The Aged P

The next time you visit Stratford-Upon-Avon go to Lower Quinton some eight miles away for in 1945 this sleepy village was the scene of one of the most mysterious unsolved murders of recent times, a crime which even frustrated the celebrated Scotland Yard detective Chief Inspector Robert Fabian. The renowned down-to-earth thief taker was convinced the murderer used the smokescreen of black magic to cover up a more mundane motive but others insisted the crime had the smell of witchcraft about it. Even now, nearly seventy five years later, those who live in the village remain tight lipped….after all it has been written of Warwickshire “This is the country of the spook and the witch; of the spirits that haunt the hillsides; of the demon that halts horses in lonely roads and makes them refuse to take another step”

On St Valentine’s Day 1945, the mutilated body of 74 year old farm labourer Charles Walton, who lived his whole life in the sleepy village of Lower Quinton some eight miles from Stratford-Upon-Avon, was found on the nearby slopes of Meon Hill. Walton had set out at 8am that morning from the small cottage he shared with his niece, Edith Isabel Walton, for a day’s work hedge-cutting for local farmer Alfred Potter.

Riddled with rheumatism, the ageing villager carried with him his walking stick and the tools of his trade; a pitchfork and a billhook. When his corpse was discovered later that evening, all three of those implements had been used to end his life in the most horrifying of ways…….

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The Daily Telegraph highlights a story about a radio interview that might have been with Donald Trump a quarter of a century ago. The previous day there was a piece about Trump’s butler. Then there was something about how few music celebs would perform for him.

Meanwhile, over at the lefty liberal Guardian, John Harris actually went to Indianapolis and talked with Trump supporters who were entering or leaving the polling station during the Indiana Republican primary election.

That’s right – instead of cutting and pasting from stuff already in the US media Harris used up some shoe leather and went out and chatted to actual voters. Yep, the stuff that real journalists used to do.

His conclusion?

Donald Trump supporters are not the bigots the left likes to demonise

Read it. It’s not totally uncritical but, unlike the pap in the Telegraph it is very fair.

The moral? If you want to find out why Trump resonates with many voters – don’t bother reading the Telegraph

Whoops!!!  Iain Dale for the naughty step….

He pours scorn on the temper tantrum being thrown by the Vote Leave camp because ITV have invited UKIP leader Nigel Farage to oppose David Cameron in their set piece EU Referendum debate. He also has the audacity to suggest Farage would do better than Boris or Gove…

It’s not as if Nigel Farage isn’t a good media performer or doesn’t know the arguments. In fact, I’d say he’s a far better performer in debates than either Boris Johnson or Michael Gove would necessarily be.

Naturally this goes against the grain of the currently accepted narrative that Marmite Nige turns off as many people as he turns on. How could he possibly cope against the smooth as silk double glazing salesman that is Dave?

But hark back to 2010. Dave’s failure to achieve an overall majority and his need to swallow the bitter pill of a coalition with the Lib Dems is often put down to his failure to outsmart Nick Clegg in a TV debate. Clegg became the SuperDebateMan and the bruised Dave steered clear of repeating the format in 2015.

Yet who was it who crushed SuperDebateMan Clegg in two widely broadcast debates on the EU just two years ago?

That’s right – Marmite Nige…

Nigel Farage triumphed in the second television debate on Europe by a clear-cut 69% to 31%, an instant poll showed, suggesting that a more emotional but often overscripted Nick Clegg failed to convince viewers that Ukip is selling the British people a “dangerous con” and a “fantasy”.

The Guardian/ICM findings after the BBC2 debate were almost exactly matched by a separate YouGov poll for the Sun, showing that in a sometimes brutal debate, with both men accusing the other of lying, it was the Ukip leader who came out ahead by an even bigger margin than a week earlier.

Yet a year later in a TV match up with SNP, PC and Greens he didn’t do well at all. He scored a pathetic own goal by linking health tourism with Aids and became very bad tempered with the audience. This was not the confident operator of the Clegg Debates or a score of BBCQT appearances where he had overcome hostile audiences with a good grasp of facts and a sense of humour.

Some blamed campaign exhaustion. Others sensed ill health. But many squarely placed the blame on Nigel’s campaign guru and right hand man at the time, BreitbartUK editor Raheem Kassam who, it has been claimed, advised Farage to go “shock and awe”. With Kassam’s guidance Farage not only was marginalised in the 2015 TV debate but he also failed to win a constituency that had earlier appeared to be “in the bag” for UKIP.

So, yes, Iain Dale, Farage is a good media performer. There’s no reason why he couldn’t do a  Clegg on Cameron as well – but only if the loose cannon that is Raheem Kassam is locked firmly in a box for the duration.

