I am impelled to write a few words about Peter Hitchens after having just seen an interview with Owen Jones [see below], which interview dates from 2017.
I have already written a blog post about Owen Jones:
To examine the views and influence of Hitchens in detail would necessitate a blog article of inordinate length, but Wikipedia has a considerable amount of information about him:
I should like to focus mainly on a few matters raised in that interview.
As to Hitchens himself, he is an odd fellow, apparently fairly well-educated. His family background had elements of tragedy (his mother bolted with an unfrocked priest, and the couple later died via a suicide pact in an Athens hotel). Not mentioned in the interview is that Hitchens (like Owen Jones) has part-Jewish roots, his maternal grandmother having been half-Jewish, in that her mother was Jewish. It was on that basis that Hitchens’ even more eccentric brother, Christopher, declared himself in latter years to be “Jewish” (taking the traditional Jewish course of deciding via the matrilineal side alone).
The interview mentions his having attended a naval school, but that must have been in early years, he then having attended The Leys School, Cambridge, an institution which has schooled a number of well-known people: at least one Rothschild, a few kings (albeit from Bahrain and Tonga), a number of MPs and journalists (in some cases both, as with Martin Bell).
Hitchens then went on to the City of Oxford College (a college of further education) and finally to Alcuin College, part of the University of York.
It may be that the university education and milieu that Hitchens found in Alcuin College permanently influenced his attitude. Wikipedia says of Alcuin College that,
“From early days of the college an uproar for secession of the college from the remainder of the university has been present.[3] It is a self-styled Separatist Movement and at times presented as a running gag at the University of York about Alcuinites….For many years Alcuin College was very much the outcast on the university campus, the only college physically separate from the others except for a bridge from the library…“
The photograph of Alcuin College in winter shows an almost Soviet bleakness and isolation.
Hitchens, though characterizing himself in the Owen Jones interview as having been a “joiner” in his youth, has also been an outsider, defector and maverick. I wonder whether he applied to the University of York because Oxford and/or Cambridge (in both of which cities he had attended school) refused his application, or perhaps he made no application to Oxbridge because (I speculate) his developing extreme socialist views made him reject such “bourgeois” places of learning. A better interviewer than Owen Jones, such as the late and great Brian Walden, might have explored all that.
Hitchens was from 1968 (aged 17) to 1975, a member of the Trotskyist “tendency” called the International Socialists [IS], the forerunner of the Socialist Workers’ Party [SWP]. He joined two years before he went to York. Later, in his forties, he became a card-carrying member of the Conservative Party, but only for the six years 1997-2003, and —typically— at the very nadir of Conservative fortunes, which is interesting, psychologically. Does he court unpopularity? Does he deliberately express unpopular or contrary views?
Hitchens is known as what might fairly be called a “reactionary”, someone who thinks that Britain was a better place in the 1950s, no ifs no buts. In fact, I believe that I watched him say that or something like that on TV once. My own view is different, that some aspects of life in the UK are better now, though many are certainly worse. This blog post is about Peter Hitchens, not Ian Millard, but in my view, things that are better now than in the 1950s (which I scarcely remember, having been born in 1956) or the early 1960s (which I certainly do remember) would include
central heating as the norm;
wider selection of fruits and vegetables (and in general a healthier or at least more varied diet);
less antiquated snobbism;
more understanding of animal welfare;
far easier access to information (via Internet);
Whereas, on the other side, the aspects of British life now that mean that UK life is worse (than in the early 1960s, anyway) are (and Hitchens has a point, because it is a longer list by far)
the general pressure of life now (of course, I was a child in, say, 1963, so my perception is affected to that extent but I think the judgment is still valid);
pervasive lack of freedom of expression;
pervasive “political correctness” etc;
the cost of living, though that is a complex question; it includes
the cost of real property both for sale and rent, and the impossibility for most people to buy a property without family money;
British people swamped by mass immigration;
real pay and social benefits etc generally reducing;
hugely less choice of employment for most people;
many people in full-time work unable to live on the poor pay offered;
unwanted millions of immigrants and their offspring;
congested roads and railways (and refer to the above line);
a huge new mixed-race population;
a huge amount of crime;
public and private housing shortages (refer to immigration, above);
huge numbers of drug-contaminated persons;
workers exploited in terms of having ever-shorter lunch breaks etc, “on call” after hours etc;
public services near to collapse in some respects;
intensive farming, with consequent harm to wildlife;
standards in all areas (NHS, schools, social security, Westminster MPs, police etc) falling like a stone
We often hear (eg from very young Remain whiners) that, eg, “foreign travel is easier now”, whereas that is mostly illusion. True, there were some silly aspects “back then”, such as being restricted as to foreign currency taken on holiday (you even had to have the amount, bought from somewhere like Thomas Cook, written in your passport!), and that silliness (a kind of postwar sacred cow) lasted until Mrs Thatcher stopped it in 1979 or 1980! Yes, true, but that was about it.
If you listen to Remain whiners (esp. the under-30s), you read or hear that Brexit will mean either no visa-free travel to the EU states, or no travel allowed at all! They really believe that, pre-1972, British people were almost imprisoned, as if Cuban, Chinese or Soviet citizens!
Until blacks and browns abused it in the 1980s to import relatives illegally, you used to be able to get a “British Visitor’s Passport” from post offices for a small amount; the passport was valid for short visits to almost all Western European states (not many people went to Eastern Europe as tourists until the 1990s). I had one in 1978 or 1979, in between possession of two ordinary passports, when I wanted to travel to France at short notice. I think that it cost about £5 and took about 5 minutes to be issued at Lanark Road Post Office, Little Venice.
Transport to the European mainland: true, there were no budget airlines as such in the 1950s, 1960s, but there were routes and ways not now in existence: in the 1950s and 1960s, people could take their cars by air to France! The main route was Lydd (Kent) to Amiens. This was not only for the rich: 5,000 cars (20,000 passengers) as early as 1950, and over 50,000 cars (250,000 passengers) by 1955 (incredible when you recall that rationing lasted until 1955!):
The idea that some Remain whiners have that young people will be unable to travel if the UK leaves “Europe” (meaning the EU) is laughable to those who know. As a child I travelled with parents; and then (from 1971) as a teenager, I travelled alone to Paris, Amsterdam etc. No visa required, UK not in EEC (the then EU).
I might add that it actually takes longer to fly to Paris in 2019 than it did in 1970 or even 1960!
One cannot say that Hitchens approves of that aspect of 1950s lifestyle, though, and (if I understand him aright), he thinks that the British war against Germany could have been avoided, but I may be mistaken here. He certainly thinks that of the First World War, which he says, surely rightly, destroyed British naval supremacy and economy.
Where Hitchens is certainly mistaken is in saying (in the interview) that Churchill’s refusal to countenance the German peace proposals of 1940 was “unquestionably the right and moral thing to do”. Oh really? Right and moral, to continue a war only started because triggered by a treaty obligation that could never have been fulfilled (the Anglo-French worthless “guarantee” to Poland) and when an honourable peace via armistice was on the table?
Such a peace might have been bought at the price of German victory in the East, but would that have been so bad? The destruction of the Stalin/Bolshevik regime? The saving of most of Eastern Europe from both wartime destruction and post-1945 Stalinism? The prevention of the enormous damage, loss of life and hurt across Western and Southern Europe and North Africa? Hitchens says, however, that he is “sceptical” about Churchill overall.
Hitchens is on surer ground when he says that British history has gone, in that no-one knows British history. He cites David Cameron-Levita being unable to translate the two words “Magna Carta” from Latin! After 6 years at Eton! That was when “Scameron” was a guest on the Letterman Show. Shaming for the whole country. Not just the Magna Carta bit. Cameron came over more like a part-Jew public entertainer (and not a good one) than a British statesman. Oh…wait…
[the bit about Magna Carta starts around 8 minutes in]
Scameron was also proven, though I think on another occasion, not to have heard of the Bill of Rights! Hitchens cites an apparently intelligent 6th-former whom he met, and who had passed exams in English History, and yet who did not know which side Oliver Cromwell was on during the English Civil War!
I have had similar encounters. Few people under 40 now know even the most basic facts about British history, and less about European history generally. An indictment of the British educational system. One should, though, be wary of thinking that this kind of ignorance developed overnight. I recall having a brief conversation with a South London couple I met by a swimming pool in Sousse, Tunisia, in 1986, and who, it transpired, had no idea at all that what is now Tunisia had been (part of) a Roman imperial province. Not knowing who was Nelson or Drake, though, is arguably of a different order.
Hitchens says, again correctly, that “we” “have no idea now what it means to be English or British”, but does not go on to examine the racial implications. Come to think of it, that may be one reason why so many people in the UK want to denounce others to Twitter, Facebook, the police, employers etc for holding the “wrong” views, i.e. because the denouncers have no idea of the English historical struggle for free speech (John Hampden etc…) and no respect for it.
Owen Jones talks about how open-minded (he says…) Corbyn is, and implies that he, Jones, is the same. Oh yes? Take a look at my blog post about him…
Hitchens himself is really little different. He once had a short and at first reasonable discussion with me on Twitter about the early Zionists, in 2017 or 2016, but then a Jew tweeted to him about how I was apparently an evil “neo-Nazi”, after which, just like Owen Jones, inter alia, Hitchens blocked me. I was unaware then that Hitchens is part-Jew, though not to the extent that would have rendered him liable to sanctions under the 1936 Nuremberg law(s), his maternal grandmother having been only part-Jew (Mischling) and his maternal grandfather not a Jew. In fact, under those laws he would even have been able to work as a journalist.
Hitchens says that Enoch Powell’s so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech “was a disgrace”. Why? He dislikes its tone, it seems. What about its truth, though? He also says that “the intermarriage [resulting from immigration] is great”. I begin to wonder what major part of modern British society he does dislike, when push comes to shove! To be fair to Hitchens, he does disapprove of the ghetto communities established by Pakistanis and others in, mainly, the Midlands and North of England. He is certainly not “white nationalist”, let alone social-national. If he were, he would be sacked at once. Long live freedom!…
An area in which I do find myself largely in agreement with Hitchens is in intervention by the “West” (in my terms, “NWO/ZOG”) in the affairs of the Middle East. Iraq, Syria, Libya. He opposes it. That’s something.
As to Russia, Hitchens seems to take an objective view (informed by better historical knowledge than most msm scribblers), eg:
I apprehend that Hitchens likes the social conservatism of most Russians.
So what is my overall view of Peter Hitchens? I should say that he is someone of considerable intellect, though nowhere near as intelligent as he himself imagines. Someone of considerable education, but who imagines that he knows more and better than almost anyone else, and believes that it is his role in life to pronounce on the truth of any given social, political, historical or ethical topic. Someone who harks back to a supposed golden age prior to, perhaps, 1959, or 1989 (at very latest). Someone who sees what is wrong in the present society but appears to have no programme or (Heaven forbid!) ideology to move from here to there (to a better society).
Hitchens takes a reasonable view such as “the family is a good thing” and tests it to destruction. Likewise, in his critique of both socialism and the contemporary Conservative Party, he goes to an extreme, saying that the Conservative Party is “extreme Left-wing”, by which he means “socially liberal”. He defends traditional marriage and his arguments here have force.
Hitchens thinks that the Conservative Party is dying (understandable, looking at its MPs and ministers) but, yet again, goes to an extreme, wishing that it could have lost the 2010 General Election so that it might have died, and so made room for a new and socially-conservative party. I wish that it had lost too, but for other reasons!
Hitchens reminds me of two other scribblers of note, Peter Oborne and (now rather forgotten) Paul Johnson.
All three are often intuitively correct on some issues, risibly mistaken on others. They are alike in other ways, too. As the Russians say, they are all “Maximalisti”.
Hitchens (like Owen Jones) blocked me on Twitter for ideological reasons. Hitchens (like Owen Jones) makes a very comfortable living from the System msm. Hitchens (like Owen Jones) poses no danger to the existing state of affairs, despite making much noise. Hitchens (like Owen Jones) is a mass media pussycat pretending to be a tiger.
I like to read Hitchens’ words occasionally. He is often right, not always. However, his words are commentary, not inspiration. He says in the interview that Britain is finished and that the only serious history of contemporary Britain will one day be written in Chinese! Maybe, but God moves in mysterious though sometimes sanguinary ways. As a Christian and a student of history, Hitchens should know that.
Hitchens’ recent book (which I have not yet read, but which promises to be at least as myth-shattering as those of the unjustly neglected historian Correlli Barnett)
Update, 18 September 2020
Since the above was written, Peter Hitchens has been almost a lone voice struggling against the “Coronavirus” panic and the allied government-proclaimed fear propaganda.
Update, 24 April 2022
Hitchens is now in the small minority of public figures unwilling to go along with the msm noise against Russia, and for Ukraine (meaning the Kiev regime of the Jew-Zionist Zelensky).
On the face of it, a clear case, with no doubt about the immediately-relevant facts. The defendant admitted to the crime and was sentenced to a year in prison. There are some nuances, however.
Obviously, criminal damage cannot be tolerated, and it is certainly not very nice and certainly not very polite to daub words on the door of a neighbouring dwelling; but to my mind the sentence was harsh.
The defendant was sentenced to a year in prison and will therefore be released in 6 months’ time, possibly earlier. The chances are that he will lose his local authority home. I have no idea what possessions or companion animals he may have, but unless he has friends or family somewhere to look after them, they too will be lost. He will come out of prison with nowhere to go, and may not be rehoused if some local penpusher decrees that he made himself homeless by his own actions.
That is part of the background. Then we have the point that the defendant had no previous convictions save for a silly one, 27 years previously, involving a “sick-note”.
In view of the fact that the local authority would probably take the crime to be a breach of lease terms or conditions, and so would take away the defendant’s home anyway, would it not have been more just simply to have given this defendant a suspended sentence?
This looks like kicking a man when he is down. At the same time, we see the courts daily giving thugs, thieves etc non-sentences. Of course, this was a “racial” crime…the courts have obviously been told to treat any offence having a “racial” element more seriously (harshly), in an attempt to keep the doomed multikulti society from falling to pieces.
I noticed, also, that the victims were from the Congo. Again, I do not know the full facts, but it is odds-on that what we have here are either “refugees” or economic migrants who have left Africa in order to settle in the UK. Odds-on, again, that the British people (including the defendant) are paying for the victims to live here and breed.
The case above reminds me of one about 25 years ago in Hammersmith, in which a man was driven half-mad by the incessant noise of blacks and their “music”, parties etc in the flat above his dwelling; so much so that he burned them out, killing several. He got a sentence, I think, of about 10 years for manslaughter and arson. Again, the act can scarcely be “justified”, perhaps, but it can be understood. Legally, provocation does not exist and provides no defence in such a case. In real-life terms, though, I think that many will feel a little sorry for such a defendant.
