O goes OTT.....

O is going over the top. He is leaning more and more left every day and what's more bizarre he is treating the Presidency like his own personal fiefdom and in the process is attempting to create a public image of himself as the best president America ever had. Trouble is, he has to rewrite history in order to promote the intended image and many are taking umbrage.

O insists on penalizing the rich to make the poor wealthy. This policy is a hallmark of his national budgets and has been a major sticking point with the opposition in the House of Representatives. As they have the power of the purse and are controlled by Republicans, the budget's future looks glum.

But O carries on insisting that we need to spend more to stimulate the economy and we need to finance this spending by taxing the rich. In fairness, he has agreed to make some cuts, but at a rate which may be too little too late.

O has a bevy of economists who swear by his Keynesian economic theories. I find them rather compelling myself, but do not claim to have mastered the subject. A big problem with O's theory is to him, spending has been a matter of reinforcing the welfare state. Giving money away is a far cry from stimulating the economy.

While I may see some logic in Keynes, I see none in perpetuating the well-being of jobless and idle citizens who are content to accept welfare rather than enter into gainful employment. One problem is that the type of employment they are fit for is not gainful when compared to what they get from welfare.

The drinking man's diet......

I continue to ascribe my sylph-like figure to the drinking man’s diet that I designed a year or so back.

A typical day’s consumption would be a kipper for breakfast (must have one oily fish a week, at least), a papaya for lunch, one only pint of beer at The Dog & Pessary at beer o’clock,  red wine at wine o’clock (only one bottle, mind), beef casserole in beer for dinner (and possibly a modest fruit salad marinated in Madeira), ending with a couple of gold watches as a night cap. Another favourite is a pate of chicken liver, olive oil (no butter),garlic, and either a splash of brandy or Appleton’s rum.

Of course, when I get the results of my annual blood-test next week , the Quack will once more tut-tut about my liver function being less than perfect. There’s nothing to be done about it. It is a side effect of my medication for gout.

As a result of this abstemiousness, I have lost 30 lbs. and have maintained  my weight at a lithe 212 lbs. for over a year, so I can now take my weight on my elbows once more.

Should I copyright this and make a fortune like Dr Atkins?

Warning: when using this diet do not drive or operate machinery. May cause drowsiness.

Immigration: trying to make sense of it all....

Whether politicians like it or not,  immigration is now well up the political agenda.

Let’s try and make sense of it all, because there sure is a lot of nonsense about.

Britain is a creature of immigration

In time out of mind people have come to these shores from somewhere else, perhaps even when there was  a land bridge with the European mainland.

In recorded history we have had a constant succession of intruders, mostly with malice aforethought; the Romans who civilised us; the Angles, Saxons, Danes, Jutes, Norsemen over 1000 years, and then the Normans who tried a bit of ethnic cleansing and scorched earth, destroyed the superior civilisation of the English, and tried but failed to turn us into French. We turned them into English instead.

The French have been trying a repeat process for centuries, and still are.

We had the first influx of Jews and then expelled them.

Due to the perfidiousness of the French in abrogating the Treaty of Nantes and their relentless persecution of Protestants, we began to receive a huge influx of Huguenots after Charles II granted them ‘denizenship’. They were as welcome as the flowers in spring. They represented all that was best in craftsmanship and enterprise. The English churches raised money to relieve their poverty. House-to-house collections raised £40,000, millions in today’s money

They were an incalculable asset to England. They brought a whole raft of new skills and technologies.

They brought new wool-dying techniques to Barnstaple that would make it famous. They became tapestry weavers, spinners, woodcarvers, and calico workers. They created whole new industries – leatherwork, fans, girdles, needles, soap, vinegar, and revolutionised the silk industry. They transformed the manufacture of paper. From a zero start, they created 200 paper mills; they produced all the bank-notepaper for the new Bank of England, and they started the first newspaper press. . Several became the first directors of the Bank of England. Their contribution to the British economy was enormous, but this early example of off-shoring was disastrous for the French

Is estimated that 7%% of us have Huguenot blood.

The trend continued unabated during the 18^th and 19^th Centuries. We acquired people of genius, like Brunel (the father of Isambard Kingdom, the engineer). He was the first to devise mass production and the production line for the manufacture of pulley blocks at the naval workshops in Portsmouth, the largest factory in the world in Nelson’s time.