An ice cold bucket of cold water from Roger Helmer MEP over the claim by government minister and former George Osborne bagman Matthew Hancock MP that Brexit would be a “leap in the dark” and lead to a decade of uncertainty – so therefore there is really no safe and sensible alternative to being shackled to the zombie EU.

The alternative to being in the EU is not being in the EU. And far from being a mystery, it is in fact the current state of a hundred-plus countries around the world – most of whom are doing rather better, in economic terms, than the declining and dysfunctional EU.  It is the state that Britain was in for centuries before we joined the “Common Market” less than half a century ago.   I don’t think that many Canadians or Australians or Singaporeans wake up in the morning scared to death because their countries are independent and not in the EU.  

For the benefit of Mr. Hancock, let me set out the parameters of Britain post-Brexit.  We shall have a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU, and contrary to the government’s scare story, that will involve negotiation not “with 27 member-states” but with just one interlocutor – the EU itself. 

But imagine a worst case, where we failed to negotiate an FTA. Then, as Matt Hancock knows perfectly well (or ought to know), the default position is simply the WTO rules.   Arm’s-length trading on a WTO basis would be less advantageous that an FTA – but not much.  For example, the duties payable on our exports to the EU under the Common External Tariff would be less than half our current net contributions to the EU budget. Dozens of countries around the world trade perfectly well with the EU on WTO terms. The three largest external suppliers into the EU are China, Russia and the USA. None of these has an FTA with the EU, but they trade with it very successfully nonetheless.

Simples….

You would think that a really serious newspaper, a really serious right leaning broadsheet like The Daily Telegraph would, after seven months realise that a man who has topped almost every poll for the Republican Party nomination prior to the forthcoming primaries would have struck some sort of chord with American voters.

The fact that he is not a politician but a businessman, a reality TV star with a larger than life reputation and a habit of “telling it how it is” and a fairly colourful CV would have at least piqued the interests of the solemn if rather pompous conservative young fogeys who pontificate daily from the elevated levels of Canary Wharf.

But it was not to be.

Yes, in the summer months when both the UK and US media regarded Donald Trump as a one hit wonder, an amusing interlude before the big boys like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker came out to play, the DT was full of jokey references and patronising asides. Hacks laughingly described as “US correspondents” performed their regular ritual of cutting and pasting quotes from the Washington Post and New York Times, presenting them as if they were golden nuggets of reportage gleaned from weeks of pounding streets from coast to coast and wearing out their own shoe leather.

All the pundits from left and right, every single self-important media figure and academic and, above all, the ghastly regiments of political consultants and operative who leech off the American body politic – they all dismissed Trump’s prospects with a disdainful sneer.

But as the autumn months got closer and Trump refused to fade the political class and their media parasites fell strangely silent – and so did the Telegraph and its hacks. There was very little reporting of the polls or the massive crowds attending Trump’s rallies because somehow it didn’t quite gel with the narrative of Trump the clown.

Until l he was endorsed by Sarah Palin – and the Telegraph went full frontal. The Telegraph Polly Fillers in particular unleashed their claws, presenting Palin as some sort of shrill, screeching fishwife who had entered the US scene as an Alaskan version of Kim Kardashian via a tasteless TV reality show. That she had been a very popular state governor, an insurgent crusader against a corrupt Republican establishment in the pocket of Big Oil as conveniently omitted.

The Telegraph campaign against Trump finally reached its crescendo with an article penned by former BBC hack Matt Frei, pimping his Channel 4 documentary, sneering at Trump, his supporters and, of course Palin (including the totally false claim that her selection by McCain as candidate for VP lost him the 2008 election). A day or so later one of the Telegraph’s boy wonders, a young man with zero knowledge of US politics outside of watching “The West Wing”, grandly proclaimed as the torpedo that would finally sink The Trumptanic.

At no time has there been any serious attempt in the pages of the Telegraph to present a serious analysis of the key question – why has Trump, derided by the media, the punditocracy and the professional political class, has nevertheless gained such support. There has been nothing about the apparent extent of blue collar support, much of it from traditionally Democrat voting swathes of the electorate or the suggestion that he has a significant degree of interest from black voters. No mention either of some evidence that he has reached across to women and younger voters.

There is, at times, a reference to “anger” about illegal immigrants and their willingness to work for wages much lower than the American born working class. – or social and economic upheaval caused by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to Asia. But the DT hacks never dig deeper into that manifestation of anger or pursue a line of thought that might question the inevitability of such a process.

Above all, our “journalists “are unwilling to confront the truth of the high degree of contempt felt by ordinary Americans for the media and its refusal to raise those issues in print or on air for fear of falling foul of the great god of the comfortably off chattering classes, the god of political correctness – buttressed, of course, by the availability of a cheap immigrant servant class that allows them to live a very comfortable life at very low cost.

