Who wants to ban e-cigs?

It would seem that the antis campaigning against e-cigarettes are working their way through the entire Liars Lexicon.

 

‘They’ torture statistics so that they will say anything the antis want.

 

‘They’ cherry-pick scientific information to fit their case.

 

‘They’ present opinion as fact.

 

‘They’ pervert logic to assert ‘proofs’ or actually non-proofs.

 

‘They’ say that there is no proof that e-liquid, which consists of an inert oil and a tiny amount of nicotine (or not; you can order the nicotine-free version)  plus a whole range of flavours from Havana cigar and Jack Daniels to bubble-gum, is harmless.

 

Try applying that ‘logic’ to all human activity. It will not get you far. You can’t prove a negative! But turn it around. What ‘they’ are really saying is that there is no proof that it is harmful. There is not a scrap of scientific evidence that the vapour given off by the liquid is harmful in any way. Nothing is burned. The liquid is simply heated; it has no similarity with tobacco smoke and all its harmful outcomes; it leaves no odour on your clothes; no tacky deposits on your furnishings and TV screen; no dirty ash trays; no eye-watering smell of smoke.

 

The UK Government’s own tobacco tsar has described e-cigs as the greatest breakthrough in public health this century, with the potential to save millions of lives in being.

 

‘They’ say that it is a ‘gateway’ product that will encourage people, especially the young, to take up tobacco.

 

The logic of this is impenetrable.

 

What possible reason could there be for someone who has never smoked to take up e-cigs? If ‘they’ can produce one example out of the entire population of the planet it would be as much a surprise as the Second Coming’.

 

‘They’ say that e-cigs don’t stop people smoking tobacco. Tell that to the 2 million+ people in UK who have switched. Until two years ago I was a two-pack a day man. Not anymore. I don’t have the slightest craving for a cigarette, and when out of curiosity I have tried one I find them devoid of any flavour or satisfaction whatsoever. Apart from which I am saving at least £3000 a year.

 

So who are ‘they’?

 

This piece by an American scientist may give a clue.

 

‘Big Pharma — notably Pfizer, GSK, Johnson and Johnson — sell multi-millions worth of near-useless NRT products and drugs each year. Not coincidentally, these same companies subsidise the public-health non-profits and academic centres very generously. Yet when these groups attack e-cigs and warn smokers to stick with the pharma products, they never disclose that funding. Similarly, the pervasive hyper-regulation of e-cigs at the state and local level has a lot to do with cigarette excise taxes propping up local budgets — as of now, e-cigs are largely untaxed’.

                                         

People are simply no longer buying nicotine patches and other modern versions of snake oil because they are expensive and don’t work.

 

And naturally there is Big Tobacco who will readily provide funding to any scientist who is ready to produce ‘evidence’ that will support the required conclusion.

 

It is now looking as if Big Tobacco will now adopt ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ as a future strategy. There are already signs that they are buying into the market.

 

So why are politicians so eager to join the banning brigade?

 

Because they can! ‘Banning’ is what politicians do.

 

 

 

 

 

EU v.s Russia: game, set, and .............?

Ukraine ‘is a far away country of which we know nothing’; Minsk has an eerie resonance in 2015 with Munich in 1937, and the so-called peace agreement is of the same worth as Chamberlain’s ‘piece of paper’.

 

If this was a  ploy  by Merckel to expose Putin as a double-crossing two-faced liar it was pointless. The world already knew this.

 

When this imbroglio first started I maintained it was all due to meddling by the EU in its attempts to bring the Ukraine within the Brussels orbit, and, by implication, eventually into NATO. Others, including John Redwood MP, have since endorsed my view.

 

The prospect of parking Western tanks on Putin’s front lawn, was bound to be taken as a provocation which played completely into Putin’s hands to give a pretext for all subsequent events, beginning with the annexation of the Crimea.

 

Everyone knows that the Minsk peace deal is a very bad joke. Putin will simply ensure that the Ukraine continues to be destabilised.

 

But it goes deeper.

