Martin Kelly's Article Archive

Remember the Lesson of Troy

2006-03-23T09:54:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
May 21, 2004

The Greeks didn’t win, according to the history written by those who claimed to be descended from the Trojans. The universally bad reviews of Troy have focussed on the liberties that Wolfgang Petersen has taken with the Iliad, but the story does not stop with the fall of Troy into ruins. It’s never stopped.

The conflict had been long and attritional, resulting in huge losses on both sides. Hemmed in on the coast of Turkey, the Trojans felt that, although Paris might have been wrong in wooing Helen away from Menelaus, their honour as Trojans had to be defended when the Greeks, a motley collection of nation states, united in alliance to bring her back. Not all Greeks were in favour of the war – when Agamemnon, brother of Menelaus, called to enlist his support Odysseus feigned madness, trying to plough a field with an ox and an ass. Only when Agamemnon placed his infant son Telemachus in the plough’s path did Odysseus reveal himself to be sane.

The real star of any movie about the Trojan War should, by rights, be Odysseus, the smartest, funniest and most charismatic mortal in mythology. The strategist who dreamt up the Wooden Horse failed, of course, to develop an adequate exit strategy for himself, resulting in a 10-year journey home to Ithaca, a journey of which he was the only survivor.

However, as Troy burned, the Greeks sailed off having crushed their enemies, mission accomplished. No nation building or reconstruction for the Trojans, the outright losers of a war that many on both sides believed to be totally pointless. But as the undisputed Big Dog of Greek politics, Agamemnon felt that his family’s honour had been slighted, a slight that only war could rectify, and the rest of them had better fall in line.

According to legend the Trojan nobleman Aeneas, bearing his father Anchises on his back, fled the burning city with some companions. For 10 years he also sailed the Mediterranean. He encountered Dido, the beautiful Queen of Carthage at its infancy, who loved him so much that, according to Virgil, ‘she fed with the wound with her life blood and was wasted by the fire she kept hidden’. When Aeneas chose his people over her, she swore everlasting enmity between Carthage and his descendants, a legend later used in their own causes by those who claimed to be of his line.

Eventually, Aeneas and his followers settled in a pleasant area of seven hills in central Italy. He passed into myth, until a great city grew up on the spot where he settled. It became known as Rome, and the Romans always invoked their Trojan roots when the occasion arose.

After the great victory of Troy, the Greeks never stopped fighting, either against the Persians, the Macedonians or each other. For them, there was no end to war. Eventually came Alexander the Great, whose dream of Empire from the Danube to the Ganges lasted only a few years after his early death. As time passed, the Romans became stronger, and the descendants of the Trojans returned to Greece as conquerors, where they stayed not for a decade but for centuries.

Beware the fate awaiting those who wage specious wars for family honour.

Fear of Failure is Killing Iraq

2006-03-23T09:53:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
May 13, 2004

Having the holder of a Harvard MBA as President must have been a novelty at first, until one realises how much a qualification like that can be as much of a negative as a positive in a politician. An MBA teaches its holder how to run corporations, whereas governments and wars have entirely different characters.

For a CEO President to surround himself with other CEO’s was, in hindsight, a bad idea – although Cabinet members must always be accomplished in their own fields, having so many people with the same CEO mentality means that there are no alternative perspectives available to provide opinion and counsel. Also, CEO types are always forceful characters, and they need someone to around them ready to raise their voice in favour of alternatives. One couldn’t imagine anyone doing that with either George W. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld, because Colin Powell seems just way too polite.

This is the most leak proof White House in living memory, meaning that there is a disturbing uniformity of thought indicative of uniform ideology. Another symptom is what appears to be the absolute lack of self-doubt that the President and the other neo-conservatives project in public, giving the appearance of strength. This appearance is false. The administration’s recent actions have shown them to be succumbing to the greatest fear of the modern corporate CEO. Fear of failure.

The Bush Administration is comprised of people who have almost never failed. It is impossible not to fail at some point or another in life – by so failing, we become stronger and grow wiser. When such people do fail, they do not know how to react, and the clearest evidence of this has been in evidence since the first publication of the Abu Ghraib photos.

Not enough analysis has been written of the importance of absolutely free market economics to neo-conservatism. It is fair to say that free markets are as important to neo-conservatives as the idea of exporting democracy, as it is their belief that free markets will turn all enslaved peoples into willing consumers of American goods. The resultant peace justifies the loss of American jobs that such free markets bring. However, a critical plank of this free market mania is that nothing should be done in the public sector that can be done in the private, even the conduct of the state’s most sensitive functions, such as the interrogation of its prisoners of war. Unless the contracts of hire of the civilians at Abu Ghraib who are alleged to have orchestrated the abuse have assumed the status of a Constitutional Amendment, they should be fired forthwith. No civilian of any nation has any business conducting such a delicate function of the State.

The mercantile flaws of such a set-up are obvious. Were these guys being paid for the number of confessions they extracted? Or was it just an hours worked only contract, payable without the necessity of showing results? Given what has already happened, it does not stretch credibility to suggest that what happened in that prison could have been the result of a civilian contractor trying to up their earnings, which is why they should all be removed immediately.

George W. Bush’s public expression of support for Donald Rumsfeld owes more to the closeness of the administration’s ranks than to any tangible proof of success in the administration of post-war Iraq. One can be sure that some of the most rabid followers of Moqtada al-Sadr will have availed themselves of the mobile phones and satellite dishes that are apparently the proof that Iraqis are free now. They are really the symbol that Iraq’s internal market has been opened up for the distribution of consumer goods, which are always snapped up in any country whose culture is incapable of producing them itself- therefore, Nick Berg’s murder was captured on VCR and broadcast on the Internet. The Iraqis lived before without easy access to wireless broadband, and there is no reason why US and UK contractors should be at risk to ensure they can have it. Peace first, money later. The Bush Administration seems to be following the opposite policy.

To put it bluntly, Rumsfeld was wrong not to have sanctioned more troops to keep the peace on the ground to begin with. The forces in Iraq are not robots – they should not have to endure having their stays being lengthened unreasonably. What is happening in Iraq is that there seems to be no real recognition that this is a war, and a war needs to be fought, against the savages who murdered Berg and who killed 168 pilgrims at Karbala. This one is being managed, in an atmosphere of rudderless stasis, driven by fear of failure.
Which, is of course, the default position of an MBA and a CEO. Even Donald Rumsfeld’s admission of responsibility did not lead him to resign immediately, so he clearly does not believe what happened at Abu Ghraib to be a matter of personal honour. He does not believe himself to have failed. He, like the rest of them, comes from an atmosphere where having a very public failure on your resume removes any further possibility of advancement. You’ll never be re-hired if you’re perceived to have been unsuccessful, an attitude that now seems to seep through every aspect of the modern culture. However, there is one great big chicken that may soon be coming home to roost. If it is proven that the contractors ordered the MP’s to commit these abuses with the full knowledge of the Pentagon, that becomes a resigning issue not just for Rumsfeld, it becomes one for Bush. All these people were there because Bush wanted it so, and he must bear his share of blame for the consequences, if people he ultimately hired were responsible for tarnishing the good name of America. They will have succeeded in giving the moral high ground to the House of Saud, which is diplomacy in reverse. It’s a mad world we live in.

Recanting Neoconservatism

2006-03-23T09:52:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
May 12, 2004

The intellectual roots of neoconservatism lie in Trotskyism, and there’s nothing a Trotskyite likes more than a good recantation. Once, neo-conservatism seemed like a very bold and brave vision for the world, but not any more. If the Abu Ghraib photos are its legacy, it’s finished.

As Frank Salvato has said, Arab outrage at the photos must be taken with a pinch of salt. One is tiring of the cultural bankruptcy of Arab society, evidenced by a Basra Mullah’s call for female soldiers of the Coalition to be captured for the purposes of concubinage. America will ultimately win this war because of American culture, nothing to do with rigid ideology, the stock in trade of Trotskyism. After the burning of Washington and Pearl Harbor the American spirit picked itself up within hours and got on the move. Its dynamism meant that December 7 1941 or September 11 2001 were not the disasters that the fall of Granada or the retreat from Vienna were for Islamic culture, nursing its grievances for centuries, the human potential of Muslims only released when their skills, abilities and common humanity are unleashed in the Western world. Not for nothing are America’s Muslims the richest in the world per capita.