We became home to Herschel, the mathematician and astronomer of genius (his sister became the first woman to become a Fellow of the Royal Society in the early 19^th Century).

And many others.

After Cromwell gave qualified permission for the Jews to return we had the next  of many influxes, first Sephardi and then Ashkenazi as a result of pogroms all over Europe. There was another wave in the late 19^th C and it is ironic to read in the contemporary press the kind of shrill comments that we hear now about the dirty, diseased, ignorant, non-English speaking foreigners coming here to inflict Lord knows what on the indigenous. What is remarkable is the within a very short space of time they had integrated so unobtrusively that  their presence went generally unremarked upon. And they certainly produced some big hitters – Ricardo, the Sassoons, the Rothschilds and so on. They also helped finance the upper classes by their daughters marrying into aristocratic families.

The last big arrival of Jews was the Nazi ethnic cleansing which over the years has produced to this day a disproportionately high number of top politicians.

At the end of WW2, we took in DPs (displaced persons for all over Europe), large numbers of Italians, and then – and this is where the plot changes – Caribbeans.

The latter were welcomed especially into the NHS and transport services where there was a serious manpower shortage, but this was the point at which race and culture became serious issues.

I now put my head into the lion’s den by reflecting on which groups of immigrants make a positive contribution to contemporary Britain.

A good place to start perhaps is educational achievement

From memory, the league table goes something like this.

1.   Chinese and SE Asians. It is reported that in schools having a large minority of Chinese kids they raise the standards of the whole school on the basis that ‘a rising tide floats all boats’.

2.   Indians. Both groups seem to have an astonishing capacity for mathematics.

3.   White English and Caribbeans equal. I am not quite sure what to make of this. Are the Caribbean getting better or the English getting worse?

4.   Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. The only common feature between them is religion. Is Islam a fetter on learning?  And if so, how come it doesn’t apply to Ismaili Muslims?

My purely empirical impression, not backed up by evidence, is that Group 1 are hard-working, mostly law  abiding (Chinese crime seems to occur within the Chinese community from what I have read) and keep themselves to themselves.

Indians are ambitious, middle class, integrate (and inter-marry) more or less effortlessly into the native population. Their contribution to the UK economy is massive. (And to our first-class cricket teams!).

And then there’s the Europeans. Under current EU rules we can’t do anything about migration from the EU, but how valid are the complaints about Polish plumbers and the rest?

So where did it all go tits-up?

Originally throughout our history immigration has been driven by the economic imperative.

Then somewhere in the late 20^th Century, it was hi-jacked by the race relations industry, the Guardianistas, the bleeding hearts and in later years by NuLab determined to open the floodgates and create a client electorate.

We now have a ‘benefits’ imperative that encourages people to come here because a month of state benefits will be more than annual earnings where they come from.

So it would seem that a solution is to ensure a ‘benefits’ regime in which none are paid until immigrants have contributed to the national pot for a period of years

And immigration policy should embrace a total exclusion on people who come from countries that have no cultural, historic, linguistic or other ties to the UK, and who have little to contribute to the national economy. I include Somalis, Yemenis, Ethiopians, and others of that ilk. Why are they here?

But with the little LibDem tail wagging the big Tory dog, don’t hold your breath that anything will change soon.

Libel: boring but important.......

Well, kiss me neck; Dave is actually going to keep a promise – the one about reforming the libel laws. I missed it in the DT, but then it wasn’t very prominent.

The proposals will be important to bloggers.

Its main but not only purpose is to put an end to the abuse of ‘libel tourism’ whereby wealthy foreigners, mainly American, sue in the English courts to silence their critics. Often the connection with England is tenuous to say the least, such as publication on a Ukrainian web-site that secured only 6 readers in England. I find this particularly offensive because it is not designed to protect the reputation of the plaintiff but to intimidate the defendant into silence by threat of legal action that the plaintiff can  afford and the defendant cannot.

The intention is to make cases fairer, simpler and cheaper. The legal procedures will be speeded up; new rules will require the areas of dispute to be narrowed before trial; and cases will be heard by a judge without a jury.

