens of thousands, not hundreds’.

 

At the last count the foreign population of Britain was 8.5 million, a hefty percentage of the total.

 

And yet she has moved from ‘also ran’ to favourite in what passes for a leadership contest. The on-going farce in what is left of the Labour party is nothing compared with the shin-kicking, eyeball-gouging Donnybrook going on amongst the Tories.

 

Now she is advocating using the 3 million-plus Europeans as hostages, in her Brexit negotiations with Brussels. This is beyond doubt the most immoral and deplorable statement to be made by any politician during the whole referendum campaign. It elevates xenophobia to a political policy. She is supported in this by Hammond, the Foreign Secretary – another ‘get off the field and strengthen the side’ Tory lightweight.

 

She was immediately condemned by Andrea Leadsom who made it clear that the security of EU workers would be guaranteed; people were not there to be used as bargaining chips.

 

Andrea Who? A couple of weeks ago hardly anyone had ever heard of her. Now she is mounting a serious challenge to Teflon Tess.

 

And finally………..

Telegraph headline ‘Andrea Leadsom surges ahead…….’

No more than three minutes later ‘May surges ahead…….’

 

Tories seem to surge a lot

May for PM? Maybe!

These are salad days for Grub Street. Almost every day a front-page story drops into the media’s laps like over-ripe  fruit. There is so much stuff that sub-editors would be driven to distraction, except there are no longer any subs. The media prowls the field after the battle, bayonetting the wounded.

 

The headlines have written themselves; here’s a sample:

 

‘Stop Johnson’ plot may delay contest for months’

Osbourne mulls deal to make Boris PM.

Boris withdraws.

 

And just by way of a change

 

‘Corbyn crisis’

 

The story changes literally by the hour. ‘The man of tomorrow’  yesterday is yesterday’s man today.

 

On Wednesday, it was a shoo-in for Gove. On Thursday, it became the turn of the Home Secretary.

 

That Teresa May is now favourite when only a few days ago the bookies had her as an ‘also-ran’ is clear proof that politics has become deranged.

 

She has but one aptitude – survivability. She is the longest serving Home Secretary for about half a century, in a job that is a notorious graveyard for ambitious politicians.

 

One of the biggest issues in the referendum campaign was immigration - the total failure to control it, the promise to bring numbers down when in fact they spun out of control, the scandal over border force naval cutters or, rather, lack of them. In every respect, her management of border controls has been an abject failure. The consequence is that HMG has not the faintest idea about numbers, illegals, asylum seekers or much else apart from the fact that immigration is three times as high as the Government’s promise.

 

Some of her activities – or lack of them – border on the bizarre.

 

Despite being continually frustrated by deportation orders being set aside by the courts as a result of ECHR judgements, she rejected the chance to get rid of ECHR jurisdiction and revert to the position pre-1998 and the Human Rights Act. Otherwise ECHR judgements would be persuasive only, meaning that the courts would be free to follow them or not. At the same time, she refused to exercise an option to cease to recognise the oppressive European Arrest Warrant.

 

And when one of the biggest policing scandals of all time emerged, the neglect of duty or even connivance of all the regulatory bodies to take action against  child abuse by Pakistanis against young white girls that had gone on for decades, her head was well below the parapet.

 

To add to the gaiety of nations, there is now a spate of hair-pulling and eye-scratching between Teflon Tess and Sarah Vain, Gove’s wife, over an e-mail  that got into the wrong hands; it was a list of orders and instructions from this latter-day Lady Macbeth to Gove on how to deal with Boris.

 

The question that the Tory Party appears not to be asking itself is ‘Will she appeal to voters?’ She does not come across as empathetic, but her ambition is almost palpable. She carefully kept her head below the parapet during the referendum campaign, showing no real preference for either side. Likeable? Electable? Hmm!

 

And at the end of the day the Establishment is still missing the point.

 

It was not merely, or even principally, about ‘in’ or ‘out’. It was anti ‘them’, the condescending denizens of the Westminster Village who still believe that 17.5 million voters are  misguided fools.

 

It was an update of Cromwell’s advice to corrupt and useless MPs.

 

‘You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’