Tag Archives: Ian Robert Millard

Diary Blog, 8 February 2020

Saw some dull System drone on Sky News, talking about all the wonderful work of the Coastguard, rescuing those in trouble at sea. Very good, but not when what it means is that migrant-invaders are basically given a fast-shuttle service from mid-Channel to the shores of England.

No less than 100 are known to have crossed the Channel on small boats yesterday alone (with or without UK government help). That’s the ones that were known about…What about the thousands of others no doubt smuggled in by ferry or via the Channel Tunnel? Some even come via light planes that land on grass strips in rural areas.

Then there are the “legal” migrants, in their thousands, daily. “Family members”, “asylum seekers”, “students” etc.

100 in a day (minimum) = about 40,000 in a year. Total arriving every year legally/illegally— about HALF A MILLION. No civilized economy or society can survive that for long.

I notice that these “poor refugees” (migrant-invaders, mostly economic migrants) seem to have access to good quality rubber boats or RIBs. Those boats cost from about £1,000 (with small outboard motor) to not only thousands but sometimes tens of thousands of pounds. The ones I saw in newspapers and on TV, and which were involved in yesterday’s incidents, cost about £4,000 each…

Poor suffering “refugees”? With £4,000-value motorboats? For God’s sake, when will the UK wake up? Actually, most of the people have woken up, but there are influential lobbies that want to bring in the invaders: System drones working to the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan [https://www.westernspring.co.uk/the-coudenhove-kalergi-plan-the-genocide-of-the-peoples-of-europe/] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Coudenhove-Kalergi], the “useful idiots” of “antifa”, “refugees welcome” etc (the “@zoejardiniere” type); then you have the Jewish lobby generally (very much involved with all of that).

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/migrants-english-channel-home-office-border-force-record-number-a9324191.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-51420971

My view is that there is a will across Europe to reverse the process, but that that will, or at least wish, is only found in the people (and some cartoonists), and not in the ZOG/NWO governments of most of the EU states (and UK), which are, in their most secret councils, part of the Coudenhove-Kalergi conspiracy.

bq-5c87ada639494

Rather harsh satire, perhaps, or arguably, but it does portray the wish of the bulk of the European peoples as a whole.

Katie Hopkins

Katie Hopkins is back on Twitter (slightly to my surprise):

https://twitter.com/KTHopkins/status/1225806551253995521?s=20

As always, Ms. Hopkins aims again at the Muslims, when it was a Jewess and/or the Jewish lobby, and a lobby group allegedly funded in whole or in part by George Soros, that got her suspended from Twitter. Not “conspiracy theory” but admitted fact:

Katie Hopkins should think again and tweet accordingly, while she still can…

Like so many, Rachel Riley thinks that Twitter = The World or The Public, whereas in fact Twitter is an ever-narrower echo-chamber, as previously blogged about.

Talking about Twitter, the platform made a profit in 2018, the first since Twitter went public in 2013. Until 2018, Twitter had lost well over $USD 2.2 billion! I have often wondered why the big investors have been content to lose billions of dollars funding Twitter. What is really behind it (and Facebook etc)? Is it just a huge trawling operation to discover and archive users’ political views? Maybe. Maybe not. Look at Uber:

Whatever the truth of that, the Katie Hopkins/Rachel Riley/Twitter incident highlights again the precarious state of free speech online. If you annoy some daytime TV game show presenter, and that TV face is a loud enough nuisance to Twitter, Facebook, whatever, you’re kicked off those platforms and to hell with your supposed right to freedom of expression. Sick society.

Equal chance?

In the clip below, some no doubt sincere fellow from the North of England says that everyone has “an equal chance” and “it is what they do with it…”.

Is he joking? A couple of examples:

  • Boris Johnson: part-Jew; educated at considerable expense so that he might make the right sort of connections; sacked from various jobs but connections always sorted out other ones for him; no good at anything except self-promotion. Bang! Prime Minister 2019-; useless;
  • David Cameron-Levita: part-Jew, educated at…[see above]…. Inherited £40 million. Connections had him given a job as Special Adviser to a Con Cabinet minister and then as head of a TV publicity dept. Underwhelming, but still got selected as Con MP for a safe seat. Bang! Prime Minister 2010-2017; useless;
  • Zac Goldsmith: part-Jew, educated [see above]. Inherited about £300 million. Never had a job, really. Selected as MP. Bang! Appointed minister; lost Commons seat later but then immediately elevated to House of Lords; useless;

You get the picture. That poor sap in the clip really thinks that, under a Conservative Party government, he has or will have, or his offspring if any will have, the same life-“chances” as someone replete with family money, and with connections garnered at somewhere such as Eton (and then Oxford, in the first two examples given). It’s sad…

The reality is that

  • this government is for (at best) the most-affluent half of the society (and arguably for the most-affluent 10%); and
  • the whole idea of “equality of opportunity” is flawed in any case, leaving 90% of the people out in the cold.