 

Since the early 90s the West has been gloating over ‘winning’ the Cold War. The problem is that it has not moved on. The intelligent policy  would have been to have brought Russia in from the cold. Instead it treated Russia with a degree of disdain, a gangster state with a mockery of democracy, run by corrupt oligarchs who are Putin’s friends and backers. Very true, as it is true of many Western allies.

 

EU policy was to push up to the borders of Russia by signing on new members who possessed very few of the essential qualifications, which include sound democratic institutions, economic stability, good governance, free courts and judicial system, and financial and fiscal integrity. Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria possess scarcely any of these. Their economies are almost ‘third world’ and none is in the top 50 countries for GDP per capita. (The quasi-criminal Balkan states are in the queue. Russia regards them as within an exclusively Slav sphere of influence, so Vlad is not going to like the idea one bit. Just for the record Bosnia has a GDP per capita ranking of 105, just shy of Jamaica).

 

Meanwhile, Vlad has been schmoozing around potential friends all over the place. He has given loans to the half-country Cyprus in  return for military facilities. This could be interesting. The street of Akrotiri of a Saturday night could be quite exciting as British squaddies from the British base there do battle with  their Russky equivalents. ‘Professionals against amateurs’ nights!

 

He has been cosying-up to Iran. You can be sure he will be making mischief in Greece. He had a hero’s reception in Egypt, which pre-Obama was Yankee territory.

 

The EU has no clue as to what to do next. Their hopes that Russia’s economy would collapse under the weight of sanctions are absurd. The impact so far has been minor with only 6% of companies being badly affected. Oil revenues have held up through the simple expedient of devaluing the rouble against the US dollar. It is true that Russian standards of living have fallen for the first time in 15 years, but if Brussels thought that rising unpopularity would sweep Putin from power they were much mistaken. His popularity rating has risen.

 

Maybe the latest political assassination, of leading politician Boris Nemtov, will be Putin’s tipping point.

 

Don’t hold your breath.

 

 

 

Tally-ho, Tony Blair

Tony Blair has just gone up in my estimation, admittedly from a very low starting base. The DT informs us that in 2004 he made  a bet with the Prince of Wales that there would still be fox-hunting ten years later. He won, of course. He had no sympathy with the antis and ensured that the Bill was so drafted as to make the Act largely unworkable.

 

And so it has proved. More people ae hunting than ever and the crowds who turn out to the traditional Boxing Day meet are huge.

 

As it should be.

 

There is no logic in banning hunting with hounds; the motivation is entirely sentimental. Public support for it has dropped to around 50%

 

The plain fact is that not only is hunting with hounds the best conservation practice. It is just about the only one that is at all effective.

 

Hunting only takes place outside the breeding season, so no young are left behind to suffer and starve as happens when the animal is shot at any time. The animal is always killed instantly, again unlike shooting when a wounded animal may linger in agony for days.

 

But there are equally important conservation considerations.

 

Deer are becoming an increasing menace to traffic and to farmers. They have no natural predators in England so provided there is plenty of grazing they can multiply almost without limit. When they invade cattle farms they infect the beasts with the diseases that they are carrying, to which cattle will often have little natural immunity.

 

They do massive damage to growing crops. Farmers would tolerate this in return for the enjoyment of hunting. Since the ban, they have no stake in their preservation, but have every incentive to shoot them out.

 

Hunting with hounds removes the old, the sick and the starving, leaving only the fit behind. Some time ago there was a furore over the shooting of the so-called Monarch of the Glen, a magnificent stag which had ruled over it herd for countless years. But the sound conservation reason is that a dominant stag has to be taken out from time to time otherwise there is inbreeding which weakens the stock generally and makes it more susceptible to disease.

 

Foxes are classified as vermin. They may seem cute and cuddly to the urban idiots who feed them, but not to the poultry farmer who finds that a fox in the henhouse has killed the entire flock. They also have no predators except man, so they will breed unchecked if there is food. This increasingly means garbage dumps and land-fill sites. A bite from an animal feeding off filth can have nasty consequences and yet people whose babies have been bitten are told by the animal rights stasi that they ae not allowed to kill the fox!

