If the World Cup Were Brexit, England Just Lost to Colombia…

Christopher Furlong/AFP/Alan Crowhurst/Getty

England’s victory over Colombia in the World Cup has made many English people happy.

But not all English people.

Left-wing campaigner Kevin Maguire is clearly miffed, after a somewhat embarrassing misreading of the match which he seems to imagine England lost:

Talk Radio host Stig Abell’s liberal sensibilities were severely discombobulated by the fact that the English commentators were not rooting sufficiently for the diving, cheating, devious Colombians:

Read the rest on Breitbart.

Exposed – German/Russian EU Conspiracy Vindicates Brexit

JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty

“Better off in.”

This was the slogan of the Remain campaign during Britain’s EU referendum. It didn’t persuade the 17.4 million people who voted Brexit, most of whom see the EU for what it really is: a corrupt, sclerotic, socialistic, anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, authoritarian superstate run primarily in the interests of the country that lost the war but won the peace, Germany.

Ever since, bitter Remoaners have been lining up on the BBC to explain how this was a huge mistake and how we should all vote again to get the correct result this time.

But what if new evidence emerged to prove that those untutored, ill-educated, knuckle-dragging peasants who were stupid enough to vote for Brexit were right all along?

Read the rest at Breitbart.

George Osborne’s Gone, Thank God. So Why’s Mark Carney Still Around?

Like Osborne, Carney abused the prestige of his office quite abominably during the EU referendum.

Did you see that odd photo of George Osborne looking shifty, queuing up in the Vietnamese jungle for the chance to fire an M60 machine gun? I found it interesting for a number of reasons.

One, obviously, is that it’s probably the first time in five years Osborne hasn’t been pictured wearing a hard hat and goggles. Another is what it tells us about his earnings prospects on the US speaker tour circuit: those guns can fire up to 650 rounds a minute — so at the local tourist rate of £1 a bullet that’s quite an expensive cheap thrill.

Mainly, though, what struck me about that snap was just how quickly fortune’s wheel can turn. Only two months ago, Osborne was the UK’s second most powerful politician, in charge of the world’s fifth largest economy. Today he’s just another middle-class, middle-aged tourist, with kids in tow, living out his midlife-crisis Rambo fantasy.

I wish I could feel sorrier for him than I do. But I’m afraid I found him as disappointing a chancellor as David Cameron was a disappointing prime minister. Some years ago, I used to chat to him in our kids’ school playground. ‘Just you wait till we get into power, then you’ll see how Conservative we really are,’ he once promised when I complained about the wet, centrist, anti-free-market direction his party was taking in opposition. He never delivered on it, though, did he?

His darkest hour, most of us will probably agree, was during the EU referendum when he masterminded the confected and mendacious Project Fear, promising all manner of made-up disasters if Britain voted the ‘wrong’ way. But even before that, he was showing some pretty worrying tendencies: his kowtowing to the Chinese; his closeness to Russian oligarchs and sinister Machiavels like Lord Mandelson; and, most dangerous of all, his addiction to micromanaging and neo-Keynesianism, whose damaging effects we may yet be ruing for many years hence.

Whatever had happened to the zealous young Thatcherite I used to know in the playground? Probably the same thing that happens to a lot of senior politicians: seduced by high-level shindigs at Davos, Brussels and wherever Bilderberg is holding its roadshow this year, they become convinced that the people best placed to run the world are a Brioni–suited cabal of enlightened corporatists, globalist technocrats and Goldman Sachs-trained central bankers like his Canadian import Mark Carney. It’s like the Bullingdon for grown ups, and naturally George wanted to be with them on the superyacht.

Read the rest in the Spectator.

 

Better a Cocker Spaniel as Prime Minister than Theresa May…

But there’s one thing on which must agree. Better either of the above – or, frankly, a Cocker Spaniel – than the (current Home Secretary and lead rival contender) Theresa ruddy May.

Let me give you two reasons why.

First, May is fundamentally unsound. Earlier this year she claimed, without blushing, that “Sharia courts benefit Britain.” But there was an earlier indication she was a wrong ‘un in 2014 when she had a public spat with Michael Gove (who at the time was Education Secretary), over the best way to deal with Islamic extremism in Britain.