The older conservative doctrine of containment and deterrence couldn’t work in the face of Saddam Hussein’s defiance. The UN’s inability to act against defiance of its resolutions arose from its Cold War roots, and you can’t have a Cold War with only one superpower.

However, the deed is done. Unless, for some obscure reason, the public is not being told, there have been no WMD discovered. The apparent failure of the Bush White House to devote resources to this quest or at least keep the public informed on why there have been no WMD found is one of the most startling aspects of this whole period in history. There is a callousness about its failure to communicate which is wholly unbecoming of a White House at war.

Those who called for war had mostly never fought in one. This is a point that has been made again and again by those who criticise the think tanks and magazines from which neo-conservatism sprung. It’s a perfectly valid criticism, although in a civilian society the oversight of wars must be left to civilians. But there is just as equally valid criticism to be made of very distinguished conservatives who oppose the war appearing on the same websites as people like Justin Raimondo (‘Go F…. Yourself, Mr. President’) or the extreme left-winger John Pilger, whose beliefs on everything except the war are the antithesis of conservatism. Such people do not good bedfellows make for the likes of Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts.

The real failing of neo-conservatism is its belief that all societies, if not free, cannot just be made free but made to be free. The historical pointers suggesting its ultimate failure were all there – anyone who cries for Zimbabwe will see that that country’s failure has been the result as much of Mugabe’s Shona tribalism as his Communism. Nearly every failed country in Africa has failed because of tribalism, and few places are more tribal than the Middle East. Loyalty to tribe trumps loyalty to fellow citizens in the form of the state, the first demand of an open society. Democracy has never thrived in tribal societies, and there was no real prospect of it ever taking root either in Iraq or in Afghanistan. It is not the war that will ultimately fail – it is the peace that will fail, and because of the world vision of a few people living cloistered and privileged lives in the smart parts of Washington DC US forces will be in that part of the world for decades to come, not to keep the peace but to enforce the peace.

The final straw has been the last two weeks. Anyone connected to the regime of Saddam Hussein is art and part responsible for his regime’s atrocities. If the Iraqi Army was to be disbanded, its generals should never have been re-hired. When the statues came crashing down in April 2003, the line that was spun was that the Iraqi people would know that the Saddam regime would never be coming back. Now, even if the involvement of Ba’athist officials is limited they can’t be so sure, which negates the whole exercise.

It was over with Abu Ghraib. As a result of the idiotic actions of Lynndie England and her colleagues, and the equally idiotic actions of CBS in broadcasting the photos without thinking that there might be competition between their news value and the national interest of protecting American lives, American soldiers are at further risk of attack. If you don’t think that could happen, remember last summer, when six Brit MP’s were murdered by a mob after holding out in a crappy wee police station in the wholly crappy town of Majar-al-Kabir, a last stand of enormous courage and élan for which not one of them has received a medal. England’s Alamo happened because the Parachute Regiment had quite deliberately broken the terms of an agreement with the town headman to respect cultural differences, by using sniffer dogs.

Such needless loss of American, British and other coalition life was not, never was the point. After a year, there has been no point.

Instead, let’s return to the proven ways. It is wholly conservative to suggest that the best way to keep the peace right now is for the USA and UK to recruit spies. I don’t mean a few, I mean thousands and thousands of spies, to destabilise and subvert every damn dictatorship from China to Cuba to these demented crackpots in otherwise valueless and unimportant, unproductive places like Turkmenistan. Let’s do a Dutch, cut Medicare and build up the forces properly, starting by giving the Japanese the bomb and outsourcing the defence of Korea to them. Let’s start by saying ‘No’ to the Chinese just for once and park every ship we can find on their lawn, just as we did with the Soviets, and really test their enthusiasm for a fight over Taiwan. Two generations did not grow up under the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction to enable international Communism to win because it can make cheap DVD players. We still have enemies, many of them in Iraq. But we have other, more dangerous ones as well.

Pride makes me hate to admit this, but Shane, you were right all along.

Why Growth Will Never Stop

2006-03-23T09:50:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
May 3, 2004

Frosty Wooldridge’s polemics against growth in the Washington Dispatch are always informative, if not downright alarming. However, it’s unfortunate to say that the two principal causes of the unrestricted growth he berates are now so embedded in the structure of government that it will never stop, and they are the direct responsibility of the disengagement of political elites of both parties from the people they are paid to serve. They are the direct result of the social revolution affected by the liberals and the economic revolution affected by pseudo-conservatives and corporatists. The effect of these two revolutions has been to create a synergy of socialism, greed and special interests so enmeshed that it cannot be unwoven without catastrophic consequences for the body politic, and will in all likelihood not simply aid but also assist the continuation of mass immigration for the foreseeable future.

Every country that enacts a Social Security law signs its own death warrant. Not that having Social Security is a bad thing per se- it is simply that its cost places two great burdens on the citizens in whose name it is enacted. Firstly, at all times and under all circumstances it must be paid for. To speak of a ‘fund’ in these circumstances is disingenuous – if it is payable, it, must be paid immediately. It would be bad politics to make a remedy available and then make those entitled to the remedy wait 20 years to build up a relief fund for themselves. Secondly, it must continue to be paid for. It must be administered, so bureaucrats will need to be hired. Bureaucrats, once hired, are extremely difficult to remove, they need to be paid and provided with a solid pension backed up by the taxpayer. Therefore, the costs of government grow.
The outsourcing of government is not an answer. If a private contractor is carrying out a function of government at lowest cost it is still a function of government. What happens in this case is an accounting trick to provide a short-term electoral advantage to the party with the White Rabbit in its hat. The function of government has become its own maintenance, and the Medicare Bill is the classic example of government doing what it wants with other people’s money for no reason other than to curry favour with a preferred demographic.

The prevailing corporate culture of the 1980’s was one of wild, absolutely reckless consumption. This continued even after 9/11, when in order to stimulate the economy, the President told the nation, effectively, to go shopping. He did not say, ‘Invest in the T-bill’ or provide any other solution. It was simply because he couldn’t, for there was nothing else for him to work with.

The bulk of America’s debt is now held overseas, with the Red Chinese near top of the list of creditors. So dependent is the entire western world on what the Chinese produce that it has created a crisis in the world steel market, with the price at its highest level for 30 years. They consume one-third of the world’s steel output. Where Carnegie and Schwab and Morgan led, the Chinese follow.

What does this mean for growth? Commentators speak of illegal immigrants only in terms of how they consume resources in the form of healthcare, education and water. The socialists’ long game on illegals is to get them legal ASAP, so they can become taxpayers in order to fund their Congressional pensions. The corporatists long game is that the sooner they are legal they will become consumers, providing more fuel to the insatiable, rapacious financial engine that sees ‘best value’ as its creed, and whose holy texts are stock reports.

Cui bono from all this? If you’re a 1980’s era investor who made it through 2000 in one piece, you’re doing just fine. If you’re a preferred demographic, you’re doing just fine. If you’re a pensioner aristocrat from the ‘60’s who’s now claiming the fruits of the society you wanted to undermine, you’re doing just fine. If you’re middle class, you’re not. Nobody cares for you or your concerns, only what and how much you consume and if your taxes are in on time. The fuel of the system you inherited is people. Only more and more people can sustain a government with a structure like that of America today. Not the sort of people you want to grow naturally, like children, but fully-gown consumers and taxpayers.

The answer is to downsize government, which can only be done by cutting funding and killing programs, not by accounting tricks. The answer is to take back control of the economy, by perhaps seeking a smaller return on investments that you are sure will lead to a job being created in America, best of all an American manufacturing job. The answer is, once again, the sad return of Ellis Island, which helped ensure that TB was not widely imported.