There is a further point: the defendant in the immediate case in question felt the need to say that he is not “racist” (perhaps after consultation with solicitors or Counsel). So even he himself felt the need to “virtue-signal”! If he or his advisers thought that a display of “contrition” and “I’m not racist” protesting would mitigate the sentence, they seem to have been mistaken.
There is also the point that, as hundreds of thousands of blacks and browns etc flood into the UK every year, and as politicians bleat about the “need” to destroy what is left of the countryside in order to build little boxes for migrants on agricultural land and forested land, very many fully-entitled British people are homeless (after today’s sentence, add another one, 6 months down the line).
I am at present also preparing a blog post about Peter Hitchens, who thinks that the UK is doomed in terms of its present society. I suppose that most of us hope that he is wrong. I also suppose that he is probably right.
A comet has appeared in the UK’s political skies. Its name is Brexit Party. It is running at about 30% in the opinion polls re. the EU elections to be held on 23 May 2019, while in respect of Westminster elections, it is on about 15%. The EU elections may not be of much importance except as a popularity contest, but for a new party without any policies at all (except to get out from under the EU) to be at 15% indicates a groundswell of public disquiet which may have huge consequences one way or another in domestic UK politics.
[note: even as I write, the polling figures above are out of date! One very recent poll now has Brexit Party at 34% for the EU elections and 20% re Westminster voting intention, with Conservatives only on 19% for Westminster and 13% for the EU elections; has the Conservative vote ever been that low? I think not; even in the Blair-Labour landslide of 1997, the Conservatives polled in the actual election at 30.7%].
It now looks as though some of my early blogging was prescient indeed, if I myself may say so. “Give that man a cee-gar”!
Exclusive Telegraph poll: for the first time Brexit Party is in second place in general election polling – BP on 20%, Tories on 19% – on course to win 49MPS – Tories lose over 130 seats including Johnson and Rudd – Labour in minority governmenthttps://t.co/YGVFr3Y6bL
The Brexit Party gets more popular by the day, with 34% now intending to back them in the European elections – more than the Labour and Conservative Parties COMBINED. The 17.4m have been betrayed by our political class for years, and now we're going to MAKE them listen!
There are signs of panic in the main System parties:
“A ComRes poll for the Sunday Telegraph showed that if a Westminster general election were called, Labour would reap the largest share of the vote with 27%; the Brexit party would garner 20% ahead of the Conservatives on 19%. The Liberal Democrats would win 14%, followed by ChangeUK (7%) and the Greens (5%) with Ukip trailing on 2%.” [The Guardian]
I come from a certain direction: I recall the limited but real popularity of the National Front [NF] in the mid-1970s, and saw at first hand how outside forces made use of internal dissensions in order to destroy the NF as an effective party and movement. I believe (though without having any direct or personal knowledge) that similar events may have happened to explode the British National Party [BNP].
The National Front and BNP were both broadly social-nationalist, whereas UKIP is broadly nationalist but lacking the para-socialist element ideologically. Brexit Party has taken on UKIP’s “nationalist” or “patriotic” mantle despite having no published policies at all beyond leaving the EU.
It is easy to speculate about why the course of events happens, harder to pin down the exact or even approximate facts. Many casually blame, or designate as important, the operations of Zionists, Israel, MI5, SIS, MOSSAD, unnamed State agencies, freemasons, occult spiritual groups etc.
Every party or movement has internal tensions. As a John le Carre character remarked, “Jesus Christ only had 12 agents, and one of those was a double” [meaning “double-agent”].
The art of influencing events from the shadows is not to be identified or identifiable as a moving force.
Coming back to Brexit Party, there are known facts. The extraordinary political showman (as some would have it, “snake-oil salesman”), Nigel Farage, was leader of UKIP for decades. He in fact was in UKIP almost at the start, and is often termed one of the founders, though he was not the actual founder, who was an academic called Allan Sked.
“Sked is a member of the British-American Project, which exists to promote Britain’s political ties to the U.S.” [Wikipedia].
“During the administration of President Bill Clinton in the US, the Australian journalist John Pilger attacked the BAP as an example of “Atlanticist freemasonry.” He asserted in November 1998 that “many members are journalists, the essential foot soldiers in any network devoted to power and propaganda.” [Wikipedia].
Here is one msm drone who belongs to that British-American Project:
Yes, that’s right. Yasmin-Alibhai-Brown, the supposedly “radical”, “anti-imperialist” “journalist” (in fact, totally unqualified and inexperienced in true journalism, just a ranting loudmouth).
Another member of the very same organization is BBC journalist James Naughtie, most of whose views are, at least superficially, totally different from those of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown…
The British-American Project contains a large number of UK-based (and other) journalists (and others), of supposedly diverse views. I wonder if their views and motives are as “diverse” as they seem to be at first blush.
Only today, on the Andrew Marr Show [BBC 1 TV], Marr tried to trash Nigel Farage and Brexit Party, but Farage was able to crush Marr easily in the end.
System drones like Marr do not seem to understand that populist movements such as UKIP (a few years ago) or Brexit Party (now) are the last chance for the System to listen to the British people and so avert an explosion of justified political hatred which will, otherwise, roll over them like a tank over a cockroach.
Marr’s own (rarely admitted) views:
A typical pro-NWO, pro-ZOG, pro-EUmsm drone, paid until recently a million pounds a year by the BBC out of your “licence fee” (enforced tax) monies (apparently somewhat less now, after public uproar about the absurd salaries paid by the BBC to key propagandists).
Was the secret aim of UKIP to draw off nationalist sentiment from parties such as the BNP, i.e. to neutralize effective political opposition to NWO [New World Order] and ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government] in the UK by containing it, controlling it, monitoring it? Or was UKIP just a typically English amateur effort which mushroomed into something bigger. Or both of those?
Already, in looking at UKIP, we see the difficulty of unravelling the skein of motives: secret forces, public faces, ambitions, ideals, various personalities etc.
As recently as last year, Alan Sked said that “I founded UKIP. It’s a national joke now and should disappear.” [The Guardian]. Is that just sour grapes from a founder left behind? Is there anything else there? Had UKIP “done its job”, and so could be binned?
Until 2010, the BNP did better in all or almost all elections than did UKIP. It is hard to recall that, now that the UKIP star has risen and fallen and now that the BNP is just a tiny handful of back-room zealots. In its heyday, the BNP was more successful by far than UKIP. The BNP even had two MEPs (Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons).
Brexit Party is UKIP, but a UKIP which, like a snake, has shed its “skin” of various unwanted people, unwanted history etc and, unlike the snake, miraculously become far far more powerful, far more slick, far more able to capitalize on its “unique selling point”, the sheer hatred which many many people now feel for UK society as it now is (and also for the EU dictatorship).
Farage is the star of Brexit Party, as he was when in UKIP. Look at the clip below. Farage enters a hall packed with supporters. It echoes in a minor key the entrance of Adolf Hitler into the hall at the end of the 1935 Leni Riefenstahl film Triumph of the Will.
The Brexit party turned up in Newport, south Wales last night. A true Labour heartland. Usually. https://t.co/NoBovPxNCv
Farage can draw large crowds, as in this recent rally at Peterborough, where 2,000 supporters are said to have paid£10 each just to hear Farage speak. Few other politicians in the UK could get 200 (or even 20, in many cases) to turn up to hear them, even for free!
Peterborough rally for the Brexit Party. When was the last time British politics saw something like this?? Astonishing. They’re doing three rallies a week! pic.twitter.com/YVUlQnhTdw
Farage is the key to this. No Farage in UKIP means, effectively, no UKIP. Were there no Farage in Brexit Party, that party would also rapidly cease to exist.
Despite his public profile, Farage is to some degree an enigma. A metals trader, he was in employment as recently as 2003 and possibly even after that. He was elected as an MEP in 1999. He seems to have been a “Eurosceptic” (anti-EU) for a long time, voting Green Party in 1989: the Green Party was, at that time, Eurosceptic and not pro-mass-immigration. One wonders whether, had it not become a kind of middle class virtue-signallers’ party, Green Party might have had greater political success.
Farage created UKIP (not founded perhaps, but created) in his own image: anti-EU, free marketist (softened for tactical purposes), English more than British, not social-national, not “racist” (racialist), despite Farage making a few innocuous comments that only echoed what most white British people believe or feel. Brexit Party may or may not follow those lines, but we cannot say for sure, because Brexit Party, almost uniquely, has published literally no policies at all, save for Brexit itself.
I say “almost uniquely” because the surely-doomed Change UK, which can be taken to be the opposite pole to Brexit Party, also has no published policies (beyond staying in the EU). This is in fact consonant with earlier blogs and, until I was expelled from Twitter, tweets, i.e. that people in the UK, at least in England and Wales, are now voting against rather than for parties; voting tactically to block parties they dislike, rather than supporting the party they like. I have blogged before about this and how it is an outcome of the ludicrous UK electoral system.
I take Farage to be sincerely anti-EU, anti-socialist, possibly anti-immigration, but not to have any sophisticated socio-political or economic ideas. I have said before that Farage does not understand politics well, a surprising statement in view of his stellar public political performance. What I meant is that he has not developed any ideology, as such; neither has he a political programme; also, he has not much developed a party machine (with UKIP; we shall see what happens with Brexit Party).
I take Farage at face value, more or less; the same with his mass following. As to others, I am looking and seeing a strong Jewish element. Brexit Party already has a “Brexit Party Friends of Israel” group. There are other indications; the Brexit Party Treasurer is indirectly connected by marriage to the Rothschilds:
Brexit Party not only has Jewish influence but is open in general to persons of other and various ethnicities. Many candidates are not really British, certainly not of British origin.
Good afternoon Mr. Umunna. I am a candidate for the Brexit party. I am partly of Pakistani origin. There are many candidates of mixed ethnicity in our terrific party. You have the wrong end of the stick. May we pls meet to discuss your prejudices? Anytime that suits you. Pls say https://t.co/W6IdKODVMQ
Despite its paucity of policy and its multi-ethnic candidate list, many of those who support Brexit Party and also many of those who oppose it seem to think that it is somehow “nationalist”. It may be, but only in the very broadest sense.
In respect of candidates, one aspect I find very odd is that, out of about 60 or so Brexit Party EU election candidates, Brexit Party has no less than 3 who are former members of the (1978-1997) Revolutionary Communist Party. Remarkable from a tiny party which had so few members. If I were to suggest State involvement here, it would be without any real evidence, but it does give me pause all the same.
The Great Replacement, otherwise known as “migration-invasion” of Europe, is no mere “conspiracy theory”. United Nations and EU documents have laid out the conspiratorial globalist plan time and again. Only recently, EU and other political heads met in Marrakesh, Morocco, to pledge to assist African and Asian invasion of Europe, to replace European populations with alien black and brown populations.
This anti-white, anti-European campaign was built into the EU right from the start and conflated with the idea of a European “superstate”:
Jean Monnet was one of the principal freemasonic architects of the EU:
“Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet (French: [ʒɑ̃ mɔnɛ]; 9 November 1888 – 16 March 1979) was a Frenchpolitical economist and diplomat.[1] An influential supporter of European unity, he is considered as one of the founding fathers of the European Union. Jean Monnet has been called “The Father of Europe” by those who see his innovative and pioneering efforts in the 1950s as the key to establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor of today’s European Union.[2] Never elected to public office, Monnet worked behind the scenes of American and European governments as a well-connected pragmatic internationalist.” [Wikipedia]
“He was the first to be bestowed Honorary Citizen of Europe by the European Council of the European Union, for extraordinary work to promote European cooperation on 2 April 1976. Following this he became the first person alive to be pictured on a German stamp who was not also a German head of state.” [Wikipedia]
“In his book Praktischer Idealismus (Practical Idealism), written in 1925, he describes the future of Jews in Europe and of European racial composition with the following words:
The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today’s races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroidrace of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals. […]
Instead of destroying European Jewry, Europe, against its own will, refined and educated this people into a future leader-nation through this artificial selection process.”
“Nazis considered the Pan-European Union to be under the control of Freemasonry.[27] In 1938, a Nazi propaganda book Die Freimaurerei: Weltanschauung, Organisation und Politik was released in German.[28] It revealed Coudenhove-Kalergi’s membership of Freemasonry, the organization suppressed by Nazis.” [Wikipedia]
“Hitler did not share the ideas of his Austrian compatriot. He argued in his 1928 Secret Book that they are unfit for the future defense of Europe against America. As America fills its North American lebensraum, “the natural activist urge that is peculiar to young nations will turn outward.” But then “a pacifist-democratic Pan-European hodgepodge state” would not be able to oppose the United States, as it is “according to the conception of that commonplace bastard, Coudenhove-Kalergi…”” [Wikipedia]
There are secret occult forces behind the founding and expansion of both USA and EU. They are not exclusively Jewish or Zionist, but there is a strong link, as there is to Freemasonry, and also to other groupings not publicly named. Forces of Evil.
Look at the tweet below, from the World Economic Forum at Davos, and retweeted by a pro-EU public relations drone, and which purports to show a wonderful “economic plan” to create a “trade route” (corridor) from Malta and the Mediterranean to Scandinavia. What is the real purpose here? To create a funnel from Africa to Northern Europe, through which migrant-invaders will be funnelled through the heart of Europe to destroy it racially and culturally.
The EU was never meant to be just a mutual-benefit trade bloc. It was always meant to be a monolithic superstate in which the white European populations could be mixed, eventually, with blacks and browns. Of course, that was never conveyed to the peoples of Europe, only to the self-appointed “elite”. In fact, some naive people supported the EU (and still do) because they imagined that it was European in race and culture and not only in geography. Thus we see the deliberate conflation by Remain drones, in the msm or on social media, of “EU” and “Europe“, as in “if Brexit happens, we shall be leaving Europe“, rather than “…leaving the EU.” The UK is part of Europe and always will be; it need not be part of the already-dictatorial EU superstate, which is deliberately importing the culturally inferior by the million.
How is it possible, though, for bothEU and Brexit Party to be heavily influenced by the same forces (ZOG, NWO etc)? Think of a bet whereby you could, in a two-horse race, win whichever horse puts its nose in front. Likewise, in the UK there are or were two or three main parties. The fix was/is into all of those parties. It does not matter (or did not, until Corbyn took over Labour) which party wins, because ZOG/NWO is embedded in all three “main parties” (things are changing now, though).