It began, you may remember, as a result of the Trojan Horse scandal when it emerged that a number of state schools in Birmingham had been hijacked by Islamists promoting an extremist agenda, with non-Muslim teachers marginalised, boys and girls segregated, teenage males taught that rape is legal within marriage, Islamic terrorists glorified and non-Muslims described as kuffar.

May – perhaps to duck responsibility and save her skin: as Home Secretary she’s supposed to be in charge of law and order and social cohesion – tried to pin the blame on Gove.

Gove struck back, as well he might. No one in the British government has been more keenly aware of the problems of Islamism than Michael Gove. He was on to it a decade ago when he wrote Celsius 7/7 – a book excoriating the cultural dhimmitude that had led to problems like the London bus and tube bombings.

Part of Gove’s argument has always been that it is simply not enough to combat Islamist terrorism. You also have tackle the root causes of the problem: madrassas teaching young British Muslims to despise the values of their own country; Wahabi and Deobandi imams, parachuted in from Pakistan and Saudi, preaching the most extreme form of Islam; inequality before the law endorsed by Sharia courts; sucking up to extremist “community leaders” and ignoring the peaceful majority; and so on – as well as more positive stuff, like encouraging Muslims to become better assimilated and more loyal to their host culture.

It’s known colloquially as the “drain the swamp” strategy. That is, it’s no good just bashing the crocodiles’ heads as they attack your canoe. If you want to sort out the problem long term, you have to neutralise the environment from which all those crocs are coming in to attack you.

May, on the other hand, is of the “don’t let’s make a fuss, let’s just deal with the crocodiles as and when they appear” school of thought.

Which of the two approaches, do you think, is most likely to secure long-term social cohesion and reduce the number of future terrorist attacks?

The row between the two got so heated that Gove was ordered by Prime Minister David Cameron to apologise to May.

Gove, it should be noted, is now supporting Boris Johnson’s candidature in the elections to become new Conservative leader and Prime Minister.

The second reason why Theresa May doesn’t deserve to be Prime Minister is because she backed the wrong side in the referendum.

She didn’t need to do so. It has long been rumoured that she has Eurosceptic sympathies. But when push came to shove, she decided to put petty ambition before principle and take what she thought was going to be the easy option: back the Establishment position and reap the rewards.

Had Remain won, she would have benefited accordingly.

It would be a monstrous injustice – not to mention an insult to the electorate – if, having backed the wrong horse for the most cynical of reasons, May went on to be rewarded with the highest office in the land.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Remain: When ‘Kinder, Gentler Politics’ Really Means ‘Dirtier, Uglier’

Will Straw, director of the Remain campaign, has been caught red-handed advising his team how to exploit Cox’s death by playing up the message that Leave represent “division and resentment” while only Remain represents “decent, tolerant Britain.”

This is what the left means by “dog-whistle” politics.

Only this time, it’s the left which is blowing that whistle.

Here, as Guido reports, is what Will Straw said in a highly embarrassing leaked audio file.

“We need to recognise that people have been pulled up short by Jo Cox’s death and it is now time to make a very positive case for why we want to be in the European Union… to call out the other side for what they have done to stir division and resentment in the UK.

That is something we must all do… This is what we think is the closing argument of the campaign, reflecting all the arguments that we have been setting out for many months but also the new context that we’re in. What we want to say is people should vote Remain on Thursday for more jobs, lower prices, workers’ rights, stronger public services and a decent, tolerant United Kingdom.”

The language is cautious, mealy-mouthed but the message is clear. To paraphrase: ‘Never mind the issues – just focus on Jo Cox. They didn’t buy Project Fear; they didn’t buy Project Lies; but they might just be sold on Project Grief.’

And Straw may have a point for, since the murder of Jo Cox, there has been a dramatic shift in Remain’s fortunes. Where before they were trailing in the polls, now they have pulled ahead.