 

The urban fox is becoming an increasing menace as they out-breed their rural hunting areas. Well-meaning fools catch them and return them to the countryside where they will starve because they have no hunting skills.

 

And, of course, it is a class-thing. There is a widespread belief that people who ride to hounds are rich, idle toffs. Those I knew were a tea trader, a used-car dealer, a scrap merchant, a food manufacturer in a small way of business, and working farmers.

 

The harsh truth that the antis cannot bring themselves to recognise is that the hunting ban is cruel, causes unnecessary suffering to the very animals it was intended to protect, and serves only to help the urban middle-classes ‘feel good’ factor.

 

 

All aboard the Green Gravy Train.................

‘2014 the hottest year on record’, fanfared the recent headlines. They say that it was the hottest year since records began in 1880. The Daily Mail said it was definite proof that the earth was warming ‘very quickly’. The BBC went one better, saying that 18^th Century data shows that it was the hottest year in about the last 250. And another press report said that nine of the hottest years have occurred in the last 10, which is probably true if you only start in 2004. Never mind that the report was about world climate change in which Britain is an insignificant player.

 

And the short riposte to this is in the spherical plural.

 

The snag with this claim is that global temperatures  can only be measured by satellite. Not too many of those around in Victoria’s days. And satellite records show that there has been no warming for the past 18 years. Scientists can take a much-longer term view by studying ice core records, and these show that earth’s temperature is ranked in the lowest 3% since the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. We know from historical records that Europe was much warmer in the Middle Ages (when wine was produced in Yorkshire, of all places) and in  Roman times.

 

And we have been emerging from a mini-Ice Age for the last 150 years, so it is blindingly obvious that temperatures were on average lower at the start of the period than at the end

 

According to NASA the hottest year on record for the USA was 1934. Even this is questionable because global temperature changes are measured  in hundredths of degrees, and there is no thermometer, which was the only instrument available until very recent times,  able to produce information remotely capable of this. The warmists say that this is ‘insubstantial’ because the US only occupies 2% of the earth’s land mass - and at the same time prophesying doom because of melting icecaps when the Arctic only covers 3% of the world’s land mass. The changes are measured in two-hundredths of a degree; that’s right – 2/100!

 

All this ’warmist’ stuff is beginning to look like scientists deciding on a conclusion and then massaging the facts to meet it. They continue to use thermometer records because they suit the case, not because they are accurate. Even this fails to make a case when closely examined. The records  show that temperatures in the early 20^th Century were higher than  stated. Whether this is due to tinkering with the raw data is unclear. But it looks possible that the trend has been cooler, not warmer.

 

The most realistic conclusion is that in the past 100 years there has been no appreciable climate change that matters.

 

And that is not something to be welcomed by the institutions and assorted freeloaders aboard the Great Green Gravy Train.

Diagnosing the NHS.........

The polls say that the future  of the NHS is the number one concern for voters, so inevitably all the parties trumpet their solutions – which are all the same. Chuck more money at it!

 

None go to the root of the real problems.  There are two.

 

The first is the management structure built into the NHS at its inception.

 

During WW2 the Government controlled everything, from what we ate to what we read. Belief in centralisation was paramount. ‘The gentleman from Whitehall really does know best!’ This continued to be the prevailing philosophy for the next 30 years. When the NHS was set up in 1946, it was given top-down control with a hierarchy of regional and local boards, all appointed by Whitehall.

 

This was virtually identical to the regime for nationalised industries and had the same defects – remoteness of decision-making;  lack of local accountability; a top-heavy bureaucracy. Mistakes could be expensive because they infected the entire service and took a long time to correct.

 

Aneurin Bevan famously said that ‘if a hospital bedpan is dropped in a hospital corridor in Tredegar, the reverberations should echo around Whitehall!’

 

‘Best practice’ in modern management prefers the ‘bottom-up’  approach in which every decision and action is taken at the lowest appropriate level. Despite numberless and apparently fruitless attempts to reorganise the NHS, little appears to have changed fundamentally. Indeed, it is difficult for the layman to comprehend just what those changes have been.