One big change is that the plaintiff must show serious harm to his reputation.

A second is that qualified privilege will be extended. This has always been a tricky defence, especially the burden of showing that the matter complained of was in the public interest, something quite different form ‘interesting to the public’.

In its place comes a defence of ‘honest opinion’. This will be especially helpful in peer-reviewed academic journals, so that scientists and other professionals can do their work without fear of an expensive law suit.

There will also be a definition of ‘responsible journalism’ (no easy task I guess!).

The definition will cover the seriousness of the allegation made, fact-checking, whether comment had been sought, the tone of the article and the circumstances of publication.

From our blogging perspective, an important feature is that greater protection will be given to ‘secondary’ publishers, such as booksellers and to internet service providers and web-sites on which other people write the content.

Is this tantamount to an indemnity for blogging sites, leaving the legal liability with the blogger alone?

We shall have to await the text of the bill. There may well be significant amendments arising from Leveson (apropos which we have seen no reference to the disgusting outing of the blogger ,nightjar, by the Times through illegal hacking).

But it does seem as if Mr Justice Eady, the Judge Jeffreys of the defamation court, will be able to spend more time with his pension.

Meanwhile, take care out there!

Immigration controls? No problem!

From being a topic that no politician wanted to discuss ever since Enoch’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech (which he never said) immigration is now well up the political agenda, like it or not.

So if I were newly-appointed Commissar of Immigration here are my rules:

·        Illegals to be returned immediately by immigration officials at the port of entry to the country from which they departed for the UK. That will stop the French exporting them to us from Sangatte.

·        No asylum seekers allowed in who have arrived in the UK from a friendly country.

·        Asylum seekers to be electronically tagged.

·        Those with student visas to report to a named police station every week.

·        Those given deportation orders to be made to leave the UK forthwith. Where they go is their business, but not at our expense. That will get round the human rights fiasco.

·        Appeals against immigration decisions only to be made from outside the UK. That will stop them abusing the judicial process.

·        No legal aid to be payable for immigration cases.

·        No state benefit to be paid to immigrants until they have paid 5 years NI contributions.

·        ‘Dependents’ to include only one wife and children of the marriage. That will stop the extended families abusing the privilege.

·        Application for work-permits only to be made from outside the UK. That will stop people with tourist visas from bucking the system.

·        Work permits to be granted on the basis of needed skills, not salary level.

·        Travel to ‘terrorist’ countries to require an exit visa. That will help to identify those who go to Pakistan for a couple of weeks further education in bomb-making. A fresh entry visa would then be needed for non-UK passport holders.

·        Conviction of an imprisonable offence  to lead to automatic deportation on expiry of sentence.

Er………that’s it!

Gissa job, Dave.

Look out, Dave: UKIP's behind you........

The recent outbreak of local elections has seen much self-congratulation by Labour for dishing the Tories which puts them roughly back where they were before they got donnered last time around (leaving aside Bradford where they had their noses rubbed in it by the Islamic ‘Respect’ Party, and the irrepressible Boffo Johnson retaining the Mayoralty of London).

But the commentators seem to missing the true significance.

The real winner was UKIP which got 13% of the vote. It is well on the way to replacing Lib Dems as the third force in English politics.

This is all bad news for the Conservative Party. UKIP voters tend to be disillusioned Tories.

There will be EU elections in 2014. Last time UKIP came in 2^nd with 16.5% of the vote. Next time they may well do much better as the EU moves up the agenda of concerns for the electorate. This could provide the momentum for the General Election the following year.

Europe is not going off the front page any time soon. 2014 will be a momentous year.

In 2 years time we shall still be feeling the aftermath of the Euro crisis, and further IMF contributions at the expense of the UK taxpayer.

This the last opportunity for the UK to decide  whether to irrevocably opt in to EU jurisdiction over 130 police and justice measures (including the awful EWA). And after the debacles over the deportation of terrorists, I can envisage the electorate going completely ape if a British government agrees to even more judicial power going to Brussels.

There will be a Commons vote on ratifying the EU 7-year budget framework, probably entailing a rise but at best  freeze, which, at a time of possible tax hikes in the UK, will be about as welcome as a condom salesman in a nunnery.