 

Richard Strauss, Ein Heldenleben [A Hero’s Life]

“You have to act like a hero today, merely to behave like a decent human being” [Sean Connery, as Barley Blair, in 1989 film The Russia House].

CSlKfmsWUAAp5-c

Political predictions

John Rentoul candidly admitting that it is not easy to predict the course of British politics: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/politics-predictions-2020-boris-johnson-keir-starmer-reshuffle-cabinet-a9324811.html

 

Society

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/switzerland-homophobia-referendum-lgbt-gay-illegal-a9324731.html

These days, Jesus Christ would probably have to face the magistrates for his forthright views! As for Leviticus, that old bastard would be “doin’ a tenner in the Kesh”!

 

Quiz

Well, I know six, maybe seven, of the answers to those 10 questions. How come John Rentoul got only three right (and is fairly famous, influential etc) and I am not? There’s the question…[10  mins later: in fact I only got 6, not 7, right; “Anderlecht”, Question 9, stumped me, as did Questions 1, 4 and 8].

News from Scotland

As I have often said, if the people of Scotland really want “Independence” from the UK, fine, but don’t expect any further financial help from England. Or an open border. I myself cannot see that Scotland is really “independent” if it is still under (not just part of) EU, NATO, and the international financial web, but there it is…; also, is Scotland going to continue to take in non-Europeans and pretend that they and their offspring are Scottish?

Still, good luck…

 

Axminster carpets

https://twitter.com/Emma__Wallis/status/1225724905431457793?s=20

“Brexit” and “uncertainties around Brexit” look like joining “the cheque’s in the post” and other phrases as an excuse of choice. BBC News: “[Axminster]…had previously come close to closing in 2013 and was subsequently rescued by a consortium led by a private investor Stephen Boyd.” No comma before “Stephen Boyd”…well, that’s the BBC now, full of 20-somethings with “Firsts” from Oxford but who cannot even put a comma in the right place.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-51393160

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axminster_Carpets

So Axminster very nearly closed down seven years ago? Long before Brexit, long before the 2016 Referendum…

Norton Motorcycles

Looks like famous Norton has gone too:

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/norton-motorcycles-goes-into-administration-1-6496163

…and with the same excuse: “...less than two years later, in the same week the UK was to leave the European Union, the firm has gone into administration after reportedly struggling to pay a tax bill. The owner also blamed Brexit uncertainty.”

So it was not poor management, lack of demand for large motorcycles, fraud, or anything like that, just “Brexit uncertainty”…oh, and the apparent fact that the company has not been paying its tax bills…

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/30/taken-for-a-ride-how-norton-motorcycles-collapsed-amid-acrimony-and-scandal

However, the story is far more complex than that. It is a pile-up that includes hundreds of hapless pension holders, together with unsuspecting Norton customers, staff and even government ministers, who repeatedly endorsed Norton as millions of pounds in taxpayer support flowed into the firm. All will take a lot of persuading that this is merely a story of a plucky British company that is a victim of circumstance. Their anger looks likely to be directed principally towards one man: Norton’s boss, Stuart Garner.” [The Guardian]

An associated business owned by Stuart Garner, the nearby Priest House Hotel, is also in administration, being run temporarily by an outside hotel chain.” [Wikipedia].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Motorcycle_Company

In other words, this Garner character is basically yet another “entrepreneur” fraudster.

Sad though, to see two “iconic” (as people now say) British companies down and probably out.

Bonnie Greer

Is the Chicago-born African-American thespian beloved of the “British” System/Establishment feeling a cold wind?…

Britain’s collapsing society

Here is an example of why, in part, UK society is slowly collapsing:

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/grinning-businessman-who-broke-mans-17702035

Brutal thug attacked a man in a surprise attack, having already hit another nearby. Four punches, delivered to a helpless victim. Victim had to have metal plate inserted etc.