A pity, for, once upon a time, the Telegraph really was a newspaper that treated the world seriously. Unfortunately, it has whored itself out to shallowness and empty posturing

Chaos and Violence: How New Year’s Eve in Cologne Has Changed Germany

What should be done? An attempt at complete honesty would be a good start. Germans are not children who need to be protected from the truth for well-intended reasons. And part of the truth is the fact that politicians like to talk about integration but have not yet given any indication that they understand the magnitude of the challenge facing them. Another part of the truth is this: German society is becoming increasingly divided.

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But I was told Trump was at war with women…..

In New Hampshire Donald Trump leads with all sub-categories of voter: Republican and Independents, Men and Women.  However, Trump really extends his overall lead margins with women.

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Surely Cameron is not trying to pull a fast one over those EU negotiations?

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Muslim cleric tells British university students he recommends “light spanking” of women and  supports sex slavery and having more than one wife. Feminists surprisingly silent about this – I wonder why?

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Sorry to disappointment you, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jeremy Corbyn, but those “Noble Savages” are more savage than noble….. 

Reading the Daily Telegraph and/or The Spectator, both (reputedly) right wing organs one could be forgiven for thinking nothing much has happened during the period leading up to the Presidential election next November – except for a weekly sneer about Donald Trump. You just wouldn’t realise that for half a year several people have been jockeying for the Republican Party nomination.

Of course within a few days, starting with the Iowa caucus, there will have to be some column inches but the hacks will be operating in the dark without a compass. They have no bearings.

They have no bearings because, of course, reporting US politics is almost always a cut and paste job for the Brit hacks. They check the US media, find out what the pundits and the consultants and the academics are saying – then they alter one or two words and phrases and regurgitate the message to UK eyes.

Only the 2016 race is not going to plan.

It was all going to be so simple. Back in the early summer the Republican Party establishment had it all sussed out. The summer and early autumn would thin the ranks. “Outsiders” like Trump and Carson would flare brightly for a few weeks and then flame out. The young bloods like Rand, Walker, Rubio and Cruz would tear each other apart for the “conservative” vote and then former governor of Florida Jeb Bush, rich with big donor cash and the support of regiments of consultants led by so called “genius” Karl Rove, would come through the middle. By October the media and GOP establishment would be crowning him the unofficial nominee and all would be set for the dynastic clash of Bush v Clinton in November 2016.

Except it didn’t pan out that way at all. Despite all those consultants and over $100m in donations and the support of the official conservative media Jeb never lifted from the ground.

Instead Donald Trump has stolen all the oxygen. Despite weekly predictions of demise from the punditocracy Trump polling lead has been consistent. Attacks from the left and right media have regularly missed the target. Not a single big name media figure has come out in support – and it seems that a lot of ordinary Americans don’t give a damn.

This is why in the Telegraph/Spectator the cover has faded. They can no longer cut and paste what the pundits/consultants/academics are saying because there is very little to cut and paste. Since early December the “experts” have clammed up, scared witless by public mockery of their failed predictions. There is a subdued sneering at Trump but that is all.

What has never appeared in the Telegraph/Spectator is a serious analysis attempting to explain the phenomenon of Trump. It is sometimes put down to anger and frustration amongst older white males but if you look at the thousands who attend the Trump rallies there are a lot of younger folk as well – and women.

There is some evidence of support from previously Democrat leaning blue collar workers and elements of the black community, constituencies in which none of the other GOP hopefuls could hope to gain any traction.

Pennsylvania, anyone?

Of course nothing is certain and casting political runes is ever an unpredictable game. But even if Trump was to eventually fade post February US politics can never be the same. As someone has said he has not only ignored the rule book – he’s ripped it up and written another,

But of course, nobody in the Telegraph/Spectator said that. They feel much more comfortable and cosy with their heads stuck up their own derrieres….

Evangelical Protestant preacher Pastor James McConnell from Belfast is, unlike many 21^st century public figures, not a man given to nuance. Such a character, naturally, fits awkwardly with the modern state which increasingly seeks to discourage vigorous and robust debate. Hand in hand with the legions of the easily offended who patrol social media to hunt out and silence anyone who upsets their sensibilities our political and judicial masters are happy to enact and enforce laws to metaphorically cut out the tongues of those refuse to avoid giving “offence”

Thus Pastor McConnell, as a result of a sermon he preached to his congregation in May 2014 that was also streamed over the internet was charged with improper use of a public electronic communications network and causing a grossly offensive message to be sent by means of a public electronic communications network.

The state sought to punish him for making this statement.

‘Today we see powerful evidence that more and more Muslims are putting the Koran’s hatred of Christians and Jews alike into practice. ‘Now people say there are good Muslims in Britain, that may be so but I don’t trust them. Enoch Powell was right and he lost his career because of it. ‘Enoch Powell was a prophet and he told us that blood would flow in the streets and it has happened.