 

The second is the British Medical Association.

 

As a trade union for doctors the BMA, with its ‘closed shop’, restrictive practices, and ruthless self-protection, makes UNITE look like the epitome of moderation.

 

In 1946 it voted to boycott the NHS altogether, forcing Bevan to compromise, and to abandon what now seems highly desirable, primary care centres with salaried staff. These local clinics would have provided initial patient contact in place of surgeries. Instead the new system was based on the large hospitals dominated by the consultants who to this day are independent private contractors.

 

Amidst all the political waffle about ‘the NHS is safe in our hands’, no party has grasped that the underlying fault in the NHS is structural. 

 

They are lacking something fundamental.

 

That elusive ‘vision’ thing.

Prairie politics..........

The domestic and international scenes continue their downward spiral. It is hard to imagine that things could be much worse. Folks here on the prairie remain unencumbered by these events and thereby gain a modicum of happiness and contentment in their ignorance.

 

Their prevailing mantra is for Obama's reign to experience a quick conclusion and for anyone to the right of Louis XIV to sit in his place. Texas' own Ted Cruz would do just fine as would Rand Paul or even Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin. The moderate Republicans like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie don't make the grade from the good ol’ boys perspective.

 

We won't have Mitt Romney to kick around anymore. He pulled his hat from the ring this week pleading the need for new Republican blood to pick up the mantle of leadership.

 

The real reason is twofold.

 

He found himself unable to attract donors and he was a bit gun shy from the beating he took from fellow-Republicans who debated him in the last round of primaries. I believe his wife and family were also lobbying Mitt to not run. Evidently, the last campaign was also very hard on them emotionally and physically. Mike Huckabee, former Governor of Arkansas has also decided not to run. That was also wise as he had no chance.

 

Our undaunted former Governor Rick Perry should also quit the race, but he won't. He is currently facing a weak, but real, felony charge for abuse of power that, along with numerous skeletons in his political closet, will tear him apart when the going gets tough. Even the good ol’ boys find him an embarrassment.

 

Meanwhile, Hillary is looking good for the uncontested leadership of the Democratic Party. Yes, there are some wannabes, but she is clearly in the lead. This means she will not have to endure the slings and arrows from her own party as the Republicans will have to do in their struggle up the greasy pole for party leadership.

 

Clearly, the most ravishing debates in living memory were those of the Republicans in their bid for leadership in the campaign of 2011. There were almost a dozen candidates and most of them indulged in some degree of negative campaigning. The end result was enough dirt on the leading candidates, including Romney, to fill a small book. Nobody could be proud of themselves after such subjugation to ad hominem attacks about their personal, financial and political life. Often, statements candidates made in the past were taken out of context, given a new spin, and pounded back down their throats with extreme prejudice.

 

It is my understanding that a set of new rules has just been released that are designed to protect candidates from each other. We shall see.

 

A colourful issue............

I am somewhat bemused by the recent ruckus over some thespian wimp referring to whom Dame Edna would call ‘our little tinted friends’ as ‘coloured’ , and then publishing a grovelling and completely ott  apology.

 

The word itself it completely inappropriate, of course, because it is largely meaningless except to indicate, probably  accurately, that the person is not Caucasian.

 

Perhaps the largely (I guess) white female members of the PC classes will tell us exactly what word (or words) are appropriate to describe the such. And whilst they are at it, they might actually ask advice from a non-Caucasian in the unlikely event that they ae on conversational terms with any, although I suspect that they will get funny answers.

 

I have spent most of my working life in multi-racial countries, and each has its own vocabulary.

 

An African would be referred to as – guess what – an African. Say ‘coloured’ and you might be en route to intensive care because that is the term for person of mixed race.

 

Asians tended to be ‘Indians’ since their African settlement preceded Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan, although Goans were usually called ‘Portuguese’ because that’s what they were until India seized Goa.

 

I notice that black people tend to refer to themselves as such as in the ‘Black Police Federation’.

 

Now it gets complicated. What do we call people of other races?