“Bassnett initially gave a no comment interview to police, before he was picked out by Mr Bimpson at an identity parade”

“When interviewed again, he claimed he was threatened by the two men in the car park, which prosecutors did not accept.”

Bassnett, who admitted causing grievous bodily harm, has 29 previous convictions for 39 offences, including an affray in 2003.

“In August 2013 he punched a man during a taxi queue row in Liverpool city centre, knocking out one of his teeth, and pushed a woman to the ground.

Bassnett was convicted of battery against the woman in December 2013 and assault causing actual bodily harm against the man in 2015, for which he received a nine-month sentence, suspended for two years.” [Liverpool Echo]

Spared imprisonment because he has a business with 2 employees (it must be a small business indeed, if his own pay is only £1,600 per month), and because he has children. This is not justice.

I see the judge’s reasoning, but this was a brutal crime by someone with no less than 29 previous convictions!

Just as well that the defendant did not do such a wicked thing as mention the bloody Jews in a speech, as did Jez Turner (1 year immediate imprisonment, despite being of previous good character and having spent 12 years in the British Army, including active deployments to both Afghanistan and Iraq)…

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/jeremy-bedford-turner-race-hate-speech-antimsemitism-british-soldier-england-jewish-control-a8352561.html

Chopin, as the clock nears midnight…

Diary Blog, 27 December 2019

Homes for hens?

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/animal-lover-raises-2400-36-21167718

A nice story, but also one which highlights how living creatures are treated as disposable commodities in our society.

Another point is that, in times of distress or trouble, these creatures will be very useful to humans on the micro-level. A basic thing for prepping.

The DEFRA regulations (applicable in the UK) are that anyone can keep up to 50 chickens without having to register the flock and then maybe have to comply with various regulations. Some countries are more restrictive if the area is deemed “residential” (eg Australia allows only 6 chickens per “residential area” property).

Chickens are a useful food source (meaning that they supply eggs). I understand that a hen foraging for itself will lay about one egg every day or two, so an average-size family could get more than enough eggs from fewer than a dozen hens.

A useful fact to know is that it is not necessary to feed chickens commercially-sold chickenfeed such as corn (maize), millet or other grain. A small number of chickens can forage for themselves in a fairly small area. They also like boiled leftover human food such as potato, carrot etc, especially if mashed.

nb. Feeding “catering waste” to chickens is now banned in the UK, but that does not apply to household leftovers fed to the household’s own birds not for sale to the public.

Out in Indiaahhh…

Looks like someone in New Delhi has been watching Leni Riefenstahl’s masterpiece, Triumph of the Will!

https://archive.org/details/TriumphOfTheWilltriumphDesWillen

Homelessness in the UK

In other news, Robert Jenrick is a ridiculous, greasy little pissant…

[Ah, I should have guessed…just saw this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jenrick#Personal_life]

Eco-systems

Saw this today. Interesting.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/27/turning-farming-upside-down-mob-grazing-on-a-cumbrian-hill-farm?CMP=share_btn_tw

Kazakhstan air crash

When I first went to Kazakhstan in 1996, the runway of the airport at Almaty (former Alma-Ata, the capital city at the time) was very short. Before landing, the pilot advised all passengers to adopt the crash position (head between or towards knees, and arms braced on seat in front), though he was good enough to explain why, and that we were not actually about to crash. The landing itself was rather sudden, with much braking and swerving and engine noise.

That was then. Since then, Almaty airport burned down, was rebuilt, the main runway increased in length (I believe); also, the capital was moved to Astana, which has now been renamed Nur-Sultan (the first name of the President, Nazarbaev, who was even in office when I lived in Almaty, 22-23 years ago!). Nur-Sultan has a harsher climate than Almaty. It is the second-coldest capital in the world in winter, with a record low of nearly -55C.

Something else just noticed

Horrible creatures of evil crowing because “their” manipulations lost Labour the election (or made any —arguably— inevitable loss much worse):

Below, a good example of that which the (ironically, a Jew) inventor of the fraudulent “psycho-analysis” claptrap (a pseudo-science), Sigmund Freud, called “transference”:

Time for a cultural purge in the UK

Look at this anecdote told by ghastly old half-Jewess Sharon Osbourne [nee Levy]:

People are shocked:

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/showbiz-tv/sharon-osbournes-vile-would-lie-17481274

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/27/entertainment/sharon-osbourne-house-fire-assistant-video-trnd/index.html

…but not the panellists or audience. No, that degenerate pack of “me too” rabbits were all laughing and clapping at the harridan’s “anecdote”. For them it was funny. In ancient Rome, torture of animals and people in the arena was funny.