Yes, there’s a story doing the rounds that this is because the public are becoming increasingly concerned about economic issues and that these favour Remain. But I suspect that this is just Remain spin to cover their own embarrassment at the unseemly way they’ve been using Jo Cox’s death to their advantage.

Here’s Katie Hopkins, telling it like it is:

Ask yourself what would have happened had it been Nigel Farage not Jo Cox slain on a pavement, whether they would have called for kinder Politics?

I suspect in some quarters they would declare he brought it on himself. How they laughed when his family were attacked whilst trying to enjoy a family lunch in a pub.

As we move into the final few days of the campaign, the ugly ambition of Remain will be to keep the Jo Cox story alive – at least in print – until June 23.

There is no end to the stunts set up to ensure this story has legs and keeps running – when most of us just want the family left in peace to grieve and find some sleep.

Regrettably for the state of British politics, she’s probably right.

First came the pilgrimage by the two main party leaders David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn – both pro-Remain – to lay wreaths in Cox’s constituency in Birstall, West Yorkshire and preach the virtues of “tolerance” and “democracy”. (More dogwhistling: if you don’t believe in these virtues than you must be Vote Leave).

Then yesterday, Parliament was recalled from its summer recess for a special sitting. Ostensibly to celebrate the life and the “kinder, gentler politics” apparently embodied by Jo Cox; but also, unfortunately, to allow campaigners like MP Stephen Kinnock – son of two of the EU’s more voracious apparatchiks Neil and Glenys – yet more dogwhistling opportunities by talking about “hope not fear, respect not hate, unity not division”. (Unity: you mean, like, in a “not leaving the EU” kind of way, Stephen?)

After that will come the funeral which – let us pray – will remain a private affair.

If you think this is normal procedure for when a parliamentarian is killed while in office, you’d be mistaken.

It didn’t happen after Conservative MP Ian Gow was assassinated with an IRA bomb in 1990.

Nor did it happen in 1979 when Airey Neave – a wartime hero (one of the few men to escape from Colditz) and also a personal friend of the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – was murdered in similar fashion by another Irish Republican terror group the INLA.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

New York Times Tries to Pin ‘Violence’ on Brexit Campaign

Let’s examine its argument in more detail, starting with the headline. I’ve put the New York Times’s words in bold; my comments appear below.

Britain Asks if Tone of ‘Brexit’ Campaign Made Violence Inevitable

New York Times Journalist States that Tone of ‘Brexit’ Campaign Made Violence Inevitable, taking lead from left-leaning Remain activists and commentators whose biased opinions he cherry-picks to support his threadbare thesis.

On the specific subject of ‘Tone’ see also: ‘Tone’ – the Liberal-Left’s codeword for ‘I hate free speech’

As the shock of the brutal murder of a young member of Parliament began to subside on Friday, there was a growing sense in Britain that something ominous had been unleashed in the country.

Whence grew this ‘growing sense’? The only people actually promulgating this line are left-leaning, pro-Remain activists who’ve seen a Rahm-Emanuel-style opportunity in the crisis of a mother-of-two’s senseless, brutal murder. Most normal people would much prefer it if Britain’s democratic future were debated on more relevant issues.

The increasingly ugly anti-immigrant tone to the campaign 

This is not a fact but a left-wing propaganda trope. Sure there have been odd lapses of taste, notably the somewhat crass Breaking Point poster. But for most of this referendum campaign the nastiness has been confined to the Remain side – whose Project Fear has been characterised by mendacity, ad hominems, snobbery and bullying. Leave, on the other hand, have sought to keep their tone as upbeat and positive as possible; as have UKIP and Nigel Farage. This is because they have been alive to the possibility that their respectable position on controlled immigration will inevitably be misrepresented by the left as xenophobia and racism. So what Erlanger is doing here isn’t journalism but propaganda: stating as fact something he might wish to be so but for which he can demonstrate little evidence other than hearsay from parti-pris commenters.

Coupled with the violence of English fans at the European soccer championships…

The high-water mark of English football violence was thirty years ago. Either Erlanger doesn’t know this – in which case why he is commenting on UK affairs? – or he is being deliberately misleading.

…has left many here feeling that the boundaries of acceptable behavior are breaking down.