Brexit Party may have been partly set up with secret aims in mind, but these plans do not always go as planned. Brexit Party has mushroomed, almost exploded, in a way which was perhaps unforeseen even by Farage himself. These things happen in history. The events of the Russian Revolution spiralled out of control, or to use a different metaphor, spread like a wildfire from its modest beginnings in one city in the corner of a huge empire.
Why are voters flocking to Brexit Party? It cannot be because of Brexit Party’s policies, because it has none, or at least only one. I identify these factors:
the wish to have the Referendum of 2016 properly respected and complied with; but beyond that
the wish to hit out at the System parties and especially the mis-named “Conservative” Party, which under the influence of Jewish Zionism and globalism has trashed the UK (especially England and Wales) to the point where nothing works properly, where most people have neither security nor freedom, where the population is only about half really British now, and where standards in all areas are dropping like a stone (NHS, transport, education, real pay, State welfare benefits, animal welfare, environment etc). There is also the repression on thought and socio-political expression. “Free speech” scarcely exists now in the UK.
The wish to lash out is very strong now. The people can see that Brexit Party has the popular support to make it a credible vote at both EU and (so far) Westminster elections. People know (whether intellectually or instinctively) that a vote for Brexit Party is one that hits the Conservatives hard, much harder than voting, say, Labour. In any case, Labour itself is not supported by most people (not so much for policy reasons as because white English people especially do not like what they see around Corbyn: the blacks and browns, the semi-literate Angela Rayner types who would be in Cabinet, the creaking 1970s comic-book “Marxism” etc).
A vote for Brexit Party hits the Conservative Party hard not only in areas where Labour is strong but in areas where the Conservatives have prevailed for decades. As I blogged previously, if (as polls suggest) the Conservatives lose 60% or even 50% of their votes, they will lose 50-200 seats, to Labour, to Brexit Party itself, and, here and there, to the Liberal Democrats. That means (as I also blogged previously and to which the msm is now catching up) that
Brexit Party may actually win some —possibly 50, even 100— seats at Westminster;
The Conservative Party, which has outlived its usefulness, will fade and go the way of the Liberal Party after the First World War; and
Labour will (as I have predicted for 2 years) probably be largest party in the Commons, but will be unable to do whatever it wants, because it will be a minority government (almost certainly). People may well prefer that to a majority Labour government.
It can probably be said that, in Westminster constituencies where Labour is not now the first or second party in elections, even former Labour voters would be better to vote Brexit Party than to vote Labour, because in “Conservative” Westminster constituencies, a vote for Labour is going to be a wasted vote, whereas a vote for Brexit Party will quite possibly help to unseat the Conservative MP in question.
Speaking now from a social-national viewpoint, why do I welcome Brexit Party?
That is a simple question to answer. No matter what forces may be behind Brexit Party, no matter what forces influence it, its importance to me lies in its ability to smash the “three main parties” scam-system in the UK. A weak government, esp. Labour, would open the way to real social nationalism in a way never seen before.
The unreality of the “Remain” crowd can be gauged by the tweet below. Like so many of the twitterati, this fellow over-values Twitter. He actually thinks that he is achieving something by having a few hundred or a few thousand other Remain whiners in his echo-chamber retweet or “like” his pointless tweet. Result? Nothing, but he feels warm and justified. In fact, he is a public relations man whose Twitter output is largely a one-sided and pro-EU song of praise. I predict that 24 May 2019 will not be a pleasant day for him!
Looks as if Boris Idiot and Amber Rudd might both lose their seats at the next General Election. Conservative MPs will not be voting for either of them to be leader if there is every chance that they might lose their seats…Happy day!
Curtice: "The [Conservative] party faces the prospect of nothing less than a mass defection that could leave it with by far its worst ever result in a UK-wide ballot"https://t.co/PW0KpRPHiv#EP2019#brexit
Someone called Casper Hughes, writing in The Independent [see below], says that Brexit Party will have no effect on Westminster elections. That statement, I think, is probably wrong. For the following reasons:
first of all, like most unthinking scribblers and talking heads of the present time, he has not managed to free himself from the idea that there is a spectrum going from “far left” through “hard left”, “soft left”, “centre-left”, “centrist”, then to “centre-right”, “rightwing”, “hard right” and finally the —demonized— “far right”;
Casper Hughes labels, simplistically, a huge group as “rightwing voters”. It’s a meaningless phrase; it shows lack of real understanding;
politics is more nuanced now. People from all parts of the outdated “right”/”left” spectrum can, for example, be allied on animal rights, environment, economic outcomes (and even policies: rail and utility renationalization for example). It was Jack London who said “I am a socialist, but a white man first”;
it is a mistake to imagine that Brexit Party support is all about Brexit. The System betrayal of the EU Referendum result is one example of how the System has, in vulgar terms, shat on the white British people over and over, especially in the past 30 years or so. The Brexit Party is a chance (like the 2016 EU Referendum itself) to kick the System “parties” (which form, to a large extent, one party with 2-3 faces).
people are currently (since at least 2015) voting against, not for. The article does to some extent acknowledge that. That means that people are voting not for Brexit Party and its sole policy, but to stamp on Con and Lab (and LibDem) as well as voting —yes— for Brexit, i.e. to leave the EU properly, without strings;
people generally now realize that a conspiracy is stealing Brexit, against the “democracy” we are supposed to have in the UK; they want to fight against that; the traditional voters for the “main parties” are not as dominant as they were. In 1950, 97% voted LibLabCon. Now? Maybe 50%;
also, many traditional voters feel betrayed: Labour betrayed its core vote by turning into the Blair finance-capitalist, mass immigration, “ignore-Pakistani-child-rapists” “New Labour” or fake-Labour party. The Conservatives betrayed their core vote by continuing with mass immigration, by increasing taxes to an extent not seen under Blair —or even Callaghan in the 1970s—, by destroying much of the mental landscape that made England England, by conspiring to dishonour the 2016 Referendum result, and in other ways;
the article says in terms that the present situation is a re-run of UKIP in 2014-2015. It is not. People saw that UKIP was cheated in 2015 (1 in 8 people voted UKIP in 2015 and were cheated by a rigged electoral system) and are angry at that, but even more angry at the corruption, freeloading and dishonesty of the main 2 parties, as well as at their incompetence and arrogance;
the article supposes that the so-called “right-wing” voters will “coalesce” around the misnamed “Conservatives” as a “stop Corbyn” tactic. Don’t count on it. After 3 years of Jewish propaganda contra Corbyn, Labour is riding higher than ever; and many former Con voters actually like many Corbyn-Labour policies;
the article says that Brexit Party is unlikely to win many if any Westminster seats. Let’s see. The SNP was founded in 1934, and did not get many MPs until 2015, before which it often had 0, 1, 2 or a few MPs most of the time (81 years!); then it reached that FPTP tipping point and had 59. Brexit Party may or may not get to the tipping point, but the idea is no longer ludicrous, if it opposes, say, Labour under Corbyn and Conservative Party under whoever (possibly Boris-Idiot);
the very fact that Boris Johnson is spoken of as possibly Prime Minister is proof enough that the System is sick and the Conservative Party terminally so;
the article seems to imagine that if Brexit Party gets only the same vote as UKIP in 2015, then its effect is meaningless. No, because even if Brexit Party gets the 12% UKIP got in 2015, and if the others stack up as Lab 35%, Con 35%, LibDem 10%, that leaves the Conservatives, though largest party, 32 seats off a majority: https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html (only a couple of points more for Labour and Labour are largest party, though 18 off a majority);
the article’s conclusion is predicated on traditional tribal Conservative loyalty, but that is breaking down fast and very many older voters are dying. A recent poll said that less than half of 2017 Conservative voters intend (at present…) to vote Con next time. That would cull anything up to 200 Conservative MPs if it were to become reality;
the EU elections will be a guide, the Peterborough by-election even more important.
I noticed that the article ends on an uncertain note.
If actual voting reflected that, the Conservatives would lose about 172 seats and be left with about 145; Labour would be the largest party in the Commons, with 297 MPs (up 35), and Brexit Party would have a bloc of 105 MPs. LibDems might have 18. That would mean Corbyn as Prime Minister of a minority (or coalition) government, 29 seats short of a Commons majority.
Brexit Party is now holding two rallies daily! Not pathetic little meetings like those of Change UK (a Change UK meeting yesterday had 9 people on the podium and 5 —yes, 5— people in the audience!) Here is the Thursday May 16 2019 Brexit Party meeting in Willenhall, West Midlands, a town with a population of about 29,000; the meeting had about 1,000 attending, obviously mostly locals:
and here (same day!), another Brexit Party meeting in the same region, in Wolverhampton, this time with 1,200 attending! So at least 2,200 people had turned out to support Brexit Party in the same region and on the same day! This seems unstoppable, whatever some msm twitterati and chatterati are saying!
Nigel Farage about to go on stage in Wolverhampton. Hall managers tell me around 1200 are here. Every seat is taken. Supporters are having to stand around the walls. pic.twitter.com/xZshL2LgNW
— Christopher Hope📝 (@christopherhope) May 16, 2019
Meanwhile, at a Change UK “rally” (8 members of the public and 2 reporters? Or was it 5 members of the public and 5 reporters?…)
Now we’ve seen the enthusiasm of the people for Chuka and Soubry’s great party I assume we’ll be seeing less of them on #marr, #bbcqt and #BBCR4today… but I won’t hold my breath pic.twitter.com/TlZ9uVgCAT
Here we are. Election day. Every indication shows Brexit Party powering ahead, leaving Con, Lab, LibDems, let alone Greens and Chukup, in its wake and floundering. I saw an interesting Twitter thread analysis about it all (see below):
THREAD: On the rise of the Brexit Party and what it means for Brexit and British politics.
That’s it, there are no more Brexit Party rallies planned before polling day. I’ve been to half a dozen of them across the country, from the very first week to the end.
The Peston show on ITV got a psephologist to work out what would happen in the (unlikely but possible) contingency that the next general election saw the same voting as the recent EU elections. The result? Brexit Party 441 seats, Conservatives 1 seat!
Well, much water under the bridge! Brexit Party was polling around 12% when Farage decided to pull 317 Brexit Party candidates only 4 weeks before the election. That was followed by another 38. That, in return for a worthless promise from Boris Johnson, a man of no credibility, no integrity, a useless beneficiary of the UK’s sick political system.
Farage‘s ridiculous decision (taken unilaterally and without consultation with the candidates themselves, who had all paid to be considered as candidates) collapsed Brexit Party overnight. Farage killed his party as surely as if he had shot it in the neck.
Now, at time of writing, Brexit Party is in the polls at around 4% and, with 3 weeks to go, is not a serious contender in the General Election. Brexit Party might have won a number of seats while depriving the Conservatives (mainly) of a number of others, but now will be lucky to win even in those constituencies where it had a chance (e.g. Hartlepool).
Why did Farage destroy his own party? I am not the conspiracy theorist some imagine but I do speculate whether this is some kind of Russian operation.
Russia, we are told, wants the UK out of the EU (and, in Putin’s wildest dreams, NATO). Taking that as correct, it may be that Russian strategists were (are?) hoping for “hard Brexit” or “no deal Brexit” (real Brexit), because it weakens the EU (as part of the New World Order or “NWO”) and because a real Brexit might both cause economic/political discontent in the UK down the line and also stimulate Scottish nationalism, with the possibility that Scotland might break off from the UK, and then possibly (probably) decommission the nuclear missile submarine bases there. A break-up of the UK would be a stunning coup for the Russian state in terms of Atlantic geopolitics.
Still speculating, if an immediate “hard Brexit” seemed likely to be blocked by Parliament’s Remain majority in the event of another hung Parliament, then Russian strategists might have decided to strengthen Conservative Party chances by taking out Brexit Party.
Brexit Party is a dictatorship of one man, Farage. To take Brexit Party out of the General Election, Farage alone had to make that decision. He did. So the question is why did Farage take that decision? To my mind, there is no logical reason based on ordinary politics why Farage should take the word of a proven and continual liar such as Boris Johnson. On the other hand, if Farage is or has become an agent under control, then it makes perfect sense.
How do we know that Farage has not been promised (or even paid already) a large sum (£20M is good, £50M is even better) offshore? It makes sense in baldly venal terms but it also makes sense for Farage politically, if Farage has become convinced that a Boris prime ministership with a large majority would result, in a year or two, in a “hard” or even “no deal” Brexit. That way, Farage gets a secret fortune and the political result he has wanted to see since the early 1990s.
True, Farage is wealthy anyway (is supposed to be), but so what? As to whether the Russians would pay really large sums for such purposes…well, the wife of an “oligarch” paid the Conservative Party £160,000 just to have a tennis game with Boris Johnson and David Cameron-Levita. On that basis, £50M to change the whole course of British policy and strategy seems cheap at the price.
There is no direct evidence that Farage is an agent of the Russian state, but he has been shown to have close links with some leading “oligarchs” etc. The Russia of Putin is not the Soviet Union. It operates partly via the uber-wealthy who are beholden to Putin; the Soviet Union operated in this sense in a different way, bureaucratically, via the KGB and its predecessor agencies (NKVD etc), GRU and, pre-WW2, the Comintern.
As we have seen (google, or see my earlier blogs), Boris Johnson, like Farage, is or has been close to some Russian or Russian-Jew “oligarchs”. Then there is the role of Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s “adviser” (who however has been reported as having actually overruled Johnson on some occasions!). I blogged about Cummings a few months ago: https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/08/10/les-eminences-grises-of-dystopia/
There have been those who have implied that Cummings is a kind of Russian agent. My previous assumption was that he might have been an agent of SIS (British agent rather than salaried officer, perhaps, but who knows?) for a while (when he was in Russia for about 3 years after having graduated from university) but again that was just my speculative thought. Still, one would not necessarily preclude the other, especially over time.
I have no evidence that Farage has been paid a huge bribe by Russia; I have no evidence that Cummings has, either. Still, I do wonder. “Thoughts are duty free”, even in the EU…
There is, of course, also the fact that the British Intelligence assessment of some connected matters is not going to be released until after the General Election. It has been held up by Johnson and Cummings. Why?
I tweeted (before Twitter expelled me) in the past about freedom of expression and how it is now under attack across the “West”; I have also blogged about it. It is not a straightforward issue but clarity is possible. The same is true when talking about the enemies of freedom.
Below, I link to a BuzzFeed “report” (propaganda piece) promoting the views of Jess Phillips MP, one of the worst MPs in the present House of Commons, who has now said (of a UKIP candidate, Carl Benjamin):
“The Electoral Commission should surely have standards about who can and can’t stand for election. If Facebook and Twitter can ban these people for hate speech how is it they are allowed to stand for election?”