In our unfree country, I am not allowed to publish what I think should be done to all those in that studio, laughing at the economic and psychic exploitation of the employee in question. You, my readers, will have to imagine what I think should happen.

What I can say is that the UK needs a real and deep cultural purge, starting with the “celebrities”, the TV “comedians”, the whole radio, TV and print mafia.

Here’s another example of why Britain needs a cultural purge, in fact a cultural revolution:

In fact, that magazine, Teen Vogue, has in the past printed material supporting mentally-disturbed “antifa” bastard and violence-inciter Mike Stuchbery, who was quite falsely puffed in the magazine as an “historian”…I wonder what sort of (((people))) run Teen Vogue? I think that we can guess: “them”.

Re. Stuchbery, I have previously blogged:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/10/23/a-few-words-about-mike-stuchbery/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/11/27/mike-stuchbery-and-tommy-robinson-legal-dispute/

Foxhunting

While the fox-hunt is a colourful spectacle, redolent of Old England, Trollope, Surtees, Galsworthy, Evelyn Waugh etc, it is now morally and socially indefensible.

If the hunts are unwilling to move to pure draghunting, they must be closed down forever.

2014-01-27 09.55.36

[above, the young Millard, c.1958…]

“Manchurian Candidates”

That, above, is in the USA. What about the UK?

I have often mused, in the past decade or so especially, about how and especially why the UK population seems so supine.

  • Cut real pay back hugely? No reaction.
  • Destroy the Welfare State bit by bit? No great interest or resistance.
  • Make people work unpaid hours, whole days, be “on call” evenings and weekends? People just accept it (and I don’t mean just doctors, emergency personnel etc. People who work for undistinguished colleges, office bods really, etc…).
  • Close down 300+ courts, many hundreds of police stations, 500+ public libraries? Not worth resisting, it seems.
  • No free speech? No-one interested.
  • Continuing invasion of the UK by black/brown (etc) hordes (13 million in 22 years)? Not of much interest to the majority, despite the fact that pay, benefits, housing, transport, public security etc are all negatively affected, and hugely so.

What the hell is going on?

 

Michaelmas, Sunday 29 September 2019

CFfvYYCXIAAkryu

“And rival storms abroad are surging
From sea to land, from land to sea.
A chain of deepest action forging
Round all, in wrathful energy.
There flames a desolation, blazing
Before the Thunder’s crashing way:
Yet, Lord, Thy messengers are praising
The gentle movement of Thy Day.”

[Archangel Michael, from the Prologue in Heaven, Faust, by Goethe]

(Today is Michaelmas)

Greetings to all good-willing readers of my blog! Slava!

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/g/goethe/faust/prologue.html

*Und Stürme brausen um die Wette
Vom Meer aufs Land vom Land aufs Meer,
Und bilden wüthend eine Kette
Der tiefsten Wirkung rings umher.
Da flammt ein blitzendes Verheeren
Dem Pfade vor des Donnerschlags.
Doch deine Boten, Herr, verehren
Das sanfte Wandeln deines Tags.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21000/21000-h/21000-h.htm

A Day Out in Cambridge

Introduction

This is another vignette from my time at the Bar, specifically from my first six months (of a year, split up into two segments, in 1992 and 1993, with six months sojourn in New Jersey and New York in between) as a Bar pupil, which is a trainee barrister. I have, in a previous blog post, introduced the slightly comical figure of “the pupilmaster”, the anxious little Mauritian Indian barrister who was supposedly supervising me (we were the same age, 35). This account tells the tale of our day out in the university town of Cambridge.

Town and Gown

I had been to Cambridge a couple of times before. The first time was when I was about 25, with my then girlfriend. She was 32, a graduate of Cambridge University, and had contemporaries who were establishing themselves in academia and elsewhere. We stayed for a day or so with a couple who still lived in Cambridge; one of that couple was having his PhD thesis published as a book, and worked at the famous Scott Polar Research Institute.

My second visit to Cambridge, a decade later, was again University-connected, this time invited, by a friend at the Bar doing a Master’s degree, to Queen’s College, to the annual dinner of something called the E Society, a society which existed only to give its annual dinner; a club reminiscent of that written about by G.K. Chesterton in The Queer Feet [http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/QueeStep920.shtml].