‘Fifteen years ago Britain was concerned of IRA cells, right throughout the nation they done a deal with the IRA because they were frightened of being bombed. Today a new evil has arisen. There are cells of Muslims right throughout Britain. Can I hear an Amen?

‘Right throughout Britain and this nation is going to enter a great tribulation and a great trial. To judge by some of what I have heard in the past few months you would think that Islam was a little more than a variation of Christianity and Judaism, not so. 

‘Islam’s ideas about God about humanity, about salvation are vastly different from the teaching of the Holy Scriptures. Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell.’ 

Words, claimed the prosecution, deliberately designed to offend Muslims.

Not so, said the Pastor.

no way I was out to hurt them – I wouldn’t hurt a hair on their head. But what I am against is their theology and what they believe in.

But, from the moment he was charged he remained defiant and said that he would not stop preaching the Christian gospel even if the price was finding himself behind bars.

Certainly there were expectations that the state’s aim of shutting him away in a cell would come to pass in this age of tender feelings. But a miracle happened – or rather an equally unexpected manifestation – a justice with common sense in the person of District Judge Liam McNally.

‘The courts need to be very careful not to criminalise speech which, however contemptible, is no more than offensive. ‘It is not the task of the criminal law to censor offensive utterances. ‘Accordingly I find Pastor McConnell not guilty of both charges.’

I rejoiced at that judgement. I might or might not agree with the Pastor on what he said. But I would be outside the courthouse clapping the verdict. Not because I supported his sermon – but because I supported his right to preach it. Just as I would be perfectly entitled to then stand up on a soapbox and rip into everything he said.

It is incredibly illiberal for the state to police hatred. Hatred might not be big or clever, but it’s only an emotion. And officialdom has no business telling us what we may feel — or think, or say, or write. Allowing the state to monitor belief represents a brutal reversal of the Enlightenment itself. John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), set the tone for the Enlightenment as an attempt to ‘settle the bounds’ between the business of government and the business of morality. ‘The business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of every particular man’s goods and person’, he wrote. That ideal is now turned on its head. Across Europe, governments ‘provide for the truth of opinions’, and in the process they silence those they don’t like and patronise the rest of us, reducing us to imbeciles incapable of working out what is right and wrong, and of speaking out against the wrong.

A small but significant victory in the fightback against a censorship being imposed by those who consider themselves morally superior to the rest of us. But we must resist the temptation to sheathe our swords.

There will be many more Pastor McConnells to defend…..

A savage cri de coeur from “Lady Magdalene”  in the comments below a typical piece of political boiler plate penned by resident Telegraph hack Tim Stanley bloviating about “politics in 2015”. He’s on the usual DT “polyfilla” duty – filling up a few square inches in a slow news week but Lady Magdalene’s riposte is a searing indictment of  the political class and the parasitic media leeching from its gorged flesh.

Will there ever be a day of reckoning?

 The modern UK The Establishment and their lackeys in the mainstream political parties created did not have the consent of the British people.

If challenged (not that the media will EVER really do that) they would claim they had a mandate for the following:

1. Membership of the EU 2. Post WW2 immigration (ie up to Blair’s election) 3. Uncontrollable mass immigration (post Blair) 4. Devolution, which ignored the majority English population 5. Multi-culturalism

They would claim a mandate because they won a General Election in which the electorate, pre EEC, were offered two very similar parties. And post EU were offered a “choice” of two virtually identical ones. FPTP prevented anything else and if, by an electoral freak it did, there was always the House of Donors and Cronies to ensure that nothing significant changed.

Our so-called “representative democracy” is nothing of the sort. It doesn’t represent the wishes of the people. It legitimises the wishes of The Establishment.

Well now the serfs are revolting ….. at least, a significant percentage of them are.

Cameron got a majority based on 24% – less than a quarter – of the electorate. 75% rejected what The Establishment was offering.

And it’s going to get better (or worse) depending on your point of view.

Because a sizeable proportion have rejected what The Establishment wants for their country and they’re going to continue doing it..

I simply cannnot understand why ANYONE would want their supposedly democratic country to be governed by an unelected, unaccountable cabal of utterly corrupt and incompetent foreign bureaucrats ….. or the likes of Merkel, Hollande and other foreign politicians.

I want my country back. That’s all I’ve been voting for for 15 years now, and if we lose the EU Referendum, it’s all I’ll be voting for for the rest of my life.

I REJECT the UK The Establishment has created. I wasn’t asked. I didn’t want it. And nothing is going to change that.

Amen to that, say I……..

Greetings from Worth in West Sussex. The church is 5 minutes from our house. Pic taken by Mrs P in 2010