It is hard to imagine being back in 1999, let alone 1989, 1979, 1969 (or any time before that right back to the 18th Century), when a Member of Parliament, even one as profoundly ignorant, uneducated and uncultured as Jess Phillips, would say that a civil service body should decide who should be allowed to stand for election!
Now there are certain kinds of people who cannot stand for election in the UK, and there is a debate to be had about whether those rules are too restrictive, but it has never been seriously suggested before that a candidate should be barred from standing simply because of whatever he or she has said!
Now, those who read my blog etc know that I have rather little time for “Sargon of Akkad” (Carl Benjamin) or his fellow “alt-Right” vloggers (“Prison Planet” Watson etc) but I think that they have the right to speak, to speak online, and to stand for elections. As to Benjamin’s “rape” comments about Jess Phillips, well they were in very poor taste and certainly not chivalrous (though Jess Phillips has no time for courtesy and, still less, for chivalry, in any case), but I do not think that he should be arrested, questioned by police etc about them, nor prevented from carrying on his doomed attempt to become an MEP.
The general assault on freedom of expression in the UK and across the “West”
The attack on what might loosely be called “free speech” is being led and largely carried out by the Jewish or Jewish-Zionist lobby, monitored and supported by the Israeli state. This can be illustrated by a few examples from the UK, starting with my own experiences:
Alison Chabloz sang satirical songs which were posted online; she placed a link on her blog. She was persecuted, lost her job as a result, further persecuted, then privately prosecuted by the fake “charity” called “Campaign Against AntiSemitism”, which then led to prosecution by the CPS and conviction under the bad law of the Communications Act 2003, s.127. At present she is still appealing:
Jez Turner made a speech in Whitehall in 2015, in which speech he suggested that Jews should be cast out from England as they had been on several occasions in the past (eg under Edward I). After a long legal struggle with the Jewish lobby, more particularly the “CAA”, the CPS caved in and prosecuted Jez Turner. He received a 1 year prison sentence in 2018 (he was released on strict conditions after 6 months).
Tommy Robinson
The activist known as Tommy Robinson has been banned from both Facebook and Twitter.
I have written and spoken many times about the “privatization of public space”. In my case, I have been disbarred because Jews wanted to stop me tweeting and/or punish me for exposing them. I have been interrogated by the police at Jewish instigation. I have had other problems with the authorities in recent years. All the doing of Jew conspirators.
In the past, printed matter was the medium of political propaganda. Today, it is online matter that counts, but the online platforms and internet services are in few hands, and most of the hands that matter are Jewish.
An individual can now be effectively silenced by being banned from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which can be the decision of a single capitalist “owner”, a manager or executive, or even some deskbound dogsbody.
In addition, that decision-maker, or a couple of such, can deprive the individual of money donations via removal of his or her Paypal, Patreon or other money-donation service.
Likewise, an organization can now be all but wiped out simply by the same methods. Just as I was expelled from Twitter (albeit that Twitter is just a waste of time and effort, really), so have been expelled (“suspended”, in Twitter’s weasel word) Alison Chabloz, Tommy Robinson and innumerable others. They have also been removed from Facebook, YouTube etc (I have no accounts on those platforms) and from donation sites, Paypal etc.
I see that Facebook has now removed Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam organization too (for “anti-Semitism”). The Jews are crowing. Maybe prematurely.
It is clear that power online is in very few hands. One decision by some Jew like Zuckerberg and an organization with literally millions of followers, such as InfoWars, can be sent spinning into outer darkness, with no right of appeal or legal redress qua citizen.
In the USA, these facts also mean that the Constitutional right to free speech is scarcely worth the paper it is printed on. I was always sceptical about it, on the basis that, yes, you can speak freely in the USA, so long as you do not mind losing your job, profession, business, home etc…Now the near-uselessness of the Constitutional freedom of speech is even more stark: by all means speak freely, but you are restricted to howling in the dark, or at least in the street. Your online “free speech”, meaning your communication with anyone not your immediate neighbour or family, is monitored, censored and can be completely taken away from you, not by the State, even, but by online platforms pressured by or owned by the Jewish Zionist lobby. We see that there are moves afoot in the UK even to prevent our taking part in already-stacked elections!
Conclusion
As European people and social nationalists, we can no more rely on online platforms than we can rely on getting elected in a rigged system, on fair reportage from the msm, or on getting justice under rigged legal systems.
Believe it or not, this idiot, Paul Bernal (see below), is a law lecturer! I feel sorry for his students at the University of East Anglia! According to his definition, even Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China had “free speech” (because you could *say* whatever you liked, but as a consequence might get shot…)
What an idiot! Absolutely prize…!
Time for the regular reminder that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from the consequences of your speech.
This blog post is not primarily about the Jess Phillips idiot-woman, but it is frightening to see the tweets of her supporters, showing the intellectual dullness even of the supposedly educated these days: see the tweet by one @docsimsim of Richmond, below
Jess Phillips my shero. She should be in the shadow cabinet atleast and possibly the next labour leader should she want the job. #StopBrexithttps://t.co/v0goH4HsOw
Others, however, have seen through the Jess Phillips Empty Vessel performance
Ignorance. Just ignorance. Sad indictment of how poorly ideas/policies are communicated. The MSM only interested in sound bites & those who produce them. The mouthpieces, eg Jess Phillips, always available for comment & contribute nothing. #BBCQT adds nothing to the discussion.
Here’s an American, one “Chris”, who seems to find it unobjectionable that some “authority” persons should “decide” on whether a candidate can be “allowed” to stand:
and here is Jess Phillips trying to make more publicity for herself while trying to squash down what little freedom of expression still exists in the UK:
Happy to discuss indeed. Personally I think we need a code of conduct that cannot be breached by those who stand as public representatives. I'd say saying you would rape someone if forced I'd say was a clear breach. I'll contact you for a meeting. Thanks https://t.co/iMlQvYIOBn
For those who are unaware, since being elected in 2015, Jess Phillips has squeezed every penny she can out of the taxpayers: not satisfied with a salary of nearly £80,000 and very generous “expenses”, she even “employs” her husband on £50,000 a year as “Constituency Support Manager” (he stays at home and is, presumably, a “house husband”). Yet she, this ignorant, rude, uneducated, uncultured creature, has the cheek to talk about “people with literally no discernible skills” getting high pay! That may be so, but she should look in the mirror, if she can bear it!
YouTube have banned me for 'hate speech', I think due to clips on Nazi policy featuring propaganda speeches by Nazi leaders. I'm devastated to have this claim levelled against me, and frustrated 15yrs of materials for #HistoryTeacher community have ended so abruptly.@TeamYouTube
— Mr Allsop History (@MrAllsopHistory) June 5, 2019
Update, 18 June 2019
Just one more random example of the slide into censorship and quasi-official lies or falsity:
A Dr Who writer @OldRoberts953 is expunged from a book by the BBC because he won’t conform to the latest transgender ideology. His views on transgenderism are probably shared by 90%+ of Brits but he’s now a Non-Person for the BBC. The net tightens around free speech. Please share https://t.co/G9fM2BK1e4
The police, CPS etc, but especially police, seem incapable of distinguishing, or unwilling to distinguish, between “grossly offensive” (unlawful) and merely “offensive” (lawful) and tend to treat all “offensive” communications as “grossly offensive”, which runs counter to Court of Appeal and Supreme Court case authority.
This is what happens when plainly bad law, such as Communications Act 2003, s.127, is drafted and passed into statute.
[above, Rory Stewart, many years ago in Afghanistan, consciously reprising Lawrence of Arabia; he was sometimes called both “Florence of Arabia” (in Iraq) and “Florence of Belgravia” (because of his well-connected and wealthy background)]
Introduction
My attention was caught by the BBC Politics tweet below.
Rory Stewart MP [Con, Penrith and Borders], who until yesterday was Minister of State for Prisons, a political dead-end, now can be said, appropriately enough, to have jumped free with one bound, and is now Secretary of State for International Development, a position again not quite in the front rank but a Cabinet post all the same. From his new elevation, Stewart has wasted no time in declaring his candidature for Conservative Party leadership.
I have been interested in Stewart and his political career for several years. I was puzzled as to why someone who appeared to have so many advantages (wealth, family influence, expensive education, pre-political career moves, a degree of public prominence etc) seemed to have run into the sand as an MP. However, it may be that he was playing a long game which will yet bring him to the highest office.
I do blog about MPs individually, but mostly those I term “deadhead MPs”. Stewart is certainly not one of those. However, his CV is almost too obviously brilliant. He seems to have almost too many talents, qualifications and virtues to be true. I do, perhaps unfairly, harbour a suspicion that the sum of his many parts may not quite add up to the same amount.
“After graduating, Stewart joined the Foreign Office.[11] He served in the British Embassy in Indonesia from 1997 to 1999, working on issues related to East Timor independence, and was appointed at the age of 26 as the British Representative to Montenegro in the wake of the Kosovo campaign.” [Wikipedia]
Stewart is believed to have been, like his father, an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service [SIS], a fact alluded to by David Dimbleby on BBC Question Time. Stewart neither agreed nor demurred. Still, a touch of the James Bonds impresses the common herd, I suppose…
[above, Brian Stewart, the father of Rory Stewart, wearing the badge of a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG), the 4th-highest order of chivalry in the UK (if excluding two now-dormant orders, the Order of St. Patrick and the Order of The Star of India)]
“After the coalition invasion of Iraq, he became the Coalition Provisional Authority Deputy Governorate Co-Ordinator in Maysan and Deputy Governorate Co-ordinator/Senior Advisor in Dhi Qar in 2003, both of which are provinces in southern Iraq.[9] He was posted initially to the KOSB Battlegroup then to the Light Infantry.[12] His responsibilities included holding elections, resolving tribal disputes, and implementing development projects.[12] He faced growing unrest and an incipient civil war from his base in a Civil-Military Co-operation(CIMIC) compound in Al Amarah, and in May 2004 was in command of his compound in Nasiriyah when it was besieged by Sadrist militia.[9] He was awarded an OBE for his services during this period. While Stewart initially supported the Iraq War, the International Coalition’s inability to achieve a more humane, prosperous state led him in retrospect to believe the invasion had been a mistake.” [Wikipedia]
Full marks for honesty, but not for perspicacity. Let’s look at the above again: Stewart joined the FCO (and/or SIS) in 1995-96 and by 1999, at age 26, he is British Representative in Montenegro, at that time emerging from nearly a decade of ex-Yugoslav conflict.
This is rather remarkable. Why was a 26-y-o appointed to this rather important strategic post? Even more remarkably, perhaps, Stewart was then posted to Iraq in the immediate post-invasion era, and was rather famously deputy-governor of an Iraqi province at the age of 28. As noted above, he even “saw action” to some extent when his compound was besieged by militia fighters.
“From 2000 to 2002 he travelled on foot through rural districts of Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal, a journey totalling around 6000 miles, during which time he stayed in five hundred different village houses. He had previously walked across West Papua in 1998,[115] and has since made a number of long walks through Cumbria and Britain. He also travelled into Libya a day after the fall of Colonel Gaddafi.” [Wikipedia]
“In late 2005, at the request of the Prince of Wales and Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan,[15] he established, as Executive Chairman, the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a human development NGO, in Afghanistan, and relocated to Kabul where he lived for the next three years restoring historic buildings in the old city of Kabul, managing its finances, installing water supply, electricity, and establishing a clinic, a school and an institute for traditional crafts.[4] Stewart was awarded the Royal Scottish Geographical Society‘s Livingstone medal in 2009 “in recognition of his work in Afghanistan and his travel writing, and for his distinguished contribution to geography”.[16] Stewart stepped down as Executive Chairman of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in May 2010.” [Wikipedia]
By any standards, Stewart’s life up to age 33 at least (he is now 46) was packed with achievements and adventures. Not many UK MPs could lay claim to anything even a tenth as interesting and varied (note my blogs about “deadhead MPs”). Indeed, it seems that, in 2008, a Hollywood studio (Studio Canal/Brad Pitt) actually bought the film rights to do a biopic of Stewart, starring, it was envisaged, Orlando Bloom as Stewart! No film has been made (yet).
This is not the British politics we know! This is somewhere in the realm of John Buchan and Sidney Reilly, a post-imperial Great Game pastiche.
Stewart’s second book, The Prince of the Marshes: and other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, also published as Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq, describes his experiences as a Deputy Governorate Co-ordinator in Iraq.[4] The New York Timescritic William Grimes commented that Stewart “seems to be living one of the more extraordinary lives on record”, but for him the “real value of the new book is Mr. Stewart’s sobering picture of the difficulties involved in creating a coherent Iraqi state based on the rule of law”.[126] Stewart’s books have been translated into multiple languages.
Stewart’s reflections on the circumstances under which outside military and political intervention in countries’ internal affairs may or may not hope to achieve positive results were distilled in a 2011 book, Can Intervention Work?, co-authored with Gerald Knaus and part of the Amnesty International Global Ethics Series. He has also written about theory and practice of travel writings in prefaces to Wilfred Thesiger‘s Arabian Sands,[127]Charles Doughty‘s Arabia Deserta[128] and Robert Byron‘s The Road to Oxiana.[129]
In 2016, he published The Marches, a travelogue about a 1,000-mile walk in the borderlands separating England and Scotland, known as the Scottish Marches, and an extended essay on his Father, Brian Stewart.[130] The Marches was long listed for the Orwell Prize, won the Hunter Davies Lakeland Book of the Year,[131] was a Waterstones Book of the Month,[132] and became a Sunday Times top ten bestseller.” [Wikipedia]
I suppose that many would be well satisfied to have done even one or two or three of the things noted above. Stewart has dozens of accomplishments and successes to his name. A few more are:
“His 2008 cover article in Time magazine, where he debated presidential candidates Obama and McCain, arguing against a troop surge in Afghanistan, has been shortlisted for an American Journalism Association Award
Afghanistan: The Great Game – A Personal View by Rory Stewart, a documentary in two parts that tells the story of foreign intervention by Britain, Russia and the United States in Afghanistan from the 19th century to the present day,which aired on BBC2 and which won a Scottish BAFTA (2012).[139]
Border Country: The Story of Britain’s Lost Middleland, which investigates the rift created by Hadrian’s Wall, and the issues of identity and culture in a region divided by the fabricated border, which was singled out for praise by David Attenborough.”