 

In Jamaica Chinese were always referred to as Mr Chin; no offence intended, it was simply a stylistic convenience.

 

Americans are past masters at the art of obfuscation. ‘Afro-Americans’. ‘ Native Americans’ whereas the subjects properly call themselves ‘Indians’ on account of the fact that it’s where they came from before ‘America’ was even thought of, let alone misnamed.

 

Come to think of it why do we bother? Why not just ‘Japanese’, ‘West Indian’ etc.

 

No, it won’t catch on. It would remove the whole raison d’etre from those who  prefer a grievance to a remedy.

 

 

 

 

 

The Euro's long 'Goodbye'!

The general opinion amongst the chattering classes is that the new Greek PM, Alexis Tsipras, has got himself into a lose-lose situation. If he does a deal with the hated Troika, the IMF, ECB and EU, he is dead meat. His political support will evaporate overnight. If he doesn’t, the Greek economy will collapse and Greece will have no option but to default and exit the Eurozone.

 

Both views are wrong. To demonstrate this does not need the expertise of a Nobel economics laureate.

 

The measures imposed by the Troika were badly conceived and disastrously implemented.

 

There was an assumption that harsh austerity measures would solve the Greek problem without much effect on growth and employment even though Greece was already in recession. There would be a modest contraction in 2011 and a return to growth the following year. Unemployment would rise to 15% but then reduce quickly.

 

This was la-la land economics.

 

The recession quickly gathered momentum, as it was bound to do. It is now a fully-fledged depression. Unemployment rose to 28%, hardly surprising when cuts in public service spending dictated by the Troika shoved 500,000 people, 10% of the total workforce, onto the dole queues. Youth unemployment is touching 60%; that is the way to civil unrest.

 

The debt situation is worse than at the beginning of the crisis, partly because Government revenues have fallen as the tax base has shrunk. Cuts have removed a huge block of spending-power from the economy, so the anticipated surge in the private sector has not happened. The only way out of this mess is debt-relief and inflation, neither of which fits the Troika’s grand plan. Or Grexit, which the Greeks don’t want (yet)

 

Here is what Roger Bootle had to say a couple of years ago

 

In 2010 and 2011, Greece implemented fiscal cutbacks worth almost 17pc of GDP. But because this caused GDP to wilt, each euro of fiscal tightening reduced the deficit by only 50 cents. . . . Attempts to cut back on the debt by austerity alone will deliver misery alone.

 

Things have got much worse since.

 

 

Germany now finds itself exactly where it does not want to be. The original post-war concept was a European Germany. Now it is a German Europe. It is overwhelmingly the dominant power, cast as the big bully-boy.  It never wanted to give up the mighty DM, but joining the Euro gave it access to artificially cheap money which has boosted its overly-favourable balance of trade. In doing so it has ruined the Club Med.

 

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore says:

 

‘the single currency has made Germany by far the most powerful country in Europe. It has made it more competitive by giving it a relatively cheap currency. But the euro also threatens to debauch Germany’s unimpeachable post-war achievement, financial soundness. Mr Draghi’s attempts to create a genuine monetary union make the zone’s most important nation terrified that it will lose what it sees as its money to the beggars. The suffering south is trying to take the money of the oppressive north. This is a recipe for strife. So each step towards completion of the euro-dream makes its ultimate break-up both more likely and more explosive’.

 

The plain truth is that this is not about saving Greece; it’s about saving the Eurozone. Brussels is terrified that Grexit might start a Club Med stampede for the exit. Monetary union has been a catastrophic failure. Greece’s new Finance Minister gives it two years. The big question is what can be salvaged from the wreckage

 

What we are seeing is the death-agonies of the Euro. It will be prolonged and nasty but the single currency must eventually collapse under the weight of its fundamental contradiction, that it cannot work without fiscal union and the member countries surrendering complete sovereignty over their financial affairs, as Delors told us years ago; that is never going to happen.

 

That’s a win-win situation in anybody’s  money.

 

Provided it is not Euros.

 

 

 

Another British institution bites the dust........

An unpleasant piece in the Torygraph by a teenage scribbler gloating over the demise of Simpsons-in-the –Strand, that gastronomic icon of Britishness.