That dinner took place in the richly-panelled rooms of the Dean of the College, a pleasant though cunning-seeming host and fellow (or should that be Fellow?), who later became briefly famous in the tabloid Press for two things: firstly, fulminating against “guests” of undergraduates (i.e. girlfriends/boyfriends) staying overnight in College; secondly, having a young woman actually living with him! (I believe that, by tradition, his office was reserved for bachelors living alone). The dinner was for about a dozen and was black-tie.

I also remember the dinner for other reasons: the Wagnerian-themed menu (“Valkyries on Horseback” etc); also the administrative slip when my “vegetarian request” (put in by the person who had invited me) turned out to have been lost in action. I was then ceremoniously served by the butler with a couple of poached eggs on toast! OK for me, but a hard-core veggie or vegan would have had a fit. I also recall the shock with which a fellow guest received my account of a TV programme I had seen about Filipino “psychic surgeons”. Turned out that he was the Something-or-Other Professor of Cardiac Surgery (and was unamused)!

Cambridge Crown Court

I saw Cambridge Crown Court on TV news recently. A horrible building which might be described as “public loo meets nuclear bunker” (with a nod to the Guggenheim in New York, in my opinion Frank Lloyd Wright’s least-successful conception).

https://courttribunalfinder.service.gov.uk/courts/cambridge-crown-court

However, in 1992 Cambridge Crown Court was still held in the ancient-seeming Guildhall (in fact built only in 1939).

It soon became clear that Cambridge was a little behind London in attitude. In London, when someone on bail “surrendered to custody” on day of trial, the “surrender” was nominal: he checked in with the Usher and his name was ticked off a list. In Cambridge, the defendant checked in and, despite having been on bail for months, was shoved into a cell! So it was that pupilmaster and I, having robed, found ourselves witness to an argument between two court guards and our defendant, who had arrived not long beforehand and had been roughly pushed into a cell with an injunction to “get your arse in there”… Having pacified the ongoing argument, we settled down (well, stood there– no furniture) to hear the defendant’s story already read in the brief.

According to the defendant (who was of “gypsy”, i.e. Irish tinker or, in today’s politically-correct terminology, “traveller” origin), he had been invited to travel with his friend (co-defendant) to Cambridge, far from their homes in Shepherd’s Bush, West London, in order to see a used car which the friend wanted to buy. While walking in the centre of Cambridge, he encountered a person described by him as “a hippy”, who had offered him a cigarette. Well, that cigarette “must have been drugs”, said the defendant, because when he regained consciousness he was in the back of a car which was being chased by a police car. He had been unable to understand why the police car, blue lights flashing and sirens sounding, was trying to chase the car in which he was now a passenger. The chase ended and, despite his having tried to explain himself, he had been arrested. Unlikely that he had ever read Kafka’s The Trial, but his surprise echoed that of Josef K.

The police account, which formed the case for the prosecution, was different. In their view, a car had been stolen by the co-defendant and defendant, had been sighted and chased and our defendant had exited the car on a bend and rolled under a parked car. His attempt to hide had been brought to a swift conclusion by a police dog.

This depressing and hopeless case might have caused pupilmaster to think a little unclearly. Never very punctual [see https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2018/06/19/home-and-away-or-neighbours/], pupilmaster was in danger of yet again irritating a judge by appearing late in Court (a massive discourtesy if the judge has already taken his seat). He poo-poohed my warning about this, saying, “Don’t worry– I know a short-cut into this court; it’s up those stairs. I’ve been here before”, indicating a dark stairway not far away. The defendant was bid au revoir for the moment, and we ascended the stairs.

In the words of Victorian novels, “imagine my surprise” when, instead of emerging outside the courtroom, we found ourselves in the dock! Worse, the judge was seated, looking livid, and the court was packed to such an extent that it reminded me of the famous courtroom scene in the old black and white film of A Tale of Two Cities. This was not good. Pupilmaster hissed at me to find the (hidden) catch so that we could exit the dock and take our proper place. After some fumbling, this was done. The judge, quite the Judge Jeffreys type, had turned that odd red-purple colour which might be called Judicial Livid, and which I myself may have triggered a couple of times in succeeding years. Not good.

The barrister for the co-defendant was there and all we now awaited was the putting-up of the defendants. It was at this point that it turned out that the co-defendant had exercized his non-existent right not to turn up for his trial. As a result, the trial collapsed, the defendant was bailed again and a warrant was issued for the arrest of the co-defendant.

So it was that another day in the pursuit of Justice ended.