The EU will implement a provision in the Lisbon Treaty which will enable the Eurozone (assuming it still exists) to gang-up on the UK to pass financial regulations that could have serious implications for our financial services industry.

All this is good news for UKIP and bad news for the Tories who may well see their share of the vote haemorrhaging away as disaffected Tory voters change allegiance or merely sit on their hands.

The Tories in particular have always played down EU affairs in their election campaigns for fear of reopening old ’Maastricht’ wounds. Now Europe is  a serious headline issue amongst voters. The People’s Pledge, a pressure group campaigning for a referendum on the UK’s continuing membership of the EU, recently held a referendum in one English parliamentary constituency. There was a turn-out of 13,000 and an 89% vote in favour of a referendum. Even Vince Cable, Europhile and star of the Lib Dems, has launched a fierce attack on the Brussels bureaucracy and called for a more limited Europe. The tectonic plates are shifting, to use a right-on cliché.

So what is Dave to do?

Well, for starters he can spell out clear policies on the return of powers, a more flexible EU, remaining outside the Euro, exercising the block opt-out on police and justice matters, shrinking the EU budget especially the CAP. And not gold-plating the EU regulations that are implemented, and, indeed, simply ignoring those that are detrimental to British interests.

And then he might consider ditching some of his more crack-pot notions that have no resonance with the voters.

Who gives a flying fig for House of Lords reform except for a few deranged Libdems? It does a pretty good job as it is in protecting us from elective dictatorship of the Commons. Leaving aside the tired old has-beens elevated to the Lords after being life-long under-achievers in the Commons, it is a repository of a vast array of talent, experience and expertise amongst those of their Lordships who would scorn the idea of campaigning for election. I once had to appear before the Lords Committee on Science. Amongst the committee membership were such luminaries a s Lord Ritchie-Calder, one of the most distinguished scientists of the20th century.

What mandate does he have for wasting Parliamentary time and taxpayers’ money on homosexual ‘marriages’ ?

And how about keeping a few promises, like the reform of the defamation laws that make the English courts a magnet for American libel-tourists and throttle free speech. As with ‘super-injunctions that allow wealthy celebs to conceal their misdoings behind an injunction wherein the media is forbidden even to report that an injunction has been granted.

He might also wake up to the fact that increasing foreign aid by 37% at the same time as abolishing the names of famous old regiments and making 20,000 soldiers redundant does not sit too well with his natural constituency

So much to do, Dave; so little time!

Watch our; there’s lawyer about!

Everybody who blogs, twitters, or uses Facebook (or any other ‘social media’) would be wise to consider the recent case of Cairns v. Modi.

Chris Cairns is a cricketer; Lalit Modi is a former chairman of the IPL.

Modi tweeted (or twittered) that Cairns had been involved in match-fixing.

Cairns sued for defamation and won.

Lodi’s 24-word tweet is likely to cost him over £1 million.

This should make us think quite hard about what we publish on-line, because although we may have the illusion of anonymity and that we are merely addressing a few ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ we are in fact exposing ourselves in a very public way – and permanently, because what you put on the internet stays there. What’s more, the web-site can easily hand over your name and address.

You may be tempted to put things on the internet that you would not say to a person’s face from behind an imagined cloak of anonymity.

But a libel is a libel. If you blog something libellous a plaintiff might first go for the web-site, in which case it would most likely join you in the action.

When I was advising politicians about whether they should say or do something, I would tell them to ask themselves how it would look on the front page of the local newspaper.

'The light's on at Signpost......!'

I should first explain the rather curious title.

On the Manx motor-bike racing course, the last check-point before the finish is called ‘Signpost’. When a rider passes it, a light comes on to tell him he has nearly completed his race. So when a Manxman says ‘the light’s on at Signpost, he means that you are getting to the end of your journey through this vale of tears. And that is when we tend to look back rather than forwards.

(It is also the title of a book by our late resident famous author, George MacDonald Frazier, best known for his ‘Flashman’ series. In fact, most of his career was as a script-writer on Hollywood blockbusters. The book is autobiographical and is interspersed with his political views, which are a shade to the right of Heligoland. He also wrote the finest book from the perspective of the ordinary Private in the Burma Campaign called ‘Quartered safely out here’, a quote from Kipling and still in print).