 

Here is how he describes it.

 

 

‘Simpson’s was an unventilated backwater, stale and dispiriting, whose only tics of animation were the energetic repetition of lazy clichés.

One of its reputation-making customers was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but this was in the period when he had submerged himself into an especially loopy version of Spiritualism. Conan Doyle thought the dead were speaking to him. Any visitor to Simpson’s knows this to be true. And today the dead are tipping us the wink, saying: “I’d go somewhere else, if I were you”. Will we be losing a great institution when the patinated silver-plated cloches and creaking butlers’ trolleys are consigned to the antiques trade and the pompous chandeliers to architectural salvage dealers? Maybe, but most traditions are, like Simpson’s itself, inventions of the 19th century. And there are some traditions we can do very well without.

 

Apart from Conan Doyle, Dickens and PG Wodehouse were regulars.

 

And me, in those halcyon days when Maggie was putting a bit of stick about, the City was awash with loadsamoney, and three-course lunches accompanied by a bottle or two of Chateau Collapso were the way of doing business until replaced by the modern generation’s preference for rabbit-food and cocaine.

 

It had its own culture. Dress code was jacket, collar and tie in the days before Dave made scruff-order fashionable. It was noted for its roast beef Yorkshire pud and ‘bubble’. The huge baron of beef came round on  a trolley, and you could have it any way you liked, from rare to well-done. The trick was to tip the carver, when there would be so much beef on the plate that there was scarcely room for the veg. Otherwise you got a couple of slices!

 

The writer goes on

 

‘An exhausted Simpson’s could never compete in a new London food culture where foraging, sourcing, cooking and tending bar have a youth appeal which working in television or music once had. Simpson’s is dying not because it became very old, but because it became irrelevant’.

 

What that particular piece of verbal ordure means is almost beyond me by I think he is saying ‘Yoof don’t dig it, know what I mean!’ Personally,  I would rather go on a starvation diet than be seen in his kind of right-on nosherie.

 

The paper is a bit kinder in a separate short piece. It says

 

Simpson’s-in-the-Strand has been delighting patrons since 1828, when it opened as a coffee house and chess club. With its richly reassuring fare illuminated by chandeliers, and wood panelling interrupted only by the odd monarch in oils, it is perhaps a quintessence of Britishness. Not that it has failed to move with the times. Women have been allowed in since 1984. It is sad, then, that the Savoy hotel, which owns Simpson’s, feels further update is required. It is seeking a chef or, worse, brand, to run the restaurant, which may even lose its name. An update of the Bateman cartoon on Simpson’s menus may be required, with the red-faced chap hurling his knife in outrage at “the gentleman who suggested Simpson’s needed 'revitalising’”.

 

Not entirely accurate. Women have always been allowed in but before 1984 only in the upstairs restaurant.

 

This is sure to be a case of Hutber’s Law: ‘all improvement is deterioration’.

 

At least it answers the question ‘Is nothing sacred?’ It is ‘No!’

 

After Ed; is this the man to watch?

One of the most depressing  features of modern politics is  the rise over the last twenty years of the political clone, educated expensively, top university, never employed outside politics, no other experience, always moving in  the same circles, resident in the Westminster village, a member of an establishment elite. The outcome has been an increasing contempt for  MP’s, distrust of politicians generally, and the general feeling that ‘they don’t understand us. They are not like us’ (perfectly justified).

 

Thus applies par excellence to the leaders of the three major parties – all public school Oxbridge alumni who have hardly ever earned a penny that was not paid out of the public purse.

 

The country is crying out for a different sort of politician and especially for a different sort of leader. It craves for a PM of principle; a conviction  politician who is not led by the focus groups or the Red Tops’ headlines. Maggie was the last, and now careerism rules. ‘If you don’t like my principles I have others!’

 

Is there one amongst the present dismal crop in the Commons capable of delivering a bit of clout to the country’s governance?

 

Step forward, Major D.O.W Jarvis MBE, MP.