Update, 24 June 2026

I happened to see this blog post for the first time in years (it was published in 2018) and, out of mere idle curiosity, looked up online the Scott Polar Research Institute to see whether the academic with whom my then girlfriend and I had stayed overnight was mentioned.

Well, since those days of the mid-1980s, the Internet has blossomed, and what a difference it makes to research! Turns out that the individual in question, though now retired (he must be about 76 or even 78 now) is still connected with that institute, is on its website, and now has a huge amount of academic publication and other activity to his name: https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/people/vitebsky/#biography.

I wonder whether he is still married to (I think that they were married, though cannot be sure, after so long) the same lady with whom he lived well over 40 years ago.

“Thank You For Your Service!…Have A Nice Day!”

One of the many minor but telling irritations of the present day is the extent to which American phrases and linguistic usage has infiltrated everyday English English. I say that despite having lived and worked in the United States (work sourced both in the USA and elsewhere) alongside American people. In fact, I am (despite the best efforts of parts of the Jewish Zionist lobby, including the crazed scribbler Louise Mensch) still a member of the New York Bar, at least on paper (I never practised there).

It was back in the early 1990s when I first heard someone (a West Indian woman) use the term “train station” to designate what everyone I knew until then had called a “railway station” or sometimes “rail station”. When I questioned the term, she replied that she had never heard such places called anything but “train stations”. My theory was that that was the influence of latter-day American films, particularly those shown on Sky. Maybe. Since then, “train station” has become ubiquitous, even on the BBC.

One might say, “what does it matter?” whether railway stations are called “railway stations” or “train stations”. However, language does matter. Whole treatises have been written on the power of transformative vocabulary. The American military machine and its political masters used to be expert at that (far more so than the British). “Operation Desert Shield” conveyed a message; “Operation Desert Storm” a different one, a changed one. Sometimes it became awkward if pushed too far, as in the phrases used in the Vietnam War: “bodycount”, “free fire zone”, “friendly fire” and many others became notorious; some are still in use today.

Such manipulative use of language is common elsewhere. The linked worlds of special operations and espionage have given us “plausible deniability” etc, and that is before we even look at the sleazy swamp of the political milieu. I do not want to go off-track too far and lose my point in the morass of “hard Brexit”, “soft Brexit”, “helping people back to work” (indeed the ghastly “world of work” itself) etc.

Words create a mental landscape, they shape a society as surely as the architecture of our cities and, to be rather topical, public statuary.

It matters whether the influx of millions of non-Europeans into Europe and other European-inhabited lands is described as a “desperate” “movement” of “refugees” or as a “flood” of “migrant-invaders”, indeed as a “migration-invasion” (my favourite) or simply as an “invasion”.

It matters if “social security” (in the British use of the term), meaning a “safety net” or system available to those who need it (and, importantly, into which most if not all of those using it have paid, one way or another) is then changed to “welfare”, a term which gives the impression of money or food thrown at (probably undeserving and probably useless) eaters, who are, again, “probably” taking money from “the taxpayer” (not even “the State”).

It matters if “free speech” is in many cases re-designated as “hate speech” and/or “hate crime”.

So we return to “thank you for your service”…one of the least meaningful phrases around. An American affectation, which seems to say, “this person served in ‘the military’ in some capacity and so we regard him –or her– as heroic.” It of course bears little relationship to reality. Most service personnel, even in a war, are not anywhere near the “front-line” or active fighting areas. Indeed, many American service personnel never even leave the shores of the USA. In Britain, that idea crept in during the Falklands campaign, when anyone who had been to the Falklands in uniform became, ipso facto, a “Falklands hero”, courtesy of the Sun “newspaper”.

No-one disputes that a modern military system requires large numbers of accountants, lawyers, dentists, administrative people, pension experts etc, as well as cooks, drivers and the more obviously martial occupations of fighter pilot, tank commander, infantry soldier and commando. They all “do their bit”, in the English phrase of yesteryear. However, it seems strained to say “thank you for your service” to people who spent their entire service researching legal cases in Washington D.C., or fixing the plumbing on an Air Force base in Texas.

One notices that some scribblers who are very adherent to the Atlanticist or “New World Order” viewpoint are among the worst offenders (people such as Louise Mensch). In fact, it could be said that “thank you for your service” goes beyond affectation and constitutes an attempt to further Americanize the mentality of the British.

So it is that I plead for people to avoid the use of “thank you for your service”, even when addressing those who should be in that sense respected.