One of the comments on ’75 not out’ suggested that we have seen moral, social and political deterioration in our lifetime, and that things were better in the 30’s and 40’s. Let’s have a look at these.

‘Moral’ deterioration is certainly apparent in a perceived widespread lack of a sense of right and wrong, manifested by the looting in London last year in which educated middle-class young people gleefully participated (they’re not laughing now). However,WW2 and military service afterwards created a culture of fiddling, skiving and beating the system. It was perfectly OK to ’liberate’ all sorts of public property. A friend in the army was part of a ‘milk scam’; the dairy would only deliver half the ordered quantity, double-invoice, and split the difference  with the cook-house staff at the end of the week. He later became a parson.

Likewise previously accepted sexual mores. And a good thing, too, say I. The concept of sexual morals was foisted on us by the Church. It must have caused untold misery over the centuries, and liberation came with the invention of ‘the pill’, one of the greatest breakthroughs of all time, and the main cause of the long-overdue liberation of women. The religious concept was based not on ‘morals’ but on inheritance. In the days before birth control it was important that estates were inherited by biological heirs.

Until the pill, it is likely that many (most?) working class marriages were of the shotgun variety which ended in tears at a time when divorce was almost impossible for any but the well-heeled, and largely unknown. In my village we had a divorced couple of retired colonials. They were a source of great interest; no-one had ever seen a divorced couple before.

Adolescent youngsters are sexual time-bombs, because that is what nature intended. If they can now indulge in a little horizontal jogging that’s fine with me as long as they recognise that the health consequences can be dire if they overdo it. Our pre-marital years were spent in an a torment of frustration. Kids today have never had it so good – or so often. I suspect that those who rant about teen-age promiscuity are secretly envious that they themselves never had the chance to go at it like a frog up a pump.

Social values? I generally write out of experience or study, so I can’t speak with much authority about the 1930’s, which are as remote from us today as the 1850’s were then. However, I can refer back to the early life of my father.

He was born in 1907, left school at 13, became an apprentice iron-moulder at Vickers Armstrong’s in the Scotswood Road, Newcastle (where the bus-wheel flew off in ‘Blaydon Races’), and lost his job in the Great Depression. He walked to London to find work as a building-site labourer, a big come-down for a skilled craftsman. It was harsh manual labour and my mother used to recount how she had to wash him because his hands were ragged from rough work.

It was a hard life.

In ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, George Orwell recounts how he saw grinding poverty in the industrial north, sparse food, stinking dirty houses, high rents for damp-infested rooms 70 yards from the nearest privy shared by the whole row, and back-breaking shifts in damp and dangerous coal-mines. And no 5-day week or paid holidays, medical benefits or company pensions for the workers.

Until the Swinging Sixties heralded a social revolution, Britain was riven with class-distinction, a social apartheid. I well recall the appalling snobbery that I faced as a working-class officer in the Army. To be fair social mobility was pretty easy for grammar school oiks; I became what the pollsters would call middle class by the time I was 20. We were also almost unbelievably deferential compared with today. Peter Cook did a good hatchet-job on this when he gave his wonderfully cruel parody of Harold Macmillan with Harold in the audience, and political satire became very big in the 60’s to 80’s. It has now disappeared; modern politics is beyond satire.

There was censorship of books which was effectively destroyed by the failure of the prosecution in the ’Lady Chatterley’ trial (when Counsel for the Crown achieved overnight fame by asking the jury whether this was the sort of book to be read ‘by your wife and servants’). The acid test under the1959 Obscene Publications Act was whether the publication was of literary merit. I doubt whether many would pass that test today, but who cares?

There was theatre censorship that had gone on for 231 years until it was abandoned as late as 1968. This is what the DT had to say:

The Lord Chamberlain’s office had long been a channel for fathoms-deep reserves of reactionary philistinism. No other outlook could have banned the phrase “up periscopes” from being used on stage because, in the view of the Lord Chamberlain’s comptrollers, more impressionable minds than theirs might be incited to “commit buggery”.

So society was not quite as free as some might fondly imagine. In the present century we have sacrificed freedoms that in the past people had fought and died for under the pretext of ‘ant-terrorism’. As Ben Franklin said ‘Those who would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety’, but rather curiously this refuses to become a political issue. Of course, there are plenty of fools around  who say ‘if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear’ and yet that is precisely when you do have something to fear.