“Stewart speaks some French, Persian (Dari), and Indonesian. He has also studied at school, in the Foreign Office, and on his Asian travels, Latin, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Serbo-Croat, Urdu, and Nepali languages. He acknowledges that the latter three languages are “very rusty“;
He has lectured at Harvard and even advised Hillary Clinton…;
He is a karate expert (level unknown) and belongs to the Special Forces Club in London, some of whose members were in WW2 secret work, some were in the military and naval special forces, some ex-intelligence personnel —and there are also some who are rumoured to be just gold-plated fakes and fantasists;
“His speech about hedgehogs in Parliament in 2015[39] was named by The Times and The Telegraph as the best parliamentary speech of 2015 and described by the Deputy Speaker as “one of the best speeches she had ever heard in Parliament” [Wikipedia]
Stewart is married to an American woman who had previously been married to a fellow NGO worker. One of the children of the Stewarts was delivered by Stewart himself without medical assistance.
Stewart once tweeted to me about something, several years ago, and was very polite, something that I value. I do not attribute that entirely to the influence of the Dragon School or, indeed, Eton. He seems to know how to behave (though not all agree, I have heard).
Thoughts
Stewart’s stellar career stalled after he became an MP in 2010. Having said that, he has chaired Commons committees, been promoted slowly but surely, and Wikipedia notes that he attended the Bilderberg cabal along with George Osborne. Not that being a Bilderberg attendee is a guarantee of lasting political success (cf. Nick Boles MP) but it does indicate that the primary powers behind the Western throne consider that a person is of interest.
This is Rory Stewart’s moment of opportunity. He has seized it. Once Theresa May leaves office, the Conservative Party will elect a new leader. Stewart is the international System candidate nonpareil. I should not be surprised were he to win a first ballot outright, bearing in mind the collection of fools, knaves, deadheads and frauds likely to oppose him in the contest:
Penny Mordaunt, best known for diving in a swimsuit (she looked good, so be it…) and for being a reserve naval sub-lieutenant;
Michael Gove, pro-Jew, pro-Israel fraud and expenses cheat (I tweeted that once and it was one of 5 tweets that had me disbarred at the instigation of the Jew lobby, so it pleases me to repeat it!);
Boris Johnson (aka Boris Idiot), who proved as Foreign Secretary that he cannot hold down high office;
Andrea Leadsom, a nonentity;
Jeremy Hunt, smarmy clever snake and tipped to take May’s purple;
Amber Rudd, yet another dimwit, though she thinks herself terribly clever. Pro-Israel, pro-EU, pro-immigration. Was involved personally with Kwasi Kwarteng, the “African at Eton” (well, one of them), who has now married, or is about to marry, a younger Amber Rudd lookalike. Amber Rudd’s own seat may well be lost next time;
Philip Hammond, careful calculating Remainer;
Dominic Raab, part-Jew, pro-Brexit, hardfaced and careerist.
There may be others. There would have been Gavin Williamson (who has the self-confidence of the stupid) and Stephen Crabb (sex pest, expenses cheat and so pro-Israel that he could be termed “an agent of influence”) but both of those have ruled themselves out by their egregiously poor behaviour. Deadheads.
It scarcely needs to be said that, as social nationalist and thinker into the future, I am not on the same page as Rory Stewart, so obviously NWO/ZOG in orientation is he, and whose MP voting record etc is far from entirely to my liking. He also wanted the UK to remain in the EU and now seems to want to “leave” but not really leave: Brexit in name only (BRINO). However, there is no doubt that he is the standout candidate now to replace Theresa May, which means that he could be Prime Minister by the Autumn.
Still don’t understand the hard-on people have for Rory Stewart. Guess Brits can’t get over their worship for the military or posh men addicted to lying about statistics.
Military? Does 5 months as an instant 2nd lieutenant count? Or is that a reference to Stewart’s “secret war” posts?
A few more thoughts, 4 April 2019:
It seems that Stewart favours immigration:
“One farmer told Stewart, “All illegal immigrants should be rounded up and on the first ship out.” Some voters might expect their Conservative candidate at least to nod, but Stewart said, “Hmm,” and changed the subject. After leaving that house, he said quietly, “Actually, I’m rather in favor of immigration.” [The New Yorker]
So he favours (mass?) immigration. That would chime with those Bilderberg/Davos linkages. Also, it is all very well for a spoiled son of the “British Establishment” (father was a high-ranking SIS officer; Stewart lives in a country house surrounded by a small estate of a hundred acres or so) and who has always had access to effectively any money or anything he wanted without struggle or effort, to be OK about the mass of British people being replaced by blacks, browns, Chinese etc; and having to live with those basically backward peoples, share limited housing, road/rail space etc. Not to mention the effect on rates of pay, and the huge strain on public services, education, NHS, “welfare” etc.
Stewart is quite consciously remote from the concerns of the British people. He has put in huge effort on his adventures and career, but has never had to. Big difference.
I seriously wonder now, looking at or studying Stewart, whether he is right for the office of Prime Minister. Yes, it is very impressive to have run an Iraqi province (effectively or not, though?…) or part of Kabul (ditto) when only 28 or 30-ish, it is impressive to have walked across Afghanistan etc. It is impressive to have all those literary and other medals. However, how far does that get you in terms of being a British Prime Minister?
As a matter of fact, is it really that impressive to have been deputy governor of an Iraqi province when you were (some say) no bloody good, accomplished almost nothing and got a transfer a few months later to a more congenial post elsewhere in Iraq? I do not know the truth of it all, and I may be unfair or simply mistaken here, but I wonder whether Stewart’s other great accomplishments have a rather thin layer of reality under the surface glitter?
Impressive though those career highlights are, I am unsure as to whether Stewart really does have what it takes to be Prime Minister of this country in 2019 or 2020, as distinguished from being in that high office in a John Buchan political landscape circa 1912, and as a kind of Richard Hannay, a Hannay who is playing the role of an earlier and English/Scottish type of “Jack Ryan”, the American adventurer-patriot who eventually becomes President in the bestselling books of Tom Clancy.
I have spent some time (by my standards anyway) in preparing and writing and rethinking this picture of Rory Stewart. He disturbs me more than he reassures me: he seems rather fixated on himself, his own psychology, his motivations, his own (enormous and not denied by the man himself) ambition.
It worries me that, in the interviews and profiles I have read, Stewart says much about himself, his achievements, his accomplishments (or allows them to be known…), but little about the needs of the world, of Europe, of the European peoples, of the British people. I see little or nothing in terms of policy, or wider ideas, just a self-view that he is the right sort of chap to run the UK. That sounds like a more impressive sort of David Cameron-Levita-Schlumberger to me, and that worries the hell out of me.
Parris is not only remote from the concerns of the British people (though in his case the remoteness comes not from ancestral hauteur but is the self-consciously created la-di-da-ness of the fastidious metropolitan gay), but is also a pro-immigration Remainer who thinks that ruling the UK should be left to people like him and his affluent, cosmopolitan, pro-multikulti friends. Trouble is, it has been, and look at the result! (Parris himself, elected in 1979, was reprimanded by Mrs Thatcher for having replied to a constituent that she should count herself lucky to have a council house, whatever its flaws…), though he stayed on as an MP until 1986.
I started off thinking that Rory Stewart was, judging objectively, far and away the best candidate to replace Theresa May. I still think that he is by far the most accomplished candidate, but I the more I read about him, the more doubts and suspicions I have. I am also disturbed that some of the Jewish lobby on Twitter seem to favour him.
In the end, no System party or candidate has the right to rule the UK. Social nationalism must triumph.
A few recent tweets seen about Rory Stewart
I’ve a horrid feeling it means they are going to do a deal soon. She will announce she is going, the contest will start with Rory Stewart being lined up as her successor. Democracy is dead in this country, I just worry they will do us out of voting for MEPs too.
Rory Stewart abnormal. Who ignores pleas fr help when a quadriplegic prisoner lying on back 24/7 with bedsore so badly neglected & tissue deteriorated that pelvic bone is exposed ? Stewart as Prisons Minister downright cruel.
I thought I’d heard it all from Diane Abacus until this bloke Rory Stewart springs up. Where do political parties find these lying conniving self indulgent corrupt fuckwits? https://t.co/6cbEnUKXnY
Here is a surprise. The MI6 house journal, the Guardian, shills for ex MI6 officer Rory Stewart (whose dad was also deputy head of MI6). The Guardian views his role in the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan as making him "highly qualified" in International Development. https://t.co/2NrZXzC9tE
The first day of his promotion to Cabinet is an opportune time to recall a classic from Rory Stewart's back catalogue. As Floods Minister he said the flood defences had worked well but the water had come over the top of them. #r4today#BBCNews#Reshufflepic.twitter.com/1N2iHIkvpP
Oh, dear…(see below): I am thinking now that Stewart is rapidly using up his credit with at least some of the public, though in the end the ones who will vote for a new Conservative Party leader will be, initially, the Con MPs in the Commons, not Joe Public. It may be that Stewart will be seen as the ideal “Stop Boris” candidate, someone to rally to. I do not know what level of MP support he now has. I presume some, or why would he risk being humiliated? On the other hand, he does strike me as a very ambitious gambler and chancer.
Am I alone in thinking Rory Stewart comes across as a complete prat. I’ve never seen less leadership qualities from an officer in the armed forces.
The tweeter above is yet another who seems to think that Stewart’s 5 months as a gap-year “officer” on probation is something real, rather than a kind of adventure holiday for the gentry. Unless the tweeter, like others, takes the term SIS “officer” at face value, rather than as a conventional designation (cf. police “officer”, council “officer” etc).
Update, 25 May 2019
Well, here we are after Theresa May’s announcement of departure, and Rory Stewart is on all msm outlets. He has put the knife into Boris-Idiot and may have damaged the latter’s campaign. Opinion on Stewart himself is divided, half seeing his accomplishments and character, half seeing his gaffes. The tweet below is more favourable than not to him
On the other hand, I saw Stewart on TV, saying that “we” must build 2 MILLION (!) houses. My reaction? “Only because the UK has imported millions of unwanted immigrants, who are breeding fast; and Britain CONTINUES to import huge numbers, even in 2019!”
I see no willingness in Bilderberg/Davos Stewart to take on mass immigration. In fact, he seems to support it. The negative effects will scarcely impact him or his family, after all, in his listed Borders country house…
Ah…another tweeter who raises points against Stewart:
and, below, the sort of statement that comes easier to those who have never been poor, hungry, desperate etc…Almost clownish coming from someone who has been an MP and whose votes, with those of other Conservatives and LibDems, enabled the attacks on the unemployed and disabled since 2010…
The country can be a much better and much happier place if we learn again to focus on the small things that make a real difference to people. pic.twitter.com/KfYxEi6E6e
Stewart seems to be an engaging fellow, at least on the surface, but the more I see of him, and the more that I read about his voting record and views, the less I like him ideologically or politically.
Update, 1 June 2019
Ah, I see that I am not alone in thinking that Stewart’s accomplishments and achievements are perhaps not quite all that they seem on paper:
“Though few would speak on the record, there is a broad critique of Stewart that his biography is a little overegged and certainly self-regarding – leading to a nickname, a member of his wider social circle confides, of “Florence of Belgravia”.” [The Guardian]
“Though Stewart has claimed to know “what it feels like to be in the army”, for instance, he spent only a gap year stint in the Black Watch and did not see active service. He can often give the impression his role in Iraq was rather more important than the reality, according to someone who witnessed his work there (“He was regarded as a pretty competent mid-ranking Foreign Office official … He wasn’t a nonentity and I think the view in Iraq was that he was conscientious, but he wasn’t Lawrence of Arabia.”).” [The Guardian]
“Several well-placed observers of Stewart’s time in Afghanistan point out that his much-discussed Afghan walk, the origin of his reputation as an expert on the region, was a month spent crossing a comparatively safe part of the country (“Other people would call it a walking holiday,” notes one).” [The Guardian]
“In general, he has done a lot and it’s all very impressive,” says someone who observed Stewart at close quarters in Kabul. “But it’s not quite as impressive and remarkable as he allows people to think. This is not necessarily all his doing, but the willingness of others to project things on to him … All sorts of journalists wrote up the Turquoise Mountain Foundation [Stewart’s Afghan NGO, which aimed to preserve local crafts] as the most amazing project in Afghanistan, when it was actually a rather low impact thing that affected the lives of a small number of people.” [The Guardian]
“…to his credit he does not dissemble when asked directly about his experience (“It was unbelievably brief,” he told the New Yorker of his time in the Black Watch.)” [The New Yorker; The Guardian]. So not even 5 months? Sounds as though it was somewhere between the 5 months previously claimed and, er, what? A week? A month? A few months?
“Claims this week to have “negotiated in Iraq, negotiated in Afghanistan” provoked “snorts of derision”, the former Afghanistan correspondent Jon Boone tweeted. “Who with, the Kabul guild of potters and calligraphers?” [The Guardian]
Maybe Stewart should not have exposed his gilding to the very harsh light of scrutiny.
A few more thoughts
Since I penned the main blog post, much has happened. Stewart has come under more scrutiny, but also has travelled the country (the UK, not Afghanistan) doing Twitter vox pop chats with random passers-by. At least he is not afraid to do that. He is becoming better-known to the public and apparently now has a few Conservative MPs supporting him; but not many. As to the bookmakers, some have him as 66/1 for “next Conservative leader”, though Betfair betting exchange has him at 12/1, which strikes me as more realistic (making that 66/1 a value bet if you can get it)
“Speaking in her personal capacity – and not in her current role as chief executive of the Jo Cox Foundation – Catherine Anderson told The Courier she was drawn to Rory’s internationalism.” [The Courier]
A few more endorsements like that and it’s Goodnight Vienna to Stewart!
Ah…seems that Catherine Anderson is “an aspiring Conservative MP” who used to be “Chief of Staff” and Campaign Manager for (drum roll…) Rory Stewart! In fact she worked for Rory Stewart for nearly 9 years!
Well, the first ballot has been held and Rory Stewart is still standing. Just. 4th from bottom. All below him (McVey, Leadsom, Harper) eliminated (though only from the contest, sadly…). So far, only 19 MPs voted for Stewart. His immediate prospects look bleak, inasmuch as Boris-Idiot, someone with no real vision, ability, ideas, ideals, nor even basic decency, is the frontrunner still. Boris has 114 craven MPs backing him, so far.
Our analysis of the results of the first ballot of the Conservative leadership contest… three candidates have been eliminated – Leadsom, Harper and McVey. pic.twitter.com/GUlcsa900q
What does it say about the Conservative Party and, to a lesser extent, the UK (England, mainly) that a blot like Boris Johnson may soon be Prime Minister? I am not talking about his character alone, but also his actual ability to be effective. Still, there it is…
Update, 17 June 2019
Well, as I guessed a couple of days ago, Rory Stewart has gained ground, at least in the betting, though the betting exchanges’ and bookmakers’ odds are often not a reliable guide to political results (see the EU Referendum, the Trump election, the recent Peterborough by-election etc).