Does either candidate have the stomach for such a radical program? Thought not.

Productivity Gains While Humanity Loses

2006-03-23T09:49:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 30, 2004

How do we measure our fellow man? The outward signs are the least reliable. Too many hypocrites hide their misdeeds behind false and misleading ‘principles’. Except in the most public cases, we don’t have the ability to look into men’s souls, so we must find other criteria by which we can meter him. One of the most common is the corporate criterion of ‘productivity’.

Productivity is an effective tool for measuring economic worth. Obviously the more a man produces, the greater his value. A man with a strong work ethic will produce more than one without, so the harder worker has a higher value and should earn a premium for his labour. He should, shouldn’t he?

Not quite. Every aspect of economic life is now so subject to rules of productivity that it has become not a guide to performance but the overseer of a rapacious, insatiable culture that is nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with corporatism. Instead of rewarding steelworkers in Indiana who can roll more than every other plant in Gary combined, their productivity means they are now more expensive to reward. They have therefore become ‘uncompetitive’.

It is not extreme to say that, for all of the alleged social advances made in the workplace over the past fifty years, from maternity leave to sick pay, people with jobs are more dis-satisfied than ever. They really shouldn’t be – there is more available for them to consume than at any other time in history. The economic cost of this prosperity has been well recorded, however, the human cost is almost always ignored. It is a healthy thing to work hard, however, when productivity is measured not in days but in seconds, that turns the person being measured into nothing more than a machine, satisfying the classical definition of pornography, that of objectification of the human.

Socialists are big on productivity. Still reeling from the loss of the Cold War, they cling like limpets to the language of their ideas masters. Why else would magazines write stories on how much a stay at home mom would cost to hire? Even housewives, whose vocation is just as strong as that of any doctor or lawyer, must have their productivity measured according to the baldly mercantilist criterion of cost.

When are we going to start monitoring priests and ministers? Will they have to fulfil criteria on how many baptisms they perform (too dependent on third parties) or funerals (that could be dependent on location – you would get false statistics in areas with large retired communities)?

The socialist and allegedly conservative elites couldn’t care less why people are unhappy at work. In every workplace, you will get the loser whose lack of personal responsibility has brought them to the pass that they’re at. You can’t breed common sense – as any professional will attest, having been a lawyer, I have met some lawyers I wouldn’t trust to buy a pint of milk. However, the way in which the economy has been allowed to develop demands increasing homogenisation. We must all perform to the same standard, whether we are capable of it or not. Losing one’s job used to carry a stigma. Not any more. Every aspect of our day is an asset to be used to improve productivity, even to the fourth dimension. All managers speak the same way. They recite jargon like the incantations of some lost pagan priesthood, forgetting that, after a time, the souls of even the most ambitiously careerist longs for nothing more than a day away from the mobile phone and the e-mail.

The behaviour of corporations of the early 21st Century can be honestly interpreted as cultish in their demands on employees’ time, allied to their demands for conformity. It is fundamentally de-humanising, and anything that de-humanises people is unconservative. After all, have you ever met anyone who, on their deathbed, said they’d wished they’d spent more time at the office?

New Caesars, Old Warnings

2006-03-23T09:48:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 27, 2004

Pundit fatigue rots the brain. There is so much easily available information, analysis and interpretation of events that it has developed a critical mass, causing those who adhere to particular political opinions to be consolidated in them. Therefore, formerly pro-war conservatives are now reconsidering their positions. This is not backtracking by any manner of means, but a simple re-affirmation of why those people held those opinions in the first place.

It is because, like all sensible humans, they value the status quo. They want things to go back to the way they were before. They want the quiet life.

In a progressive age, to say one values things they way the were before is almost akin admitting belief in leprechauns and phrenology. However, there is nothing wrong in saying things were better before. Obviously, we cannot live our lives in bubbles – would that we could, for obviously we would be immune from the blandishments of Islamofascist savages.

There was a time when elected politicians made it their business to defend the interest of those who elected them. However, leaders are now so dependent on the interests behind them that those interests are the primary focus of leadership. How else can failure to intervene against outsourcing be justified? It’s because you’re backers are interested in lowest cost, not American jobs. Bill Clinton’s open identification with abortionists and the gun-control lobby meant that he would never act against their interests.

Similarly, the Open Borders, Closed Minds brigade who promoted amnesty for illegal aliens were more interested in securing Hispanic votes for George W. Bush in November than in considering the consequences of mass illegal immigration. Seeing people who are prepared to jump the queue receiving an absolution for their actions must be a sore one for every immigrant who ever took their turn in line and jumped through the hoops of fire laid at their feet by the INS. However, if there is a political advantage to be gained from it, new democracy demands that it has to be done. All ends justify all means. That is not democracy. That is Cosa Nostra.

One can tire of this manoeuvring, and with depressing confidence one can say that a Kerry presidency would only continue and consolidate what has rapidly become the new norm.

This is the stage at which democracy is in trouble. Prior to the foundation of the Republic, the greatest society in history was the Roman Empire. The first Romans loved the quiet life. Rome started off as a kingdom. After expelling Tarquin the Proud, it enjoyed 500 years as a stable and productive Republic. However, a power-grab by members of leading families, allied to a culture of imperialism, led to the sidelining of the Senate and the emergence of the Emperors, in whom all effective power rested. Concentration of power in the hands of one individual, or a small group of individuals, was the first step on the end of the road. The middle class disappeared, leaving only the very rich and the very poor. The people thus stagnated, making it one of the duties of the state to provide entertainment and sustenance for them. At the height of its power it had no real organised competitors, but did for itself from within.

One wouldn’t suggest for a moment that cheap gas and cable are the same as bread and circuses- the American people are way too smart for that. However, when groups grab power for themselves to make laws out of nothing, as the courts have done with Roe – v – Wade and Goodridge; when those charged with upholding good governance think nothing of removing an allocation given for one cause to another in direct violation of the constitution, as Bob Woodward alleges in Plan of Attack; when civic leaders treat their business like an entertainment for themselves, to the exclusion of the people; and when the hordes are already massed at the gates of Rome, like Attila – then one can seriously fear for what the new Caesars have done.

Before Julius Caesar launched his power grab, he was part of the first triumvirate along with Pompey and Crassus. Crassus was the one of the wealthiest men in Rome, who had made his name with the severity with which he had put down the rebellion of Spartacus. Under his watch, thousands of the Sparticist criminals were crucified along the Appian Way.

However, Crassus did not consider his achievement complete. Like all Roman leaders, he needed a military victory, which is why he led his legions to complete and utter disaster against the Persians, at Carrhae in modern Iraq.

There’s a lesson in there for some one. It is that the people must cherish their traditions, for they cannot rely on their leaders to do so.

The Star Wars Guide to Conservatism

2006-03-23T09:47:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 22, 2004

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a great galactic Republic. All who lived there were free, and all species therefore aspired to live in it, making great efforts to avoid the Star Patrols in order to gain entry. However, due to the machinations of those determined to undermine its traditions of liberty and brotherhood, its soul was being poisoned. This could be seen in the venom of the discourse in the Senate and the plexi-journals. One of its great powers, the Trade Federation, desperate to ensure that all markets were open, was undermining the Republic by sending all production to the isolated outlands beyond the borders, creating a disaffected mass at its heart. It fell to a group of noble souls called the Jedi-Cons to keep the peace and ensure stability.

The Jedi-Cons drew their strength from their belief in an entity called ‘The Force’. ‘The Force’ taught that all intelligent species have the same human rights, that government should be small, taxes low or non-existent, abortion banned, that the death penalty and education policy were the prerogatives of the individual systems of the Republic, that blaster ownership should be legal and that no civil service drone robot has a right to tell you where you can fly your speeder. Jedi-Cons agreed on many or all of these things. However, the Force was out of balance.