Political standards?

Between 1930 and the 1980’s politics was very polarized and class-based. That was the problem then. Today it is homogenised. That is the problem now.

The 30’s was a time of political pygmies in the West. Ramsey Macdonald; Stanley Baldwin; Neville Chamberlain?

And then there was Adolf. In a new book, AN Wilson takes the view that Hitler’s creed has been inherited by the liberal intelligentsia, as epitomised by Blair who believed that he was entitled to impose his own values on other countries by force, and that the Olympics and other extravaganzas are subconscious re-enactments of Nuremburg Rallies (the Olympic torch was invented for the Nazi Olympics in 1936 and designed and made by the arms manufacturer, Krupp).

By contrast the 1940’s produced political giants; Winston above all but also Nye Bevan, Ernie Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Attlee, Supermac, and many others. This was before politics ceased to be a calling and became a career. Then reversion with Wilson (clever but slippery), and the worst of all time, Heath, whose traitorous lies led us into the present mess in Europe.

‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’, though; or in this case the woman, and along came Maggie to save the ship of state just as it was sinking. (I will always have a soft spot for Maggie because of two wonderful gaffes. Referring to Willie Whitelaw, the Deputy PM, she memorably observed that ‘every Prime Minister should have a Willie!’.  And sitting on a huge artillery piece during an Army visit, when the Sergeant Major handed her the firing lanyard she said ‘If I pull this will it jerk me off?’).

Major was a decent enough fellow, and all the ‘sleaze’ of his final administration – the toe-sucking, the cash-for-questions -  would not raise a single eyebrow in comparison with the institutional corruption of the expenses scandal and Murdoch. If the electorate had known that John Major was hung like a grandfather clock and was discussing Uganda with Edwina Currie, Blair wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Unremarked upon is the dearth of great Parliamentarians, MPs who were devoted to the Commons and were superb orators and debaters. I am thinking of Enoch Powell, Michael Foot, Tony Benn, who were friends despite their political differences, and, back in the 30’s and40’s, MP’s like Lloyd George (who also had a sex-life far more lurid than today’s political Lotharios. But people were more discreet then; as Mrs. Patrick Campbell said ‘It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you don’t do it in  the street and frighten the horses!’).

So where does this all leave us? A re-run of the 30’s, perhaps,  with economic depression, increasing and widening poverty, civil unrest in a number of countries, Greek unemployment at 25%, Spanish youth unemployment the same, reversion to the protectionism that was so disastrous back then, loss of faith in democracy, the rise of Fascism?

Déjà vu all over again?

When TV news can report the deaths of 2 more British soldiers in Helmand as last item after the weather forecast and just before the sports report, I can only surmise that we have entered the Age of Indifference.

Spiking the football.......

Pity that politics went downhill over our lifetimes. There were some good spells, but as of late our legislative assembly halls are schools for scoundrels. What seems to be brewing in the EU is but one example. I read this morning that a dark plot is underway to remake the EU into a United States of Europe with a strong leader and no room for countries that seek to maintain their own cultural identity; that would be the UK of course. This was reported in today's Express in an article entitled "EU Plot to Scrap Britain".

Newt Gingrich gave his umteenth resignation speech stating that he was not quitting, but 'transitioning' out of the Republican primaries. He is very bitter and seems to take personally all the negative attacks launched at him by Romney and others. Newt is his own worst enemy and has thin skin to boot. He has not vowed to support Romney as would be expected of an also ran, but to promote Conservative principles in the US.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, O is spiking the football. In the rare event that you are unfamiliar with this expression, it is taken from American football. When some players score a goal their pride is so intense that they slam the football onto the ground as hard as they can and then do a bit of a jig. If carried too far, it results in an official penalty. It is somewhat akin to a soccer player who, after scoring, races down the pitch while removing his jersey and then jumps into the waiting arms of a fellow player.

Well, O did his spiking over the Bin Laden assassination. He marked the one year anniversary of the event by tripping to Afghanistan, signing a pledge for long term support and then visiting with the troops. At the same time he launched a political ad featuring his role in the assassination and suggesting that Romney would not have taken such a decision. The right wing is irate with this sort of behavior. 