Stewart is now at 2nd place in the betting to be next Conservative leader, though only at 16/1. Boris Johnson is favourite at around 1/5 odds-on (Hunt 20/1, Gove 46/1, Raab 85/1, Javid 120/1).
By all accounts, Stewart did well in the TV debate (Johnson the sole absentee, obviously afraid of being exposed as an idiot and incompetent, as well as wanting to seem to be the “presidential” figure above the fray).
Having said that, Stewart will have to pull off a considerable coup even to be one of the final two, though that now seems a 50-50 possibility.
Update, 19 June 2019
Well, Rory Stewart is out of the race, which means that, until or unless Boris Johnson leaves frontline politics, his career is stalled again. He pledged not to serve in a Johnson Cabinet, and, as I blogged previously, it is doubtful that Johnson will appoint him to anything significant anyway.
That leaves Johnson, Hunt, Gove, Javid.
Looks as though arguably the worst candidate is about to win…
Talked to a Tory MP last night who was backing Johnson "Do you think he'd be any good as PM" "No" "What on earth will he do about Brexit"? "No one knows" "Why do you want him, then?" "He's the best hope we've got" "By 'we" you don't mean Britain do you?" "No the party, of course"
Having said that, Stewart has staked his claim to be taken more seriously somewhere down the line. System politicians, like revolutionary ones, are all seeking to catch the right wave, like surfers.
Update, 20 June 2019
Just saw this tweet, posted 2 days ago. Worth reading; one has to take its veracity on trust, not ever having heard of the tweeter, and the emailer mentioned remaining unnamed.
So Rory Stewart is standing down as MP for Penrith and Borders at next election. He has also resigned from the Conservative Party. Reasons not given. Maybe, in the end, he just was not hungry enough, which would explain why he did not want further ministerial preferment, or to seek the role of PM, but does not explain why he has also decided not to continue as MP; neither does it explain why he has also resigned from the Conservative Party. Perhaps the situation will be clarified in due course.
Update, 5 October 2019
Ah…mystery solved. Stewart is intending to stand for the post of Mayor of London.
He has obviously seen how Boris-Idiot used the position to keep his profile high until he was ready to re-enter the Westminster fray.
The other main candidates are already known: Sadiq Khan, the present Mayor, for Labour, and Shaun Bailey, the West Indian who will be the Conservative candidate. Sadiq Khan has the support of the msm, the Jewish lobby etc, as a Labour mayor who is rather anti-Corbyn. Shaun Bailey may be seen by the blacks as rather an “Uncle Tom”, and there are still questions around missing or misapplied funds of a “social enterprise” he set up in 2006: the monies missing were never accounted for; other monies, amounting to the bulk of spending by the organization, went on “travel and subsistence”, probably for Bailey himself. No criminal charges or civil claims were ever brought, though.
Despite Khan’s poor record as Mayor, he is probably well-placed vis-a-vis Bailey. Now that Rory Stewart has entered the fray, Bailey is holed below the waterline and his candidature will inevitably sink. Whether Rory Stewart can beat Khan and the other candidates (the LibDem being the main also-ran) is an open question.
London is a mainly non-white city now, and an English candidate (well, Anglo-Scottish) like Stewart may find this an uphill slog. On the other hand, Khan is not a popular figure, Stewart is a fresh and now politically non-aligned contender who, however, has high public recognition and profile. I do not think that he can be written off here, and if that is so, his wider ambition, to be Prime Minister, may survive the presently wintry conditions.
Update and addendum, 10 October 2019
Thank to an alert and well-informed blog reader, I can now add a significant addendum to my study of Rory Stewart:
So it turns out that, notwithstanding the listed country house in the Scottish Borders, notwithstanding the almost caricature “country gentry” persona, Stewart is part-Jew! It now is clear that he is what the Reich called a “Mischling”, in his case one-quarter, his maternal grandfather having been “a Jewish doctor from Wimbledon”, whose own parents were Jews from Romania who arrived in London after having lived in New York City for a while.
Well, now it becomes clearer: the self-publicizing (shades of Boris Johnson…), the liking for “fancy dress”, eg tribal costume and being photographed posing in it, the pro-immigration stance, the Davos and Bilderberg linkages.
More than that: Stewart’s wife, Shoshana Stewart, is half-Jewish. In fact, the “half” in question is the maternal half, which means that, according to the way that Jews themselves calculate ancestry, his wife is “Jewish”, simpliciter; that also means that, according to Jewish custom, Stewart’s children are Jewish (though of course we non-Jews decide such designations according to genetic science, meaning that his children are in fact three-eighths Jewish, if my mathematical calculation is right, which often is not the case; anyway, no matter if the right answer is three-eighths or something else, the exact proportion changes nothing). According to the Jewish Chronicle report, above, Stewart and his wife and children celebrate Jewish religious holidays as well as the main Christian ones.
I smelt a rat about Stewart when I saw that the vocal Jew cabal on Twitter all seemed to favour him during the Conservative leadership contest, but it did not occur to me that he himself was part-Jew. I thought that his odd and dark looks came from Western Scottish origins (as they presumably do, in part). I thought that the Jews were supporting Stewart because of his “liberal” Conservatism…
How do these facts, concealed or at least not publicized until now, affect Stewart’s London Mayor election bid? Damaging, I think. While the Jews of North London will probably support him now, the far greater number of Muslims and others who commonly disfavour Jews will probably not vote for him (despite the fact that the present Mayor of London and Labour Party candidate, Sadiq Khan, a Muslim by origin, has been a complete doormat for the Jewish lobby for years).
Fair comment, surely, if one looks at Rory Stewart’s voting record as an MP (2010-2019).
Without taking away from his interesting and accomplished background, as detailed in my lengthy blog hereinabove, my feeling at the moment is that Rory Stewart is basically an oleaginous, dissembling, part-Jew shit.
Update, 6 April 2020
Stewart is no longer standing as candidate for Mayor of London:
There must be a reason; I do not know that reason.
feels entirely absurd that one year ago this month Rory Stewart became the new DfID secretary in Theresa May's cabinet, and since then he's resigned from that post, run for the Tory leadership, left the Tories, and run for London mayor as an independent
So once again Rory Stewart is the nearly man: nearly something important in SIS or FCO, nearly Conservative Party leader, nearly Mayor of London. Sometimes a candidate has to stick in there and await Fate. Had Stewart not huffed off and resigned as MP after losing out to, ultimately, Boris Johnson, his time might have come, after Johnson messes up even more, which is inevitable.
I always recall being in the USA during the 1992 US Presidential Election campaign. At one point, Clinton was placed third of the three major candidates in the opinion polls. A poor third, at that. He stuck it out (admittedly, what else could he do?) and, after Ross Perot dropped out, beat George Bush snr. for the Presidency, being inaugurated in 1993.
[addendum, 31 October 2021: my point about Clinton sticking to it applies more forcefully to Ross Perot, which I should have explained better. Had Perot shown more resilience, and stuck to it, he might easily have become President and thus, as a non-Republican/Democrat candidate, made history. As it was, he dropped out, later claiming that sinister forces had threatened him and his family. Who were they? NWO/ZOG?].
Years earlier, Clinton, who at 31 had been a very young Governor of Arkansas, was defeated there after one 4-year term. Undeterred, he tried the next time and was re-elected. A stayer.
I should think that this spells the end of Rory Stewart as a potential political leader. What does it mean for the London race? I have not followed it closely, but it must give the Conservatives a better chance, despite their candidate being a West Indian with a very dodgy background in terms of near-fraud (though he has never been charged with anything).
Sadiq Khan was running at 8/1 on (1/8) with the bookmakers. Rory Stewart was at 11/8. Shaun Bailey, for Conservative Party, at 20/1. Now that Stewart is gone, I imagine that Sadiq Khan will go out to about 1/6, and Shaun Bailey go in to about 10/1 or so. Despite his poor record, Sadiq Khan is unlikely to lose to Shaun Bailey.
In a John Buchan story, the Stewart or “Hannay” character would no doubt “retire” from public life only because he would be secretly saving the Empire from imperial Russia, or imperial Germany, or would be thwarting a dastardly plot involving transnational conspirators. In fiction, he would save the Empire, then either be knighted or (and/or) be appointed Chief of the Imperial Secret Service. In real life? I have no idea. Stewart is now, or was until recently, teaching at Yale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Stewart#Post-political_career.
Update, 22 January 2022
Boris Johnson is a symptom of a much broader problem in British politics – which can only be fixed with new policies, and – almost certainly – new parties and a new electoral system https://t.co/4XUQ8YGAZ8
Had Stewart retained his MP-status, he might now be in again with a real chance of leading his former party. Having decided not to continue as MP, he is necessarily out in the cold.
Update, 9 July 2022
Just read an appreciation of Stewart from the Tatler (2016, expanded and updated 2019). Don’t think I saw it before today. Written by Quentin Letts [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Letts].
Frankly, nowhere as complete, or as good, as my own assessment, if I say so myself. As for it containing “everything you need to know about Rory Stewart“, I think not! For one thing, no mention of the part-Jewish background, and no mention of the fact that his wife is half-Jewish.
Update, 2 April 2023
Well, in the end, the London Mayoral Election was held in 2021. There were 20 candidates, both Independents and those from political parties. In the run-off, Sadiq Khan (40%), beat Shaun Bailey (35.3%) in what turned out to be a close-run thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_London_mayoral_election.
As for Rory Stewart, now 50, he has pottered around doing podcasts in the past couple of years. He also moved to Jordan in 2021 with his wife and children, apparently to do work connected with his Turquoise Mountain charity.
That article mentions that Stewart is (or was, in September 2021, when the article was written) thinking of possibly standing again as a London mayoral candidate in 2024. I doubt that he will. The 2024 election will be run on FPTP lines, giving an outsider (in his case, as a non-party candidate) fewer chances.
Overall, it seems to me that Rory Stewart’s political career is finished, in all likelihood.
“Anyone with the slightest interest in politics should get a copy of Rory Stewart’s political memoir.
Not because he had a particularly long or even influential career: just nine years in Parliament and only months in the Cabinet. But you will learn more about the nature of Westminster machinations and how government actually works (or doesn’t) from this volume than from those of many more illustrious politicians. In terms of the quality of writing, there has been nothing to approach it since the diaries of Alan Clark (who never made it to the Cabinet at all).
But whereas Clark was a genuinely bad person — part of the attraction, perhaps — Stewart is a fundamentally good man, even if his self-belief, touching on the messianic, occasionally made him appear preposterous.”
[Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail].
Interesting that Stewart was apparently in SIS/MI6 for several years, and that Dominic Lawson was said to have been a long-term SIS/MI6 source: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Lawson. Lawson is 17 years older than Stewart, in fact born the same year as me— 1956.
However, the allegations about Lawson do refer mainly to the 1990s and focus partly on the Balkans, particularly (ex-) Yugoslavia. Stewart joined FCO/SIS in the mid-1990s, and was posted to Montenegro in, I think, 1999. Tenuous link, perhaps nothing…
“This silly little man has delusions of grandeur“, “I cant wait to see the back of Khan, but Rory Stewart god help us“, “Gottle of Gear“, “Nay ,nay ,thrice times nay.“, “The guy’s a joke, and not a funny one“, “Please no, he’s a right weirdo” and “Oh no! Not this opportunist” are among some of the more polite.
Rory Stewart has now written his latest book. His profile is high enough even in 2023 to ensure msm interest and comment (not all favourable, though):
Behind a paywall, but I include it for the sake of completeness.
[Rory Stewart, 2023]
I expect that I shall buy the book secondhand off Amazon, once it reduces to about £5 or £2. The price for the new and unreleased (until 14 September) book has already declined from the original £22 to £16 or so.
I am not now in the new-book-buying classes (and prefer hardbacks) so the Amazon website is a great boon for me.
Not long ago, I bought the memoirs of Gorbachev, a heavy tome; great value at about £5 including postage from a used-book company on Amazon.
I have now bought another book: £2.80 only, and also including the postage. Hard to believe. One wonders how they make a profit, but then (to coin a phrase) I never was much of a businessman!
I met the author a few times in the 1980s. Frankly, a rather pompous man whom I (even more frankly) found rather unpleasant in a minor way, but his book might be interesting. As for the author, he is now deceased.
(about how Stewart is now angling for both a peerage and a ministerial portfolio from Starmer…).
Stewart’s ambition and careerism are both relentless, if inconsistent.
Actually, in terms of individual jobs or posts, I should say that Stewart (despite his many accomplishments) is a “quitter”, but behind that is his already-noted enormous ambition, “looming like a thundercloud over the scene“…
An old friend of mine used to quote her deceased husband (ex-Guards officer, ex-Royal Flying Corps, WW1, d. circa 1970): “if you throw a Jew out of the door, the Jew will sneak back through a window“… Of course, Stewart is only part-Jew.
If Starmer can indeed give Rory Stewart a job and put him out of his often expressed misery of not being a politician with a brief anymore then that really would be great for everyone including those who are tired of hearing him pine pic.twitter.com/83Q6CfN6Lz
Stewart will fight Vance over 'ordo amoris' but stands idly by while mothers kill their own children in their wombs and HMG arrests those who pray silently against it!
Emasculated phoney who actually cares nothing for the most vulnerable and marginalized.
USAID: British politician complaining that his wife was supposed to get $1M in USAID grants before Trump cancelled the contract. Rory Stewart's wife runs Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which exposes modern art to puzzled Afghan women.
USAID: The NGO which Rory Stewart’s wife works for just has its USAID funding cancelled, The Turquiose Mountain Foundation, teaches ‘liberated’ Afghan women about modern art like Duchamp’s urinal. pic.twitter.com/0IJdoF2Rwn
Oh this has absolutely made my day. Rory Wrong About Everything Stewart whingeing about his wife having her $1 million contract from USAID cancelled with immediate effect by DOGE. Priceless, absolutely priceless🤣🤣
I am now writing about a personal experience, because I feel that some people might find it interesting anyway, and because I also feel that, inter alia, it says something about the EU and the way it operates.
The facts
In 1998, some months after my return from a several-months sojourn in Egypt, I was telephoned by someone whom I did not know, Leasor by name, who told me that my name had been suggested as someone who might be a suitable candidate for a project funded by the EU, and would I meet the next day to discuss it? I was interested, not least because I needed a job.