The elder, or ‘paleo’, Jedi-Cons believed that it was not their role to intervene in the affairs of entities out with the Republic. They also believed that the Trade Federation should be opposed, for in their learning and the wisdom of their years they saw its policies for the greed they were. The younger, or ‘neo’, Jedi-Cons believed that they had a duty to interfere in the affairs of other systems when they perceived the Republic’s security to be threatened. They were also blinded by the false prosperity brought about by the Trade Federation. However, both could unite when the need arose. When the renegade Darth Osama attacked the Republic, all Jedi-Cons had united to defeat him and his slave army on the wasted, barren planet of Binladestano Four. But after Darth Osama had been crushed, there came reports that the Saddamians were building a Death Star.

This caused a fatal rift in the Jedi-Cons. The paleo-Jedi-Cons refused to support any action against the Saddamians, as no substantive proof had been found of a link between them and Darth Osama. They preferred to deter and contain the Saddamians. The neo-Jedi-Cons, believing the reports, contrived to attack the alleged Death Star-builders by whispering their counsels in the President’s ear. However, after Saddamia was occupied they did not find any evidence of such a weapon. They did find, alas, that the Saddamians offered more resistance to the soldiers of the Republic than the Binladestanis had.

This caused many problems for the President of the Republic. A Jedi-Con with neo leanings, he found himself facing mounting criticism on Coruscant, particularly from the Democratids. The Democratids were the mortal enemies of the Jedi-Cons, and every move they made was calculated to undermine the Force.

As time passed, the situation on Saddamia became severe. After a year, there was still no evidence of a Death Star, and the Democratids and the other forces of the dark side began to refer to the Saddamian war in the same terms as the last, more dreadful war of the Republic, against the Communisticons of the Viet system. The Communisticons now only existed in isolated pockets around the galaxy, winning the Viet battle but losing the war, having been defeated by the paleos’ policies of containment and deterrence.

The Jedi-Cons realised that balance would need to be brought to the Force. This would make the President stronger, giving him a wider basis of opinion from which draw his advisers. It would mean that the President might be forced to stand up to the Trade Federation. It would mean a return to the great days of the President 20 years before, who had united both factions and thus enabled the longest period of growth and prosperity in the Republic’s history. It would mean that the President would be able to face the Democratids in the coming Great Struggle knowing that all Jedi-Cons were behind him.

Could such a uniting of both sides of the Force save the President? Don’t ask me. It’s only a story…

Osama Is Losing

2006-03-23T09:46:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 21, 2004

Well, give Beardy credit where credit’s due, he’s remarkably eloquent for a corpse. His taped message of April 15 may mean that history might record that the greatest achievement of Osama bin Laden was issuing a press release by séance.

Although the babblings have been declared to be ‘probably’ his voice, in this context the word ‘probably’ has the same meaning as it would in the phrase, ‘the sky is probably pink’. Or, ‘George W. Bush is probably a conservative’.

No, Osama wafted off into the everafter some time near the end of 2001, underneath 6,000lbs of explosive. His demented heirs and lunatic successors have stretched themselves to the limits of their capabilities, in spite of the barriers to fighting them that we place in our own paths.

This tape shows they are losing. It shows we have them on the hoof. It shows they are nearly spent.

Osama didn’t deal. He was not just an all or nothing guy himself, he inculcated that spirit of all or nothing-ness in his followers. In order to tell other people to hijack planes and kill themselves to achieve your goal, you have to be a pretty ruthless fanatic. Treaties and truces are appurtenances of a culture that, although committed, is not fanatical. It recognises that there are objective limits to its goals, and is prepared to acknowledge these in legal form.

Osama knew no limits to his goals other than total war and total victory. He would have made a good neo-conservative.

Why are they even prepared to acknowledge that their ambitions may have limits? Because we have been so successful at arresting and killing his followers.

Since 9/11, no terrorist attacks in the USA. In Europe, one, Spain. Arrests are being made continuously and the leader of the plot blew himself up rather than be arrested, decapitating the cell. There have been arrests in England, Italy, Belgium and Germany. Although the culture of Muslim nations means that the Al Qa’edists are better able to mount terrorist attacks against foreigners in Islamic nations like Saudi Arabia or Indonesia, they have very little capability to do it either in Europe or the USA. The simplest form of security advice that there seems to be is - don’t work in or travel to Islamic countries. Earn and spend your dollars at home instead, while we still do things like jobs.

In terms of securing ourselves, we might just have won.

Another reason it just doesn’t sound like Osama is that it displays innate ignorance of European culture. For all his faults, Osama had been around the block before he took to the caves, and was a well-educated, able and quite sophisticated man. This doesn’t of course excuse his megalomania and viciousness, but the real Osama would have known better than to refer to that non-existent demographic, the ‘Europeans’. Previously, he had specifically threatened the UK, Italy, Spain and Poland. A thug-gangster-crazy like Osama, as mean as hell and violent with it, wouldn’t ever back down from a threat like that. Whoever wrote and recorded that message didn’t have a clue about the sensibilities of the target audience, particularly after Fabrizio Quattrocchi’s injunction to his killers that he would show them how an Italian dies. Nothing will stiffen the Italian people, not as Europeans but as Italians, than seeing one of their own being butchered by barbarians. Although the far-right is an unwelcome reality in too many European nations, they have never won conclusive power in any European election since 1945. Western Europeans tend to be slightly more patriotic and less nationalistic than many Americans might imagine.

So, the loonies of Al Qa’eda have set new battle lines, kill the Jew and the Yankee, give the ‘European’ an out. For as long as one of them is at large, for as long as their gospel can be preached without fear in the mosques and their materials distributed, they will remain as dangerous individually as they were on September 11th 2001. However, as a group they are weak, and they know it. We should know it too. Down with Osama and all his kind.

The Downwardly Mobile Conservative

2006-03-23T09:45:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 14, 2004

Who pays the president? The taxpayer, of course. The President of the United States is handsomely rewarded to protect the taxpayers’ interests, and right now, he’s failing. As well as failing to fulfil his primary obligation of securing the borders against illegal immigration, he is failing to ensure that the American taxpayer has the secure environment necessary in order for them to continue to pay tax, fostering instead an atmosphere that cherishes profit before opportunity, as opposed to the conservative ideal of viewing them as equals. In so doing, he is creating a demographic that has the capacity to turn round and bite him on the backside come November.

Yuppies? Forget them, their Thatcher’s Children. Dinkies (Double Income, No Kids)? Self-obsessed liberals. Nimbies (Not in my back Yard)? Yuppies who stayed rich long enough to buy a big house. Welcome to the era of the DMC – the Downwardly Mobile Conservative.

The free marketeers had a few sweaty weeks recently, after the publication of the February job creation figures. They have been crowing in self-validation after March, thinking they’ve scored a home run against the forces of reaction and protectionism. They would be mightily wrong.

On Sunday April 4, Roger Bootle, Economics Correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph gazed at the guts of American employment statistics, and didn’t like what he saw. Bootle went back more than a few months, charting the levels of job creation in every recovery since 1945. The average level of new job creation in every recovery between 1945 and 1982 was 6.3%. The average level in 1991 was 2%. However, the level of new job creation since the 2001 recovery has been minus 0.2%. As Bootle puts it, over the course this has not been a jobless recovery. It has been a job loss recovery.

The principal explanation that Bootle provides for this situation is that the productivity of the American workforce has increased massively over the same period, he says because of the investment made in IT in the 1990’s. Outsourcing plays a part –also, interest rates will probably need to rise. However, the one thing that he does not factor into his view on productivity is that people are now working harder, for longer, for lower real rates of pay than at any time in history. You can invest as much in IT as you like. However, software doesn’t vote.

The nuclear option of all discourse on conservative economics is, ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. Neither, on the other hand, is there free taxes. These must be earned in the form of wages and then levied at rates deemed necessary by the peoples’ representatives. But, just as the liberals view ‘The State’ as being the perfect expression of civil authority, so too do the free-marketeers view ‘the market’ as being the sole determinant of all that is best for government. They are as rigidly ideological as Stalinists. As Pat Buchanan said recently in an article called Suicide by Free Trade, the market is their god, and he’s right.