“Many”? See above and below.

“What we are just seeing generally is a very disturbing shift in British politics,” said Simon Tilford, the deputy director of the Center for European Reform, which favors British membership. “It is quite upsetting to me what is happening.”

“As a pro-EU activist I will say anything to smear the other side.”

With next Thursday’s vote on the referendum only days away, campaigning was suspended as a gesture of mourning and respect for the victim, Jo Cox, 41, a rising star in the opposition Labour Party who, not coincidentally, was a strong backer of Britain’s remaining inside the bloc.

That “not coincidentally” is flat-out in contempt of court. You are ascribing motives to the killer which have yet to be established in a court of law. Also, you are trying to pin the murder on the entire Brexit cause. Low – really low.

While it is still too early to say how the attack will change the dynamics of the campaign, it has unquestionably shifted the focus from the growing momentum of those in favor of leaving to the anti-immigrant tactics they have employed as the vote has drawn closer.

No. The Leave campaign is not “anti-immigrant”: it has simply argued for controlled migration, which is something else entirely.

The suspect arrested in the killing, Thomas Mair, 52, has a history of mental illness.

Wow. An actual sentence stating the truth. But let’s wait for the inevitable “but”, shall we?

But he was also reported to have been in contact with far-right groups in the United States and Britain, and to have said, “Britain first!” several times as he attacked Ms. Cox. Britain First, a far-right nationalist group, denied any links with Mr. Mair, but a United States civil rights group said he had been associated with an American neo-Nazi organization called the National Alliance.

As Peter Hitchens notes in this must-read Mail piece, “disturbed people do sometimes embrace the wilder political and religious creeds. But it is their mental illness, not these barely understood ‘opinions’, that makes them capable of the dreadful act of killing – an act which separates them from the rest of humanity.” Around 30 million people – half Britain’s population – want to vote Leave. The idea, as Erlanger and others are hinting, that they might have anything remotely in common with this mentally ill man or his warped political associations is disgusting.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Finally, The Wankerati Tell Us Which Way to Vote in the EU Referendum…

On the one hand, there are the Brexiteers, who point out that the EU economy is shrinking, that its regulatory burden is holding back our business; that outside the EU we’d be richer and freer; that we’d regain control of our borders and be in a better position to protect ourselves against the wave of potential terrorists that Angela Merkel is determined to make EU citizens in order to punish us all for what Germany did in World War II; that we’d no longer be controlled by democratically unaccountable, faceless, supremely untalented apparatchiks who, in their own countries wouldn’t be deemed fit to take the orders at Domino’s Pizza, but who thanks to the EU, in the case of Baroness “Who?” Ashton got to swan around on £400,000 a year like she was some major international powerbroker; that it’s a nonsense to argue that Britain needs to belong to a crippled, spavined, sclerotic, inefficient, wasteful, monumentally corrupt socialistic superstate when, actually it used to do perfectly well for itself for two hundred odd years when it ran half the world. For more details on this see, for example, the very excellent Brexit The Movie.

But I’ve been listening to the arguments advanced by the Remain camp with Prime Minister David Cameron very much setting the dignified, civilised, intelligent, measured, thoughtful tone – and they’re very compelling too. Here are some of the best: Boris Johnson’s wife may have had an affair – or if it wasn’t her, it was possibly someone a bit like her – or maybe not; Boris Johnson used the word “Hitler” in a newspaper article and if you use the word “Hitler” you lose automatically; Boris Johnson smells of poo-poo and wee-wee and actually loves the EU and only says the opposite because it’s opposite month and also because he just wants the job of Prime Minister, so there; David Cameron has agreed to pose looking self-conscious and awkward for a Remain campaign publicity shot while walking across the zebra crossing at Abbey Road which is amazing because it’s just what popular beat combo the Beatles did on one of their most famous album covers and the Beatles wrote Strawberry Fields and Eleanor Rigby so Remain must be a good thing.

So you see, it’s been a tricky one. Which is why, for some time now, I have been looking for guidance one way or another from the sort of people whose gravitas, clear-sightedness and deep knowledge I can rely on.