 

He was largely unknown outside the Westminster village and his Yorkshire constituency until last week when the Daily Telegraph trailed him as a future successor to Ed Miliband.

 

His CV is quite at odds with those of our political clones.

 

He has a BA  in International Relations and an MA in Conflict, Security and Development, not a bad academic background for a political career.

 

He served 15 years in the Parachute Regiment, which has perfectly trained him for currently yomping 15 miles a day  when out canvassing.

 

He did a tour in Kosovo where he was on General Mike Jackson’s staff, Sierra Leone where our gallant lads were sent to sort out the arm-choppers, Iraq, Afghanistan twice and Northern Ireland.

 

He clearly has outstanding leadership qualities. The Parachute Regiment is no place for wimps or ditherers. He is unusually respected on all sides of the House, and that’s also unusual in that snake-pit.

 

His blunt approach to managing affairs is the old 6 p’s military maxim ‘perfect planning prevents piss-poor performance’.

 

He would make the current crop of Party leaders look like (in the immortal words of Captain Mainwaring) ‘a bunch of nancy boys’.

 

With his background he would surely attract the disillusioned voter who is tired of the old gang and is looking for a leader who can put a bit of stick about.

 

It’s early days. Ed is going nowhere yet (in both senses) and Major Jarvis has only been in the House for less than 5 years.

 

But he could be the one to watch!

After Charlie, a reality check.

The strategy of Islamic Jihad is entirely transparent, except possibly to our political elite and the Daily Mail. The war-plan is to replace a free society with a controlled caliphate. Crazy, of course.

 

By small scale terrorist acts like Charlie, they want to drive a backlash against moderate, decent, hard-working Muslims, remove a possible source of information and create a marginalised community who, if not actively supporting them, will not co-operate in bringing them down. Alienating  the Muslim community will be a major achievement, even better if they can provoke boycotts of Mr Patel’s corner shop and other Muslim enterprises.

 

They are aided and abetted in this by the ranting Islamofoamers  who spittle-flecked outpourings defile the letters columns of the press and blog-sites incessantly to the point of obsession.

 

They have already succeeded in provoking serious retaliation, such as the 77 murders by a Norwegian fanatic, the Swedish mosque that has been attacked about 300 times. This all helps to create a Muslim Fifth Column which the jihadis would hope to be a source of cover and surreptitious help, including ‘safe houses’.

 

The present goal is to gather more recruits , and to do this they must force peaceful and law-abiding Muslims not to integrate with the secular societies in which they live. Their targets are symbolic – 9/9, 7/7, Charlie.

 

The over-the-top reaction of politicians the media and the French people generally was a major success for jihad. It showed the Muslim world how a handful of jihadis can shake an entire nation to its core, whereas after 7/7 it was ‘Keep calm and carry on’.

 

There is another dimension to the ‘Charlie’ affair. To portray the Prophet naked or with a bomb in his turban is not funny’ It’s incitement. The Nazis used similar grotesque cartoons to demonise Jews.

 

It was blasphemy- pure and simple. And we must remember that this was only decriminalised in England in 2008, in case anyone thinks it archaic.

 

The Biblical injunction is ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:  Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;  And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments’.

 

This is part of the Abrahamic law. It refers to idolatry, not to representations of God, Allah, Mohammed, Jesus Christ. So it seems that prohibition of pictorial representations of Mohamed is a relatively modern interpretation of the Koran. Early Islamic art seems not to have had any such inhibition

 

Nevertheless God was not represented on the English stage for 500 hundred years, between the mid16^th Century and 1951.

 

The cartoons deliberately set out to outrage and offend. They succeeded beyond the editor’s worst nightmares. But to defend them on the grounds of ‘free speech’ is laughable.

 

A democratic and civilised society assumes that there is tacit agreement to tolerate religious or cultural differences without deliberately insulting or abusing people who do not share identical values. Violence to impose alien views – political or religious – is an enemy of democracy. Those who go down this path must be shown with the utmost vigour that tolerance is not weakness.

 

We must understand that there is no ’war’ between Islam and the West. If we do not, the jihadis will have won a major victory.