But the people caught in the middle of this cosmic struggle are the DMC’s. Conservatism is the property of all, not the simple possession of whoever sits in the Oval Office. Such is the detachment of the free market establishment from the working man and woman, and so ideological are they, that they forget that the working class are some of the most socially conservative people you will find. If you want an advocate for the wearing of school uniform and corporal punishment, you’ll find them working on a production line. Ditto for immigration control, restriction of abortion rights, support for the death penalty, whatever. Archie Bunker and his English father Alf Garnett were crude liberal caricatures of the backbone of productive society. However, the free marketeers do not see these people as fellow citizens whose contribution to economic activity is as vital as their own. Instead, they are viewed merely as ‘labour costs’, untermensch almost, to be expunged from the balance sheet in favour of the option that brings the highest return at the earliest opportunity.

While the going was good in the ‘80’s many in the middle classes would not have worried so much about the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas. These would have been unpleasant things that happened to other people somewhere. However, the advent of outsourcing now means that everyone is subject to the same lack of security. Lack of security means that people can’t plan conservatively – the disparity between prices and wages is so high in the UK that the only way in which people are entitled to enjoy the fruit of their labour is through consumer credit. It’s easy for free market economics professors to proclaim the virtue of delayed gratification, however the people they’re proclaiming to delayed their gratification while they were at college, they delayed while they were establishing families and careers and in their 30’s if they find that they’re working 80 hours a week, 40 of which are for The Man, nobody should be criticised for putting a plasma TV on their MasterCard. In an economy that needs consumption for its very survival, conservatives shouldn’t grudge other conservatives some of the limited independence that consumer credit can bring.

Social mobility is the key to a healthy economy, as it’s the proof of a balance between businesses operating at a healthy level of profit and the existence of opportunity for new business and job creation, with all the positive benefits they bring. As people move up, others take their place, continuing the cycle. But if housing is so expensive that people who work hard through their own efforts can’t get on the ladder, or you study for years and find that your expectations are crushed at the end of it, that balance is lost, and the people who would otherwise be able to make or take opportunity get frozen out. Static wages, rising prices and loss of security – these are the classic signposts on the road of Downward Mobility. Been to college? Go to hell. The DMC’s are a large and growing group for whom there is now less opportunity than at any time in American history, if Roger Bootle is correct. In November, unless some steps are taken very soon to address their concerns, they may just decide not to support their natural base, the Republicans. On April 2, Bruce Bartlett commented on Townhall that, according to a firm called Global Insight the economy has lost ‘only 104,000 jobs’ due to IT outsourcing last year. As a committed free-marketeer Mr. Bartlett might find that, come November, the figure might just be ‘only’ 104,000 and one.

I’ve never been to New York City, but I can quote Emma Lazarus. Somehow, I don’t think outsourcing was what she had in mind.

Cause for Cautious Optimism in the War on Terror

2006-03-23T09:43:00.001Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 6, 2004

In an endeavour like the one in which our countries are now engaged, the greatest enemies can sometimes be introspection and self-criticism. As we suffer hideous losses like those poor Yankee souls in Fallujah, burned in their car and then despoiled, we can forget just how much our efforts are hurting our enemy. We forget that democracy is just as much a habit as a heritage for us, and that the rights that we enjoy, the right to question and dissent, sometimes cloud our view of how we are really performing. Because our men and women under arms, from all countries that have bothered to engage themselves in this struggle, are performing.

We can be so wrapped up in 24-hour news analysis by cod historians and New York Times columnists that we lose perspective. Sometimes, a real historian needs to step into the breach, to provide the proper perspective on events that shows that this battle is maybe, just maybe, being won by the forces of light, truth, peace and brotherhood, regardless of how jaded the motives of the politicians who sent them, the venal nature of the corporate interests behind them or the insanity of their opponents.

Such an historian is Victor Davis Hanson of National Review Online. On March 26, his usual Friday column was entitled ‘We Are Finishing the War’, and postulated the position that the losses we are suffering at the moment are analogous to the most bitter fighting of post D-Day Europe, effectively the Bastogne of the War on Terrorists. His view is that Al Qa’eda and its fellow travellers the Al Qa’edists have been so scattered by coalition efforts against them that their capability to mount big scores against the infidel has been radically compromised. An accomplished classicist, he likens Osama’s Old Peculiars to the Hydra or the Gorgon – ‘What we have been seeing lately is (Al Qa’eda’s) tentacles flapping about in search of prey, after the head has been smashed - still for a time lethal, but without lasting strength’.

One could easily dismiss this as neo-con drivel, but for the arrests that took place in London on March 30. If anything, these arrests dramatically underscore Hanson’s point, as well as giving us pause for the long-term future.

That morning, eight British Muslims of Pakistani extraction were arrested at addresses in London, Berkshire, Bedfordshire and Sussex. Later on in the day, half a ton of ammonium nitrate, the DIY Semtex, was recovered at a lock-up garage in west London, near Heathrow.

The men are aged between 17 and 32. If he is aged 17 in 2004, he must have been at most 15 on September 11, 2001. Accordingly, it would have been extremely unlikely that this particular Holy Warrior would ever have attended a camp in Afghanistan. Any training he had had would have been at best second hand. Also, none of the arrested men were of Osama’s preferred officer corps, Arabs or North Africans. These guys may not be top-grade jihad material.

This might be reading too much into the event, but one would have thought that if a psycho headbanger like a jihadist was wanting to mount a spectacular in London of all places, you would want some of your best guys on the job. Guys who get caught with half a ton of explosive fertiliser aren’t your best guys.

Indeed, we forget that, in its own way, Madrid was a disaster for the jihadists. Their cells are being rounded up continuously, and any effective Moroccan terror network in Spain must, by now, have been utterly smashed. When documents like the Zarqawi letter appear in such a firmly positioned site as NRO, one’s natural inclination is to be suspicious. However, assuming for a moment that it is genuine, it must be desperate to feel that you cannot operate properly even in a country so disorganised as Iraq, so effective has the coalition been at stamping out your efforts.

However, the real battle will not start until the campaign in the field is over. Just as Nazism did not die in the field, but lives on, revived after a couple of generations by the racist far-right, who casually raise their arms in the ‘Sieg Heil!’ without the slightest conception of what the gesture really means, then so too will Islamism revive after a generation. The electoral success of both the left and the far right in the recent French municipal election shows that for some cultures, extremism is never far away. It is a cancer that has never been fully removed from this continent, maybe providing an object lesson in how to reform the Islamic world. It is a strange quirk of culture that the most avid consumers of the products of Western culture are those whose culture is completely incapable of producing these things themselves – thus, the Middle East, where the grand total of 500 books a year are translated into Arabic, is awash with cell-phones, satellite dishes and Internet cafes. Maybe it’s time to start blocking the signal of Al-Jazeera Television, with its unceasing diet of Islamism and anti-Westernism. Maybe it’s time to start teaching civics properly, so that the European Muslim learns that his primary obligation as a citizen is to the state that permits him freedom of religion, as opposed to the religious precedence of the umma. For as much as Professor Hanson can draw parallels between the events of 1944 and 1945 with the events of 2003 and 2004, he could forget that that Second World War, whose cause was European extremism, is still not over to this day, in some form or another. Woe betide the Middle East if Islamist extremism, once defeated in the field, ever returns unless, like the Hydra, all its heads are severed and burned.

America's Northern Ireland Revisited

2006-03-23T09:43:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 12, 2004

In 1969, the British army rolled into Belfast to a warm greeting from Ulster’s Catholics. They were initially viewed as protectors, but within the year, due to a series of policy errors, Catholic nationalists driven by the hidden agenda of the Communists were joining the Provisional IRA in their droves.

There have been signs of rumblings in the neo-con camp recently – Jed Babbin criticising the Coalition and William F. Buckley, Jr. calling for more leadership from the President. If these rumblings continue, the President will have to face the fact that his actions may have caused a Northern Ireland to come about.