The blond lefty actor who played one of the wacky DJs in Richard Curtis’s collectably lame The Boat The Rocked, say. Where does he stand on the EU referendum?

Or the anti-fracking mad catwoman who virtually invented punk by realising that instead of using giant safety pins for just nappies (that’s diapers, you American readers) they could also be inserted through leather jackets or even parts of your anatomy.

Or the guy who played Alan Turing in that somewhat trite movie which turned the Bletchley codebreaking story into one about gay martyrdom – and who loves to sound off on all sorts of Social Justice issues, as you would, when you’re from the rough side of the tracks having only been educated at Harrow, not Eton.

Or that woman poet laureate that no one much rates?

Or the spy author who hasn’t written a good book since the Cold War days – unless, of course, you think the greatest threat to global security right now are sinister Big Business interests working with the American secret service, in cahoots with the wicked Israelis, and posho Englishmen in pin-stripes with posho accents because they’re really posh, in which case of course, you’ll love everything he writes because it’s the same every time?

Or that good-looking actor who shags everyone?

Or the Social Justice campaigner – another Old Harrovian – who actually wrote The Boat That Rocked?

Or the priapic comedian who used to do funny stuff till he realised his main mission in life was to destroy the freedom of the British press?

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Obama Might As Well Have Declared: ‘Britain Lost the War Of Independence Because You Have Small D**ks’

The tactics went like this:

The Provocation

Barack Obama came to Britain and, in the guise of lofty, statesman-like disinterested amity made a statement so outrageously provocative that he might just as well have said: “My historians tell me the reason you guys lost the War of Independence is because your penises were incredibly small.”

No really – his presumption in telling us which way to vote in the European Union debate was that arrogant and rude. The only people in Britain who welcomed Obama’s intervention were the ones already on board with the European Union project. For anyone else, it was a calculated insult from a meddling hypocrite interloper.

The Inevitable Reaction

That’s why, naturally enough, those on the opposing side of the argument – the ones advocating exit from the European Union – responded in kind. If Obama was going to behave like a bumptious prick, well, he deserved to be treated like a bumptious prick.

Hence the perfectly proportionate response by Boris Johnson (Mayor of London; leading light of the Brexit faction) making gentle reference to the President’s Kenyan, anti-British heritage, to Obama’s pointed return of the Winston Churchill bust, and to the meddling, anti-democratic, and thoroughly un-American nature of his suggestion that Britain should remain shackled to the kind of socialist superstate that no American would personally tolerate.

The Manufacture of the Outrage

If you understand how the modern left – especially its Praetorian Guard, the Social Justice Warriors (SJW) – operates, what you’ll realise is this: that the sole tactical purpose of the President’s visit was to generate a kind of “beneficial crisis” which could then be exploited for political ends.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Why Michael Gove and Boris Johnson Plumped for Brexit

“Is it true?” I asked.

“I’m still undecided. Torn between what I feel about the EU and loyalty to the PM.”

So I said: “Not many people get the chance in their lives to save Britain. Drake; Nelson; Churchill. Your call.”

“No pressure then,” said the Lord Chancellor.

I’d love to be able to claim that it was me wot swung it. But I honestly don’t believe that, for all his professed vacillations, Gove was ever capable of doing anything other than nailing his colours to the Brexit mast.

The same is true, for different reasons, of Boris Johnson.

Last week, when lots of other armchair experts didn’t, I correctly predicted that both men would inevitably vote out.

I’m very glad they did since I think it will make all the difference to the #Brexit campaign. Put it this way, had Gove and Johnson not come out for Brexit, the “Leave” camp would never have stood a chance of persuading wavering middle-ground voters to take the plunge. With Boris’s charisma and popularity and Gove’s intellectual heft to back it Brexit now stands a serious chance of becoming reality.

Let me explain – briefly, because I’m ill and mustn’t write too much – what I think made up their minds.