At the time, I was staying temporarily with my parents, at the yachting haven of Hamble, in Hampshire. As I say, I had been in Egypt for quite a while, had then spent three months penniless and effectively homeless in London (a dystopian nightmare), and since that time another lucrative work possibility, in Odessa (Ukraine), had just recently fallen through. The small financial settlement I had been paid (after having had to issue court proceedings against a Jew fraud —will blog about that another time—) was running out rapidly. So I was happy to investigate this new idea, whatever it might be.
A day or two later I was in London, lunching in a smallish and pleasant Italian restaurant in Pimlico, a stone’s throw from the Vauxhall Bridge Road. My host, Leasor (I forget his Christian name), was easy to talk to and explained that there was an EU TACIS project coming up for tender. TACIS was “Technical Aid to the Commonwealth of Independent States”, a foreign aid umbrella supposedly helping out the former Soviet republics by providing “expertise”. I regarded it as largely a boondoggle, a major aim of which was to help out not the former Soviet Union but large Western law firms, accountancy firms, “consultancy” firms and industrial concerns.
I believe that, since our telephone conversation, I had faxed my CV to Leasor, so he knew my work background, qualifications etc. He also knew that I had been, during 1995-1996, on the Committee of the Central Asia and Transcaucasia Law Association [CATLA], also connected with TACIS; the CATLA committee met every few weeks at one or another plush office of law firms in the City of London or West End. I remember that they included Clifford Chance, Norton Rose and other large firms. CATLA had been set up by UK law firms with interests in the new states recently carved out of the Soviet Union.
As for Leasor himself, I do not think that he said much about himself, save for the fact that he had been involved in a few similar deals in recent years. I am not someone who questions people closely (leaving aside my years at the practising Bar); I always think it rather rude. Neither did I enquire how he got my temporary home telephone number.
I had spent a year in Kazakhstan (1996-97), and had, a few years earlier, visited post-Soviet Moscow. This was of interest to the consortium which was bidding for the contract in Uzbekistan; also useful was my far-from-perfect but serviceable Russian language (both reading and speaking).
After lunch, Leasor took me to see his brother (in fact he had or has at least one other, but I did not know that then). His brother had been Adjutant of the 17th/21st Lancers, a smart cavalry unit now (at time of writing) not in independent existence; that brother was running what was basically a public relations outfit in a small office in Westminster. The brother or his firm would also be part of the bid consortium. I found both brothers pleasant and polite, though the ex-officer one did carry light traces of his former profession of arms in his speech and manner.
The next meeting was at the offices of yet another part of the consortium, the large law firm Simmons & Simmons, in the City of London. The meeting was chaired by its then “emerging markets” partner, a small Jew with a name so Scottish that the possessor of it should have had bagpipes and a tartan Tam O’Shanter. I had met him before. Also present was a City of London bod with a good line in convoluted financial jargon.
The project in Uzbekistan was to be based in the capital, Tashkent, the largest city in Central Asia. The title of the project was something like “Secondary Markets in Uzbekistan”. What I knew about secondary markets could be written, if not on a postcard, then certainly on a single side of paper, but no matter: the financial bod and the law firm would jointly take up that slack. My role would be to be second-in-command, so to speak, based as sole resident representative in Tashkent. All that was really required of me was legal and resident experience in the region (Uzbekistan borders Kazakhstan) and serviceable Russian. The others would be based in London.
It turned out that this was the EU’s second attempt to get a secondary market going in Uzbekistan. The first had sunk without trace, taking about £2 million in EU funding with it. I discovered that the team who had won the previous bid (I think French) had blown almost all the budget on salaries and on staying in the most expensive hotels in Tashkent, Moscow and European capitals, leaving nothing for publishing useful (educative) information or for effective liaison with the government of Uzbekistan.
20 years have now elapsed. I realized only years after the events now chronicled that, in overall charge of TACIS projects for that part of the world from 1994-1996, i.e. not so very long before I got directly involved in the region, was one Nick Clegg, since then of course MP (2005-2017), UK Liberal Democrat Party leader (2007-2015) and (2010-2015) Deputy PM, but then just a wealthy “trustafarian” whose parents had got him a job in Brussels:
“He took up a post at the European Commission in April 1994, working in the TACIS aid programme to the former Soviet Union. For two years, Clegg was responsible for developing direct aid programmes in Central Asia and the Caucasus worth €50 million. He was involved in negotiations with Russia on airline overflight rights, and launched a conference in Tashkent in 1993 that founded TRACECA—an international transport programme for the development of a transport corridor for Europe, the Caucasus and Asia.” [Wikipedia].
No wonder the project for which I was recruited had failed at its first attempt! Clegg! I note also that only now, a quarter of a century later, is the “new Silk Road” coming into being. I wonder how much EU money Clegg wasted overall…
Coming back to a micro level of economics, my own proposed salary was, if I remember rightly, going to be somewhere around £100,000 (I think more) taxfree (and paid offshore), equivalent to maybe £150,000 or so taxfree today (educated guess). I think that accommodation and flights were also on offer. This was more than attractive to someone who had, that very same year, been for months all but destitute in London (where some of my adventures would make amusing reading, were I able to write them down).
So to Brussels…
The two Leasor brothers and I flew on a small business airline to Brussels. The jet was almost empty and arrived just as darkness was falling, around 1800 hrs. A confusing taxi ride through endless tunnels and we were there, in the middle of Brussels, a city to which I had never been (though I had visited Belgium itself on a number of occasions, starting in (I think) 1963, aged maybe just 7, when my family flew Sabena from Heathrow to Ostend, a service long-since discontinued).
In the morning, after an excellent dinner (Brussels is noted for cuisine) and a night in some hotel which appeared to be exclusively occupied by delegates and supplicants to the EU Commission or Parliament, we set off on foot to our own appointment with the Commission.
At the Commission (not the famous main building but a quite neglected smaller one nearby), we were ushered in eventually to a room set up like a tribunal, with EU flags on vertical poles and tables for us, the Uzbek delegation and the Eurocrats judging our bid.
The Uzbeks were a government minister (I forget now, 20+ years later, whether it was the Foreign Minister or Minister for Foreign Trade, I think the former) and his English-speaking assistant, a clever-looking young man who had “KGB” or the equivalent written all over him.
The “tribunal” consisted of a troika: the chairwoman was a French or Belgian woman, maybe 50, very much conscious of her importance (whatever that was) and looking somehow lacquered, as if her hair or face might crack if she were to fall over. There was also a besuited person of, I think, Belgian nationality and an English or maybe Scottish civil servant, looking scruffy and wearing a roll-neck jumper, making him look like the once-famous 1956 publicity shot of the young Colin Wilson, writer of The Outsider, pictured as enfant terrible of popular philosophy.
After one of the others gave an overview of our bid, it was my turn to be grilled. The main thing was to ask about my legal background and then to test my facility in Russian conversation. That was done by the minister, with help from “KGB” assistant. After a while, the KGB assistant carried on, until one of the troika interjected and said “I think that we have established that Mr. Millard has a good command of Russian…we are running short of time.” The KGB assistant wanted to carry on interrogating me but had to shut up. Not before time. The bastard had pretty much reached the outer limits of my fluency. As he subsided, he flashed me a smile and a sharp glance as if to say “I’ve got your number…”
We went back separately to London. I thought that we had done enough to win the bid, as had the brothers, but in the end it turned out that, for purely political reasons, a consortium from, if I recall, Spain had to be awarded the contract, because Spain had not had enough of a bite at the TACIS cherry…
Aftermath
My visit to Brussels over, I only heard once more from Leasor (the one who contacted me initially). I ended up, not long afterward, going to live for a while in the Caribbean and elsewhere. To this day, I have never visited Tashkent.
It was only much later that I started to wonder whether there had been something else behind that —superficially— purely commercial bid. Uzbekistan, like Kazakhstan, was just then, in 1998, becoming pivotal in geopolitical terms, as “Western”/NATO/NWO power rubbed up against an upsurging China, a Russia starting to be resurgent, and Islamism from the South. Maybe Professor Haushofer was at least partly correct…
Uzbekistan was under strict dictatorial control and at that time had not yet committed itself to cooperation with NATO. It might be that our bid was really an opening gambit to insert an intelligence post into Tashkent, with me as “clean” figurehead, at least at first. The project would have provided access to Uzbek ministers and advisors at or near the top level of their government.
Evidence? Not much. Was it relevant that I was called out of the blue? Not necessarily (headhunters had done that before and would do so again). Was it relevant that the Italian restaurant was near Vauxhall Bridge Road? Not necessarily. Was it in any way relevant that —as I only discovered a few years ago— the brothers were the sons of the writer James Leasor, who was a WW2 officer, later a foreign correspondent and writer of famous books on war and espionage, some of which were filmed: The One That Got Away and (filmed sub nom The Sea Wolves) Boarding Party? I suppose not. Straws in the wind, as we are in life…
Extinction Rebellion, David Attenborough, and the debate
In the past days, the “Extinction Rebellion” troops have brought Central London to a halt. I am interested in the protest, not because of its own puerile idea that it will actually accomplish anything, but for other reasons: interesting how limited the official (police) reaction was at first, before millions of Londoners started to get angry at their daily life being disrupted; interesting how the protests have dovetailed with more Establishment propaganda (and I use the term purely neutrally), such as the David Attenborough film trailed below; interesting too how easily the London streets were “taken over”.
I should say immediately and in brief what is my own view of climate change.
I think that there is little doubt that climate change is happening. In particular, the Earth may well be warming. It has both warmed and cooled in the past, both in periods of geological time and in the relatively short time that humans have been on the Earth. In fact, we know from written records and necessary implications that there has been a considerable variation even in the last few hundred years, over the past 1,000 years, over the past 2,000 (etc).
In the times of the Vikings, Greenland was exactly that, albeit briefly, and in the 11th and 12th centuries had farms, homesteads etc, as recent archaeological discoveries have confirmed. The “Mediaeval Warm Period”, c.950-c.1250 AD also meant that vines could be grown successfully in Britain. It is said to have been the warmest period in Europe since the “Roman Warm Period” (c.250 BC to c.400 AD), which of course covers both much of the time of the ancient Greek or Hellenistic Period and then the flowering of both the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.
More recently, there was the “Little Ice Age”, which is rather elastic: c.1300 AD to the second half of the 19thC , but within those 550+ years, three colder periods, especially the one starting in 1650, famous for ice fairs on the Thames, skating on ponds in the Low Countries (as shown in Old Master paintings) etc. There is a good representation of the former in the 1947 film Wicked Lady [see Notes below; the Thames ice fair scene starts just before 00:59:05 and ends at about 01:03:05].
It is noteworthy, by the way, that the warmer periods of Europe’s history have been the more prosperous and the more peaceful too, overall, though not without exceptions.
Obviously, human beings cannot tolerate temperatures too cold or too hot. We require temperate or relatively temperate climatic conditions.
Let us say (i.e. assume) that the orthodox scientists are correct and that there is “climate change” amounting to “global warming”. Then we move to causation: what is causing the warming? The scientific establishment has established a dogma which says that human activities, specifically emissions of carbon, are the predominant causes. Dissident scientists etc point to sunspots or other causes.
Let us further say/assume that the more-officially-approved scientists are right and that human activity is the cause of the putative climate change/global warming. What can be done? There consensus breaks down.
The huge new economies of Asia do not want to stop polluting if that means that industrial output slows, because in India that would mean destitution for untold millions, and in China would mean, very likely, economic collapse and political revolution.
In fact, China at least is doing much in terms of reducing “emissions” (assuming that therein lies the problem) but here we come up against the real cause of most of the environmental problems of the world today: too many people, and too many farm animals to feed carnivorous populations, as well as too much energy used to warm or cool those enormous populations, the world population having grown about 20 times larger since the start of our age (the 5th Post-Atlantean Age) around 1400 AD.
I blogged not too long ago about the overall problem facing the world:
The obvious answer to the present or upcoming world crisis, which crisis includes, but not exclusively, mass extinction of creatures, “emissions” (assuming that they are of the importance the scientific establishment thinks), spoliation of land and oceans, is a huge reduction of the human population of the Earth. The main question, apart from whether it will happen, is by what method it could (will?) happen.
From the sublime to the ridiculous…
So we come back to “Extinction Rebellion” and their London protest. I am sure that most of them are well-meaning, even if totally and laughably up their own a***s, in the contemporary phrase. Many of these people are all too easy to ridicule. Emma Thompson, with or without her designer non-European adoptee, flew in (no doubt First Class) from LA to protest about people like her flying all over the place for trivial reasons; maybe it is thought OK if you are a millionairess and actress who lives in houses and villas in Hampstead, Bute (Scottish Highlands), Ibiza or France, when not in Beverly Hills or Bel-Air.
The reaction to the poseurs has been vitriolic in places:
Emma Thompson joins Extinction Rebellion climate change protest. She flew in from L. A last night and landed at Heathrow. Today she will help fuck holidays, meetings, funerals and reunions….pompous privileged pillock
Emma Thompson jets back from birthday celebrations in LA to join environmental protests. Ha ha ha! What hypocrisy! Yet the idiots regard her as some Messiah and lap it all up. #ExtinctionRebellion
“Geri the Gerbil” seems to assume that the Extinction Rebellion protests will actually accomplish anything re. “climate change”. No, let alone “save the planet”! Obviously they change nothing at all.
Here’s another one (see below) defending Emma Thompson, while urging people to sell their second homes and stop holidaying overseas (mixed message? Emma Thompson has about 4 or 5 luxury homes, including 2 or 3 overseas, and flies frequently, sometimes on private jets…). Maybe the clue is in the “Costa del Sol” part of the tweet by tweeter “Caroline” , i.e. it’s OK for a wealthy and terminally politically correct theatrical like Emma Thompson to fly all over the world, have half a dozen houses in several different countries etc, but woe betide you plebs from having a tiny concrete villa on a Spanish costa and taking an EasyJet there a couple of times a year! Shades of Emily Thornberry’s “White Van Man” gaffe, perhaps.