In November last year, I wrote an article for The Washington Dispatch called ‘America’s Northern Ireland’, likening Iraq to the UK’s 30-year deployment in its most troubled province. The recent Shi’a uprising is further proof that Iraq is not a Vietnam, but another bloody struggle like the one we brought upon ourselves in that beautiful wee corner of Ireland.

Was military intervention in Northern Ireland necessary in 1969? Yes. The Catholic people were suffering institutional harassment. The greatest British politician since the Second World War, John Hume, a real man of peace, was trying to lead a civil rights movement to ensure that Catholics did not have to suffer that discrimination. The reaction of the Unionist majority was typically aggressive, becoming more so, and the British army had to be sent there to protect Brits from other Brits.

Was military intervention necessary in Iraq in 2003? Of course, that depends on your perspective. America’s interest in that region is based firstly on the issue of the supply of oil and thereafter on containing the terrorism that oil sales help fund. The issue of terrorism, specifically terrorism driven by the adoption of Islam as a political philosophy bent on nothing less than world domination, was a live issue both then and now. However, this is where the spin breaks down.

It is incredibly hard for a government to fight an ideology. During WWII, it was much easier to fight the Germans and the Japanese than abstracts like ‘Nazism’ or ‘the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’. The conduct of foreign and security affairs was still predicated in 2003 by the presumption that all enemies have the characters of states. When you’re in the business of ending terrorism, states have competitive advantages over non-state ideologies – they have ambassadors, economies, a desire to remain in power and so on. However, the real enemy in 2003 was, and remains, a non-state ideology. Fixating upon the appurtenances of a state, such as WMD, gives you a political focus for your goal that your real enemy might not be able to achieve.

The whole business has shown how incredibly difficult it is to build a weapon of mass destruction. In the 1940’s, the Manhattan Project required the full backing of the Federal Government in time of war in order to build an atomic bomb. So closely guarded were its secrets that it took the Russians espionage and another six years to build theirs, the Chinese another sixteen years after that. It took until the 1990’s for India and Pakistan to develop theirs properly. In 2003, Libya was still not that far down the road.

However, the neo-conservatives won the day over Iraq, and the country was invaded. A year ago, the Iraqis cheered as the statues of Saddam were torn down. The war was won, and the battle to win the peace begun. Now, forces have been under attack all over Iraq.

This has happened because the Bush White House lost its nerve. When you undertake a responsibility as awesome as attacking a country, you must have a proper plan to see it through before you begin.

These are some questions the White House must answer. Were they aware of the apparent political importance of Ayatollah al-Sistani before they started the war? One would think not. For many people who seem to inform White House policy, such as the American Enterprise Institute, the word ‘Ayatollah’ is just a wee bit too Iranian for comfort. For them, there are no good Ayatollahs, forgetting that like ‘priest’ or ‘sheikh’ the word implies nothing more than a particular level of religious learning and expertise. He does not seem to have been canvassed as an ally before the commencement of the invasion.

Did they factor in that the war would attract the Islamist terrorist element, so that two battles could be fought at once? One would think yes. If one of the secondary motives of the campaign was to draw in anyone spoiling for a fight with the Great Satan, then it would seem to have succeeded. One can never be sure of documents like the Zarqawi letter are genuine. However, if it is, then that part of the policy has worked. However, it has not been followed through to ensure that there are enough personnel in Iraq firstly to provide proper force protection and secondly to carry out the necessary process of counter-insurgency.

Why was there such a hideous and universal failure of intelligence? The USA spends more than many other nations combined on intelligence gathering. My telephone calls in Scotland can be monitored from Maryland. What happened here? One does not expect any clear, fruitful answers in the immediate future, and the open enemies of America, including China, will only be emboldened by this fiasco.

After their initial warm welcome from old ladies handing them cups of tea, the British Army in Northern Ireland very quickly became perceived as ‘occupiers’. Not fellow Brits, fellow Catholics, or in many cases cousins and friends but ‘occupiers’. The Communist hierarchy at the top of the IRA, as pernicious as the top of the Islamist /Ba’athist axis, actively encouraged this view, which persists in many cases to this day. In order to quell the violence against Americans, the President must be more positive not just about why the Coalition is there but what they are doing for its future. It is a good and wholesome thing that electricity supply is now at a higher level than in Saddam’s time. Let’s hear them say it, not just to the West but also to the Iraqis. We should have Scott McClellan and the other White House spokespeople being more strident about whatever successes are being achieved. I, personally, do not believe that all the works of George W. Bush are automatically wrong because he is George W. Bush. I don’t accept diatribes like those of the historian Sir Max Hastings in the Daily Mail of April 7 called ‘Why I Hate George Bush’, 1200 words of venom paid at the rate of £1 per word. It is perfectly legitimate for the administration to proclaim its successes; we just never hear them do so.

The final lesson to be drawn from Northern Ireland is the starkest of all - avoid a Bloody Sunday. This is something that the controversialist John Derbyshire touched upon in a nasty wee article called The Londonderry Gambit for NRO about a year ago, but he does have something of a point. Nothing alienates people who consider themselves under occupation more than a massacre. The real alienation of the Catholic community came of Northern Ireland came after the events of Sunday, January 30th 1972. That day, a civil rights march in Derry was fired on by the Parachute Regiment, for whatever reason, resulting in 13 Catholic/Nationalist fatalities. Ivan Cooper, the pro-civil rights Social Democratic and Labour Party MP for Derry, described it almost immediately as ‘our Amritsar, our Sharpeville’. Mr. Cooper retired from active politics very soon afterwards, but his words were as true now as they were 32 years ago. Nothing drove the disaffected young men of Derry into the arms of the IRA faster than the sight of their friends lying dead in the street. Even in such heated times as these, and as difficult as it must be after the Fallujah atrocity, the Coalition must avoid a situation where they give the Islamists a cause for the disaffected to run to. If that happens, then they really will have a Vietnam on their hands.

At times, one wonders if the Coalition wishes this endeavour to succeed, so determined are they not to praise it. The White House seems to be opposed to any attempt to promote its own works. They started it - do they have the guts to finish it? If you want to see what happens when a government doesn’t have the guts to deal with its enemies, look to Northern Ireland. The hateful monsters Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness will one day return to the government that their bad faith helped dissolve. Is that the fate that the Bush White House wants for Iraq?

The Economy is DOA

2006-03-23T09:42:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 5, 2004

At the moment, the economies of the UK and USA are both running on empty, spending far more than they earn. They need massive annual infusions of capital to ensure they are able to meet all their spending commitments, which in the USA means anything from the West Virginia roads budget to a replica rainforest in Iowa. This annual infusion attracts interest, which can only be serviced through issuing bonds, on which Uncle Sam must pay interest, or else through taxation.

The book 'Reagan, in his own hand', should be read by every conservative, if only for Dutch’s simple injunction on the raising and spending of tax – it’s people who pay taxes. A corporation tax is paid by the consumers in the form of higher prices. All taxation is paid on this basis, meaning that in order for taxpayers to be able to pay taxes they must have incomes.

At the same time as this ballooning public expenditure, corporations, which are motivated not by national economic interest but by the pursuit of lowest cost and highest profit are shipping high value, transferable jobs overseas. This enables the corporation to lower its short-term costs to the maximum degree. However, outsourcing will bankrupt more corporations than it will ever save.

Outsourcing has the effect of removing high tax jobs from the economy at a time when high tax rates will shortly be needed to prevent the Federal government going bust. It nearly happened a month after Dutch took office in 1981, and it will happen again. As these high tax jobs are gone from the economy, the level of secondary tax, like corporation tax, will need to rise, causing price hikes which will drive consumers away from outsourced goods and services. A classic false economy.

Some commentators, like Larry Kudlow, have remarked on how the recent spurt of economic growth did not produce the usual period of inflation that accompanies such a recovery. It seems miraculous, until you read the Economics Editor of the Daily Telegraph, George Trefgarne. Trefgarne reported that inflation was happening in a part of the American economy – it just wasn’t happening in America, but in the coastal zone of China, the Red Dragon’s industrial hub. So high a proportion of the goods and services being consumed in the US are manufactured there that it can now almost be seen as a US economic zone, upon which the US is far too dependent for production of its goods, given that country’s sinister history and even more sinister ambitions. Its partnership with the EU in the Galileo space program, using frequencies very close to those of NIA spy satellites, is one to watch for the future.