First Gove. Gove’s decision is the easiest to explain: integrity. Of all my Oxford contemporaries to go into politics Gove is the only one who has not been intellectually or morally corrupted by the process. I’m sure almost everyone who goes into politics (in Britain, at any rate; less so, perhaps, in, say Nigeria) does so for the noblest of reasons. But what they quickly realise is that if they are ever to enjoy career advancement, they must compromise their ideals for whatever is thought at the time to be the “greater good” of their party. In the Cameroon era this has meant squishy, ideology-free centrism.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Why Is David Cameron Covering up for the EU?

The deep unpopularity of the EU

Much as I admire Dan Hodges, I can’t share his enthusiasm for the government’s mooted scheme to snoop on our internet activity. No I don’t buy the line that “If you’ve nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.” No I don’t believe that allowing nameless authorities to spy on our private communications will prevent another Soham or another 7/7. On the contrary, I think giving the state more power over our last bastion of free speech and free ideas will only serve to threaten our security and our liberty, not protect it. And I’m frankly amazed that any MP would wish his or her name to be associated with the push for this tyrannical, Big Brother charter. That’s why I Tweeted yesterday to ask whether anyone knew which of our politicians had been behind this assault on our freedom and our privacy. The super-switched-on @welshtoy knew the answer, as she so often does.

Had I troubled to read the ever-reliable Richard North’s EU Referendum, of course, I would have known the answer even before that.

It emanated – duh! –  from the European Union.

But, whether the case has been made or not, these are EU-inspired plans so they are going ahead regardless. This development is an integral part of the EU’s Internal Security Strategy, launched by Cecilia Malmström, EU commissioner for home affairs, without fanfare in November 2010.

What is now happening at the UK end is that the British government – in common with other member states – is working with and assisting the EU commission in trialing “EU-led operational programmes”, each member state developing the individual building blocks which go towards making up the integrated EU policy.

The internal policy is in turn part of the overarching European Security Strategy, set up in December 2008 and, with an eye on controlling terrorism and cybercrime.

Latest of the developments, happening only last week, was the launch of a Cyber Crime Centre, a working division of EuroPol, which will build up to a vast EU monitoring facility, announced by commissioner Malmström in a Brussels press conference on the Wednesday.

Initially established with a staff of thirty in the Europol facility in The Hague (in the former Gestapo building), this can only be a temporary home. Its expansion and extending remit will require a massive, purpose-built facility in the not too distant future.

Here you start to see possible links with the British initiative, which focuses on GCHQ in Cheltenham as the monitoring centre. What better home could you find for the European centre than the self-same GCHQ, thus bringing in EU money to help support this extremely expensive government operation?

And this is how the EU pork-barrel works. A member state happily works away developing EU policy, apparently unilaterally, all to provide a template which the EU can then adopt. The reward comes with the allocation of an agency or EU facility and the cash that comes with it.

Similar rules apply to another of the Coalition’s recent policy gaffes: the pasty tax. As the excellent Christopher Booker pointed out in his column last Sunday, this too emanates from the EU not from our own government. (Or rather, the entity we risibly assume is our government).

The question I would like to ask here – it’s one that Booker and North often ask too – is: “Why?”

Consider the flak the Coalition took this week over the pasty issue. David Cameron was made to look remote, snooty and rather ridiculous with his “I did eat a pasty once. In one of the emporia at a northern railway station, I believe. And most delicious it was too!!” man of the people defence. Osborne lost some of his (surely undeserved in the first place) reputation for budgetary competence. It was generally agreed to be one of the Conservatives’ worst weeks since the general election.

Yet at no point did any of their spin merchants or strategists seek to limit the damage by letting it be known that this stupid, unpopular, cheeseparing regulation was European in origin. Nor did anyone in the Coalition let slip that the Big Brother charter too was a European plan rather than a Coalition one.

This is bizarre, is it not? Here we have a Prime Minister who claims not to be a Europhile but who, apparently, would prefer to see his personal reputation and his Coalition’s reputation take several massive hits rather than allow public opprobrium for deeply unpopular measures to be directed towards the institution that devised them: the EU.

I’m sure Sue Cameron has a point when she says that it’s Whitehall, not our elected parliamentary representatives, which really calls the shots on how our country is run.

But it’s worse than that: those Whitehall bureaucrats are merely enforcing the will of EU technocrats.

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