However, the intended impact was achieved, O is building and icon of himself and Romney is forced to go on the defensive. Old Mitt will have to pull some much higher class political tricks out of the bag to match this type of hype.

'75 not out!'......

Come 3^rd May and I’m three-quarters of the way to the telegram from Her Maj. I definitely have a great future behind me. I was 2 when WW2 began and 7 when it finished, 9 before I had my first ice-cream, 10 before I saw a banana. Oh the deprivation of wartime! But now I get a free TV licence!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. We kids had almost total freedom to come and go as we pleased. The only men about the village were mostly oldies, like George D the painter and decorator who got shell-shocked in WW1, had a terrible tremor and was never heard to speak; and George B, the groundsman for our cricket pitch who was a conshie in WW1 and was for ever after known as Slacker Beckett. No bathroom, no hot water, no inside toilet, no cars, not much of anything really!

Britain has been involved in 28 wars since 1945, so never a dull moment. We were carted off to the armed forces at 18, where there was a wide choice of places to be shot at – Palestine, Korea, Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, the Suez Canal Zone, to name but a few. The 15 years after the war were the pits. Bread rationing, which had never happened during the war, was introduced by the Labour government. Sweets only came off ration in time for the Coronation in 1953. Sex had not yet been invented. But beer was about 8p a pint, cigarettes about  22p.

I missed the Swinging Sixties. I was in Africa for the whole decade where I experienced the dying days of colonialism. I was fated to become a tiny cog in the dismantling machine in Zambia and Malawi in the 60s, and Namibia and Rhodesia in the 80s.

The seventies were a terrible time for Britain, but a very good time for me, despite there being the worst administration of all time under Heath. We dumped the Empire as quickly as we could, and were tricked into joining the ’European Common Market’; now we are living through the grinding of the tectonic plates as the whole rotten edifice begins to fall apart. We had the 3-day week (the joke at the time was that Liverpool Corporation workers refused to do the extra time). And we sat and watched while Red Robbo and other specimens of pond-life systematically dismantled British manufacturing industry.

The 80s were tremendous fun, when everybody except the miners seemed to be in party mood, when business was fuelled by alcohol not Class A drugs, and we had ‘The Two Ronnies’ and ‘Morecambe  and Wise on the telly. The Big Bang was champagne at 11 a.m., ‘barrow boys’ making shedloads of money in the City, and Porsches and Aston Martins in the pub car-park of a Sunday morning

I spent the nineties and noughties all over the place,  the Caribbean, the Balkans, Malawi, South Africa, Uganda,  Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, the US, Pakistan. I have been either a rolling-stone or a permanent expat for all but 19 years in the last 50.

I last took sick-leave in 1964.

But each decade was better than the previous. Although we spent the best years of our lives under the threat of nuclear extermination, the baddies were beaten in the end; the Nazis, the Communists, apartheid, Maoism, the Khymer Rouge, the Balkan genociders, all gone during the past 70 years.

Our standard of living has improved out of all recognition. But quality of life? Hmmm……Time was when I could smoke in most any place except in Church; when I could go out for a drink without worrying that the cops were lurking around the corner with a breathalyser; when I could say pretty well what I liked without being accused of racism, homophobia, or verbal assault; when I could get on a flight without enduring the ludicrous attentions of ‘security’ and travel as a valued passenger, not as self-loading cargo.

Now the Islamists look like winning; the draconian ‘anti-terrorist’ laws, far more stringent than anything even in WW2, have created the kind of repressive and intolerant state that the Islamists so love. Free speech is a thing of the past; vulgar abuse is now a ‘hate crime’; Magna Carta is dead history; habeas corpus almost extinct, along with double jeopardy and the rule against disclosure of ‘previous’. Dave has not done a single thing to undo the abuses of the Blair reign of terror, including the 3,500 new offences created by the Revd. Tony, and the wretched Human Rights Act which enabled the Wicked Witch to set up lucrative new chambers expressly to exploit the rich pickings therefrom.

For those who say ‘fings ain’t what they used to be’ I say ‘No, matey, they never were; nostalgia is not what it was!’

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.