However, in the UK we’re not immune to the same phenomenon. Trefgarne’s answer to the question ‘What is the safest investment vehicle to ride out these times?’ was a perfect one for the target market of his newspaper – buy your own ship.

However, much as the inflation has been exported, the same is true for all aspects of the recovery. There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth that the internal job creation figures are so poor. One can only suggest that the people who are concerned should take a look at Shanghai. So dependent are we all on the use of cheap Asian labour to give us socks at fifty cents a pair that one could bet the farm that right now, the post-recession employment market in Shanghai is booming.

This will all come to a bitter end. A very close friend of mine who works in a call centre is petrified of the arrival of what he calls ‘The Doomsday Adviser’. The Doomsday Adviser is a piece of voice recognition software that can be programmed in any language, that can perform any sales or customer service function, that can run 24 hours a day, doesn’t need to rest, eat, sleep or see a shop steward and will make every call centre worker in the world redundant. It will be bye, bye New Delhi and the combos and outsourcers will have achieved the Thatcher/Bush ideal of having corporations with only shareholders and customers but no staff. One has to wonder…

Add to this mix the need for the marketplace to renew itself with new skills. For 31 years in the US and 37 in the UK, abortion has been legal. A very sad little statistic reported in the Telegraph of March 31 is that apparently one in five of all UK pregnancies end in abortion. According to the report by Sarah Womack, this is a total of 600 a day, to be set against the total of 300 adoptions that take place every year because of the insane regime of political correctness that applies if a couple wish to adopt a child. The eternal ‘spokesman’ for the FPA (Family Planning Association) produced the quote that says it all – ‘Abortion is an essential part of fertility control’.

Fertility? Control? Right now, both our countries could do with some wildly abundant fertility. Bring forth the fertility! As our judges and liberals have sowed, so do we all reap. 600 a day. Herod would have been proud of us.

It would, however, be an interesting actuarial study to assess if each of these infants had been permitted to come to life, just how much of a contribution they would have made. Some would have suffered the inevitable vicissitude of infant mortality – some would have been killed in accidents – most would have gone on to become working members of society. If the actual dollars and cents costs of raising these kids were weighed against the amount spent on welfare and support for immigrants able to arrive and work immediately, what would the answer be? I would be prepared to bet that these two sums would not be so far apart that the continuation of the practice of abortion could be justified.

What a pair of economies. Our leaders bloat them without thought of how they are to be paid for. Our corporations remove the only method of paying for them, tax-paying jobs, in actions that show naked greed and a hopeless lack of foresight. And all the while the taxpayers of the future are flushed down the stainless steel bowl. With economics like these, we can safely say that deficits, outsourcing and abortion will have one effect – our economies will become DOA.

Nice knowing you.

Why the Left Hates Condi Rice

2006-03-23T09:41:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 2, 2004

If Condi Rice were a Democrat, she’d be running for President. Because she’s part of a Republican administration, all of the professional and personal accomplishments of her life count for nothing in the desire of the left to destroy her. They do not hate her because she is black. They hate her because she denies her victimhood.

It has been one of the Bush White House’s most critical, stupid mistakes of PR in a Presidency littered with them to let Ms. Rice testify before the 9/11 Commission. What does she have to say to this body? Her tenure had lasted only eight months before that day. She could hardly have been expected to be able to correct the mistakes of the previous eight years simply by waving a magic wand, to absolve Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger and the Big Squash himself of all their liability. Surely she is entitled to the same loyalty from her civil servants as that which Richard Clarke gave to Bill Clinton. She is an adviser. Unless my dictionary has been mysteriously altered in the night, then that means she ‘advises’. Although she may be consulted on policy, her function is most certainly not to make policy.

Instead, Ms. Rice will possibly be thrown to the wolves because of the allegations of the classic disgruntled former employee. Richard Clarke’s brazen mea culpa before the Commission does not do anything to solve the problem of how this happened. In the UK, we call guys like the Commissioners, ‘The Great and the Good’. Invariably, they are retired politicians or former political associates of office-holders. Such is the politicisation of the whole security process that the Democrats on the commission will use it as an opportunity to attack Bush. He is so scared of daring to refuse, to stand up for his own guys, that Rice will appear, possibly in violation of the US Constitution, a document which, last time I looked, he had sworn an oath to uphold.

Now that Clarke’s self-justification is complete, the till-bells will be chiming, because that is Clarke’s sole interest. The information society now means that history is made on the hoof, with videotapes now having the same status as the Dead Sea Scrolls. 24-hour news media means that there is a cottage industry of journalists or others with exceptionally good media contacts willing to offer analysis and opinion of the sketchiest information. Everyone’s a military historian. Everyone’s an expert on the Middle East. Everyone knows that somebody, somewhere, dropped the ball on 9/11.

The Alpha and Omega on the story of 9/11 is that the blame lies squarely at the door of William Jefferson Clinton. The most widely publicised work of historical scholarship in the few years prior to Clinton’s election was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. Fukuyama was wrong, a very hard thing for any academic to admit, but 9/11 proves it. Clinton came to office with the End of History mindset. A frivolous man, he surrounded himself with some deeply frivolous people for whom the security of the borders was not the most important function of their office, but one of a series of ‘issues’, like pre-school class sizes or the economy, stupid. As a result, his failure to take decisive action against Osama bin Laden when the Sudanese offered him to the US on a plate in 1996 is one of the most egregious examples of executive negligence in the history of the United States. His failure to go on the publicity offensive, to put pressure on Arab states to be more co-operative in fighting Islamist ideology, in ensuring that money and men were not making their way to Afghanistan, is a catalogue of almost deliberate omission, for which one day the sober historians of the future will thrash him. If we get through all this in one piece.

Into this mess, to clear it up, steps a black woman, the epitome of victimhood who would dare any around her to label her a victim. Champion ice-skater, classical pianist, linguist, historian, Bush I White House aide and Provost of Stanford, she is everything that the left believes she should not be, and as a result they will try to destroy her. George W. Bush’s lack of care for one of his most senior aides goes beyond negligence. His actions are almost unconstitutional. If Rice is subjected to barracking by this Commission, whose proceedings are becoming increasingly partisan, then I hope that George W. Bush will be able to sleep at night, because Dick Clarke’s publishers certainly will.

England's Immigration Fraud

2006-03-23T09:40:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 1, 2004

For the past three weeks, the Brit papers have been filled with the doings of one Beverley Hughes. Ms. Hughes, our Minister for Immigration, has been at the eye of a storm concerning her ‘light touch’ regulation of the visa laws. Her touch was so light, our borders might as well be protected with swan feathers.

Immigration is as much a hot political issue in the UK as abortion in the States. The reason for this is what could only be described as an explosion in the number of asylum seekers in the UK since New Labour came to power in 1997. Such is the unwieldiness of the bureaucracy that governs who comes to our shores that nobody has the slightest idea how many people come here every year, in pursuit of freedom, opportunity or a fortnightly cheque from the Department of Social Security.

Asylum-seeking should have quite a clear meaning. If you’re a doctor in Somalia who has fulfilled his medical oath by treating the son of a warlord, if a rival warlord threatens to kill you and all your family, you’re an asylum seeker. However, as in one notorious case, if you’re a Taliban who claims his life is in danger from the Northern Alliance, you’re not an asylum seeker – you’re an enemy of the state. Such a clear distinction between who can be admitted and who should be is now completely missing from our policy.

Three weeks ago Steve Moxon, a low-grade bureaucrat from Yorkshire, blew the whistle to the Sunday Times that certain applications were being fast-tracked without proper scrutiny. He turned up for work the following day, surrounded by a posse of cameras, to find that his swipe card had been cancelled. The case was thereafter taken up by David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary. Beverley Hughes tried to throw the blame around, by insisting it was the responsibility of civil servants on slightly higher pay grades than Moxon acting on their own authority.