I might respect Emma Thompson more if she just said “it would be better to have a tenth of the present world population” (I might even agree with that, especially if those left were mainly European) or “international flights and second, third or fourth homes are OK for a few rich people like me, but not for the million…”
Why target Emma Thompson with criticism. Nearly everyone flies everywhere nowadays. She is high profile. Isn't her presence worth the carbon? Cancel all your holidays in the Costa del Sol and sell your second homes abroad. Everyone's greed is killing our planet https://t.co/NmX4VMA4wU
— 🍃💚🍃Caroline Shah – fighting for what is right (@Justwantclarity) April 19, 2019
Well, I cannot reproduce the full range of idiocy on display here, but here are just a couple of other deluded fools anyway:
And what about this one (below), one Natasha Cox? She loves London being closed down because the atmosphere is lovely, there is no traffic, and there is dancing! She is evidently not an economic scientist! Where does one even start with such people?! Smiling and being well-meaning are both good, but not nearly enough…
What interests me is that the Extinction Rebellion mobs were at first not stopped by the police: some police “officers” even danced with some of the protestors. I wonder what would happen if a few thousand social nationalists took over Central London. Would the police be so easygoing? I think not. Is it a class thing, because so many of the protestors seem to have come from rural or suburban enclaves where some no doubt live in comfort on their trust funds or buy-to-let incomes? The police are now belatedly getting a little tougher:
The serious disruption the Extinction Rebellion demonstrations are causing to people in central London and beyond is unacceptable and we completely understand the concern it is causing to those who are disrupted by it https://t.co/dS2NOnbPsy
Another point that interested me, watching some self-righteous fellow on TV news today explaining why this direct action protest was the right method, was his assertion that MPs, society etc had to be forced to do what the protestors would like to see. Whatever one may think of their views (and I am not completely out of sympathy with them —social nationalism has always been quite “green”:
the fact is that this protest has a quite strong sub-terroristic edge under the surface “non-violent civil disobedience” stuff. If ten thousand (?) people are willing to shut down Central London “peacefully”, it may be that 1% of them, say 100, might be willing to do some very non-peaceful things. I merely pose the question.
Conclusion
The Extinction Rebellion protests will not change or expedite government policy, will not convince many not already convinced, and might cause others to be even more resistant to the environmental movement, which has some excellent aspects but which is terribly confused.
It is clear that only a mass sweeping away of the world population can accomplish the rescue of the planet and its life.
"A petition being submitted by hundreds of independent climate scientists and professionals from numerous countries to heads of the European Council, Commission and Parliament declares "There is No Climate Emergency."" https://t.co/NELzaEpm09
Now many who read my blog will know that I was, in the 1991-2008 period, at various times a practising barrister (in England) and an employed barrister (mostly overseas). Defamation was not one of my specialisms. I would have liked it to have been. It is an interesting and lucrative field, often involving interesting and/or famous people, though certainly not demanding the highest legal skills or intellectual gifts (contrary to the general public belief).
I did a few cases of libel while at the Bar, though all were advisory; none reached a substantive court hearing. I did advise, pro bono (unpaid), and when only a student, on a libel matter the result of which made the front pages of the more serious newspapers: Flegon v. Solzhenitsyn [1987].
Unable (as a mere student) to appear before the judge and civil jury (all defamation cases then had a jury), I nonetheless attended court most days, sometimes all day, wrote (mostly ignored) instructions and good advice for the plaintiff (now dumbed-down to “claimant”), and advised generally on tactics etc (also mostly ignored). I was told by another attendee that once, I having told Flegon’s assistant to give Flegon a note while he, Flegon, was (speaking very loosely) “cross-examining” a witness, I bowed myself out of [High] Court, only for the judge to demand of Flegon, as soon as I had gone, “to see that note that you have just been given”. Apparently, the judge read the note and told Flegon (who was proving a massive pain to the judge in various ways) to “listen to the good advice that you have been given, Mr. Flegon”! My first commendation by the Bench!
The Daily Telegraph said, when Flegon died (16 years later, in 2003):
“His remarkable success at repeatedly getting manuscripts out of the Soviet Union led to the widespread view that he must have had contacts in the KGB; but in 1987 he won £10,000 libel damages in the High Court from Solzhenitsyn over an allegation to that effect in the Russian version of The Oak and Calf. Unable to afford a barrister’s fees, Flegon conducted his case himself, in faltering English.”
Well, returning from the past to the present, we often see people, usually on Twitter, either talking about suing this or that person (often another “tweeter”) or expressing an opinion on defamation cases before the courts.
The average Joe has no idea about legal matters, and yet many opine about the law and practice of defamation, perhaps because it tends to attract msm publicity. For example, the tweet below betrays no hint that the tweeter knows that people have never been allowed to get legal aid for matters of defamation.
"Kezia Dugdale wins £25k defamation case brought by Wings Over Scotland"
This seems to me a balanced and reasonable judgement. A Win-Win. But who will pay the costs of the action? Shared costs between plaintiff and defendant? The taxpayer? I hope not …https://t.co/ix1WbN1CBQ
Despite having been expelled from Twitter, I read the tweets of others, particularly those whom I consider “persons of interest”. Often, en passant, I see tweets by various idiots either threatening others with legal action or recommending that others sue —often named— other parties in defamation. Few seem to understand either the relevant law (which has changed somewhat in recent years) or the practical aspects.
In the Kezia Dugdale case reported today, the Scottish judge decided that the words written were defamatory, but that the defendant, Ms. Dugdale, had a defence (that of fair comment). By the way, note that that defence has now been replaced, in England and Wales, by a defence of “honest opinion”, but this case was heard in Scotland under Scottish law.
Now the claimant in that Kezia Dugdale case, a Mr. Campbell, obviously does not understand the law, having tweeted only today that the law or legal system is, in effect, asinine because the judge decided that the words were defamatory and yet had decided against him! Like many many others on Twitter etc, the said Mr. Campbell does not seem to understand that even if words are defamatory on their face or by implication, the defendant might yet have one or more of the available defences.
Time and again on Twitter (I am not on Facebook) I see people, innocent of any useful legal knowledge, claiming that words which are not defamatory anyway are defamatory, or (where the words might be defamatory) ignoring the available defences.
Prominent among the above are Jews on Twitter, who often invoke the name of “Mark Lewis Lawyer” (the Jew-Zionist lawyer who recently fled to Israel after being found guilty of professional misconduct: see Notes, below). In fact, his publicized defamation cases were all (the ones I saw anyway) very simple and straightforward, requiring little real legal expertise. My honest opinion is that he is a copper-bottomed self-publicizing poseur.
Take a look at the above paragraph. It might or might not be considered in part “defamatory” (or it might be considered as a whole or in part a “mere vulgar insult”, which would not be actionable in any event). Also, even if the statements above, or some or one, were to be considered defamatory, I have defences open to me should the supposed “top defamation specialist” reach out from his mobility scooter or wheelchair in Israel to sue me (he has so far not done so in respect of any of the rather many blog posts which I have written about him in the past months). I have the defences of, inter alia, “Truth”, “Honest Opinion”, and “Publication on a matter of public interest” available to me.
There again, the armchair lawyers of Twitter rarely consider other factors, chief amongst which is whether the defendant has any funds. If not, large sums (in some cases, hundreds of thousands of pounds) might be expended in pursuit of a defendant who (like me) would simply declare bankruptcy if faced with a money judgment. Bankruptcy in England is now little more than an inconvenience lasting for a year (in most cases) for someone without capital (whether in cash or real or other property) or income. There are few advantages to being broke (as I now am and, incidentally, as “Mark Lewis Lawyer” now is); one of them, though, is the useful one of being effectively “unsueable”.
There are other factors, but this is a blog post, not a legal treatise.
It is usually the case that the best advice that can be given to a potential litigant in defamation is “don’t”! Three examples:
Oscar Wilde. Wilde need not have brought the libel action which eventually led to his disgrace, imprisonment, exile and early death;
David Irving. A fine and persecuted (by the Jew lobby) historian, but not a lawyer. Need not have brought the case against Deborah Lipstadt, an American Jew-Zionist academic supported and funded by the worldwide Jewish/Zionist lobby. Insisted on appearing for himself. Said to have lost £2M in costs to the other side, at least on paper. He also, more importantly, had his books removed from large bookshop chains; some were even pulped. Large publishers dropped him;
Count Nikolai Tolstoy. The only one of the three whom I have ever met (once). The only one of these three who was the defendant (there was also a co-defendant in his case). He lost, but eventually paid only £57,000 of the £1.5M awarded against him initially; he paid the £57,000 years later and only after the death of the plaintiff, Lord Aldington.
So, Twitter armchair lawyers and the perpetually outraged: don’t put your daughter on the stage, never wear brown in town and stop threatening libel suits against people, even if you can get lawyers you can rely upon…
Notre Dame, which as I write is still ablaze, is of course at the very heart of Paris and, metaphorically, France too. One could point to other buildings in that latter regard, perhaps the Sainte-Chapelle, the Sacre-Coeur, the Cathedral at Rheims, or even that of Chartres, but Notre-Dame symbolizes Paris, or did, until the secular landmark of the Eiffel Tower was constructed.
Like millions of visitors to Paris, I have been inside Notre-Dame a couple of times (as I have the Sainte-Chapelle, and the Sacre-Coeur with its unique atmosphere and where a Mass is continuously performed, 24 hours a day).
Sometimes, the burning of, e.g., a great building, is considered a symbolic event, marking a great change. One thinks of the Burning of Rome, the later Sack of Rome, the destruction of the great ancient Library of Alexandria, the Great Fire of London etc. In more modern times there was the deliberate burning of both the First Goetheanum in Switzerland (see Notes, below) and the Reichstag in Berlin.
Other catastrophic events can be —or be seen as— historically, politically or socially significant. When the Herald of Free Enterprise sank, in 1987, the very name made me wonder whether the era of “Thatcherism” was drawing to a close. It was. On a smaller scale, there was even speculation, at the time of the Marchioness disaster of 1989, as to the sociological meaning of it, if any (because so many well-heeled families in London, it was said, knew or were acquainted with one or more of the 51 people drowned and/or others on board).
Are these events causally connected in some way with the movement of history, or is it that human beings, having perhaps a premonition of coming events, attach meaning to large fires and other disasters? Was the fire at Windsor Castle in 1992 somehow connected with the events that hit the British Royal Family in 1992 and in the years after the Queen’s annus horribilis? It was certainly the case that, after hundreds were crushed to death at Khodinka Field while celebrating the crowning of Nikolai II in 1896, the “simple people” thought it a bad omen. Were they wrong?
France is facing an existential crisis still not fully accepted as such by most. The influx of Algerians, Tunisians and black Africans since the 1960s became a flood, a disastrous flood, many years ago.
France and particularly Paris is now under siege from those of non-European descent, some of which may have been born and (semi) educated in France, but who are, except in language (and sometimes even in that way) alien.
An extremely high proportion of the population of France (at least 30%) is now non-European, and that situation is worsening. At the same time, there is a pushback by the (real) French via the Gilets Jaunes movement and via support for Marine le Pen.
“President” Macron, a complete puppet of the Jewish lobby and New World Order, has instituted a “Zionist Occupation Government” in France via his pop-up “party” (facade), En Marche, which consists of random people from nowhere who were recruited almost overnight, thanks to funding from secretive sources.
Macron’s expressed policies are to ruin the French way of life and French society, and to put in its place a globalized bastard-American culture. His secret policies (the policies of those behind Macron) are no doubt worse yet. He has allowed yet more hordes of non-Europeans to flood into France. Paris itself has become a poubelle (dustbin) compared to what it was only a few decades ago.
I hope that some of Notre Dame can be saved. I wonder whether France can be, and what it might take to do it.
“Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness which drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars” [Novalis]
I was just reading the blog of some Mancunian of whom I was unaware until today. I found his blog interesting despite his (to my mind, rather silly) pro-EU and (evident from his Twitter output) pro-immigration views.
His blog tells of how he and his family were immune from the mass hysteria all around after the death of Princess Diana. I found that interesting, partly because it echoes what I heard from people who were in London when it happened, in 1997 (the actual death was on 31 August 1997). I heard tales of pubs full of blubbing drinkers (days after the actual death), people who did not smile or even look normal in the streets, crowds treating Harrods department store (owned by Mohammed Fayed, the father of the last of Diana’s known lovers, Dodi Fayed) as if it were a shrine, taking flowers there etc.
In fact, I had seen the evidence of that last, because I had been to Harrods to buy a raincoat. I myself was not in England at the time of what I call the Diana Death Hysteria. I was then living in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Only about 70 English/British people lived in Almaty in 1997 (I know that because I had quite close contact with the small British Embassy and in fact visited the Embassy fairly frequently).
I did not have satellite TV and was unaware of the fact that Diana had died until 2 days later, when a colleague told me about it on Monday morning (the death having occurred on the weekend). I was later told that I was pretty much the only British person who had not gone to the Embassy to sign a book of condolence opened by the staff there.
On my return to London a few weeks later, I needed to buy a raincoat (it scarcely ever rains heavily in Almaty), so headed to Harrods in a taxi. When we approached the store, I noticed what seemed to be piles of trash outside Harrods, piled against crowd barriers. I asked the driver what that rubbish was doing there (to me it was reminiscent of the scenes seen during the 1979 “Winter of Discontent”, when rubbish went uncollected) but the driver replied, “that isn’t rubbish, Sir, it’s flower tributes for Princess Diana”. Well…
The phenomenon of mass hysteria or collective grief and/or jubilation has tended to pass me by. I also missed the mass celebrations for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 because, again, I was at the time overseas and incommunicado (in Rhodesia). Those who experienced either or both have found it hard to explain what exactly happened to (other) people (I can only assume that my own connections and associates are a hard-bitten lot!).
I am no psychologist (or psychiatrist) but have some tentative theories, revolving around emotional triggers in the population. I have wondered whether such mass emotionalism could be harnessed for the public good in future. In the past, a usually more restrained type of emotionalism bound the British people together. In the 20th Century, that involved devices such as the Union flag, shared “experiences” (even if in reality never actually experienced by many of those emotionally affected), such as the two World Wars, the Poppy Day commemorations, noted historical events and people (such as Nelson, Trafalgar, Wellington and Waterloo, Richard the Lionheart, Florence Nightingale, Robin Hood), music such as “For those in peril on the sea“, the National Anthem, “There’ll Always Be An England” etc. A patriotic and historical pastiche, certainly, neither comprehensive nor even particularly accurate in parts, but true enough and simple enough to bind a people together.
Today, the UK population is so fragmented in terms of race, ethnicity, language, age, (what passes for) “ideology”, culture, even sexual orientation or display, that it is hard to imagine them coming together in collective grief (false or otherwise) or jubilation today. I suppose that some would point to football or cricket games, the Olympics etc, but these are minority interests, despite the large number interested.
If one talks to people, or watches the often incredibly ignorant TV quiz contestants, it is realized that many (and by no means always the “blacks and browns”) know next to nothing of British history, literature, music, or even basic geography. Their world is not even a post-1945 one, but a post-2000 one of X-Factor persons, “soaps”, “celebrities” of whom I at least have never heard, music which is either banal or simply noise.
It may be that the Diana mood of 1997 was an elegiac lament for a Britain —or more accurately an England— which was on the point of disappearing (and now has disappeared).
Ian Robert Millard 