However, on March 29th, it all went to pieces. James Cameron, a diplomat in Bucharest, revealed that he was under orders to process applications from Romanians who might not be able to prove that they satisfied the criteria for admission, in an e-mail to Davis. He was suspended immediately.

It is a matter of great regret that, should The Washington Dispatch ever hold an editorial meeting, I won’t be able to attend (assuming, of course, that I’d be invited). I dearly hope to visit the USA again, but, at this point in time, I don’t feel inclined to pay $100 for a visa application that enables someone to try to profile me as a terrorist. The President and the Congress must make such laws to protect the security of the American people as they see fit. However, my own government does not seem to have the slightest interest in protecting me from the blandishments of those outside the borders who want inside in order to do me harm.

For weeks and weeks, Sir John Stevens, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has been saying that an attack will happen in the UK. The deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph Sarah Sands described Stevens last week as a ‘Cassandra’, forgetting that Cassandra’s warnings were the ones that should have been taken seriously. Such is the stupidity of the professional politician’s mindset that they cannot, in fact wilfully will not, look at the issues of terrorism and immigration holistically. Their commitments are not to ‘security’ but to ‘safety’. They cut military spending while insisting on the proper maintenance of playground equipment. They forget that not being born a British citizen is not a form of ‘social exclusion’ to be eliminated with access and grants. If Beverley Hughes was aware of the system that operated in Romania, she should resign. If she permitted such a system to come into being through failing to ensure proper oversight of civil servants, she should resign. If the department she headed was structurally incapable of providing such oversight, she should resign. If she has deliberately politicised access to the UK to fulfil the false promises of political correctness and multiculturalism, she should resign forthwith.

However, Ms. Hughes is riding out the storm. We are the only country in the EU that has not imposed some form of immigration control on the citizens of the new member states that join on May 1st. We will shortly face another tidal wave of people, whose entry has been spun as ‘bringing vital skills’. The fact that the Labour government has continued the policy of widening access to college, causing drops in graduate employment and earnings, means one can only wonder what vital skills the newcomers will have that cannot be found working in a bookstore somewhere. However, we forget that our government is now carried on mostly not in London, but in Brussels. As a net financial contributor to the EU, we occasionally need to be reminded of our obligations. Someday, they will make us all good Europeans. But not yet.

One Less Terrorist

2006-03-23T09:39:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 25, 2004

As John Donne said, each man’s death diminishes me. In the case of Ahmed Yassin, we can safely make an exception.

Israel’s assassination of the Hamas leader is an example of how this war on terrorists should be fought. As Hamas is prepared to give no quarter to the Jew in its lust to drive him from the Holy Land, so too is Israel prepared to take the fight to terrorists, regardless of how tightly they wrap themselves in the folds of the Koran. Ahmed Yassin was a committed international criminal, in Conan Doyle’s words a Napoleon of crime, who, after years of sending wee boys and lassies to blow themselves up in the pursuit of his bigoted jihad, has received his just desserts, on the receiving end of a missile.

The majority of Hamas’s assaults on the Israeli body politic have taken place on the public transport network, specifically targeted at commuters. Less than two weeks after Spanish commuters were massacred by Islamist terrorists, so deep is some Europeans’ hatred of Israel that they cannot rouse themselves to consider whether or not this attack was morally justified, reverting to their lockstep condemnation of Israel, Sharon, Likud and all their works. Javier Solano, the EU’s foreign policy chief, has condemned it outright, and has been echoed like a parakeet by Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, who’s described it as unlawful. I’m quite sure Ahmed Yassin huddled over his well-thumbed copies of Justinian, Grotius, the Declaration of Independence and the UN Charter in order to seek legal justification for sending 18 year olds to commit suicide attacks.

Spiritual atrophy causing moral gangrene, the twin diseases of European social democracy, are clearly visible here. They offer nothing but harsh words of condemnation when Hamas kills working mothers, but have no clue, indeed no desire, to confront the problem in their own midst. They ignore the views of their own people, causing the people to turn against them into the waiting tentacles of the racist far right, who offer the easy bromides of telling people what they want to hear, and all the while the incidence of anti-Semitic attacks in Paris and Berlin keep going up and up.

No such torpor from Ari Sharon. The least one can say about him and the Likud Party is that they have disinfected themselves from any trace of political correctness. One can safely say that no alleged fundraiser for Islamic Jihad would gain tenure at an Israeli university, like Sami al-Arian did in Florida. Sharon possesses none of the ambivalence that enabled Mullah Omar to go free on the first night of Enduring Freedom. According to an article called ‘A King’s Ransom’ in the November 2001 New Yorker, that night a Predator spyplane picked up a convoy which intelligence had reasonable cause to believe included the Taliban leader’s vehicle. Seymour Hersh reported that Tommy Franks declined to fire on the basis of legal advice from his JAG, resulting in Donald Rumsfeld kicking a glass door in frustration. However, the policy of contradictions that has infested Bush White House policy towards Israel has been brought out of the cupboard again.

On the first night of the Iraqi War, the US launched a targeted strike against Saddam. At that stage, no Iraqi had fired a shot in anger against US forces. The launching of that missile was a deliberate attempt to kill Saddam, to cut off the snake’s head. The US has repeatedly condemned Israel for using the same tactic against Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Although Scott McClellan has not specifically condemned the attack, one would have thought that a wartime President would be publicly supportive of an embattled leader fighting the same war on a different front. Israel is both the Leningrad and Stalingrad of the war on terrorists, a maelstrom where battle and war can strike at any moment. The President must, of course, pay due heed to the concerns of America’s other allies. With gas at $33 a barrel, it seems even neo-conservatism has its limits.

There will be no reprisals, in the sense of direct attacks to revenge Yassin, although they will say they are. Hamas are not people who deal in the lex talionis, only striking when they have been struck. This is one blow in a war that will not be over until the other hate-masters of Hamas, like its sinister public voice Abdel Azizal-Rantissi, a paediatrician who called on Iraqi civilians to prepare suicide belts in order to kill Americans in the run up to Iraqi Freedom, are crushed. Hamas would have been prepared for an eventuality like this long ago. Ahmed Yassin, quadriplegic or not, was the leader of a sectarian terrorist mob willing to subvert the young to continue a war he took up the moment he joined the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood produced Sayyid Qutb, the ideologue of all radical Islam, hanged in 1966 for plotting against Nasser. Its other radical son is Ayman al-Zawahiri, the son and grandson of professors at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, apparently the greatest seat of learning in Islam. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, banned by Assad the Elder, spawned Omar Bakri Mohammed, the fat Islamist twister who receives $500 a week in benefits from the British state while preaching jihad and calling 9/11 ‘a towering day in history’. If the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t banned wherever it’s found, it should be.

Now that the deed is done, the Israelis will no doubt continue to look over their shoulder as anxiously as ever. But when they get on the bus, looking for the telltale signs of wires sticking out from under clothing, they at least know that their government is determined to fight their enemies. Likud aren’t interested in plea-bargains and subjecting the people responsible for suicide bombings to the benefit of the legal process – they want Hamas to suffer the same terror that they inflict on the innocent. The Israelis will hunt them down, dead or alive. George W. Bush proclaimed that intention after 9/11. The Marshal needs to keep the posse in the saddle, ‘coz the desperadoes are still out on the range.

Negative Reactions to Spanish Democracy

2006-03-23T09:38:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 19, 2004

Since Jose Maria Aznar lost the Spanish general election for the Popular Party by opening his mouth too soon, some conservatives have taken to labelling the Spanish people cowards and appeasers. Any conservative who does this has automatically forfeited the right to complain of unfair criticism of the American electoral process from Europe, as it displays something approaching contempt for the free expression of the free will of a free people.

The tipping point against Aznar was apparently his immediate rush to blame ETA. It would have suited Aznar’s political purposes for ETA to be responsible – they were the home-grown enemy; and culpability on their part would automatically have deflected wrong-headed criticism that Islamists attack Western societies because of the war in Iraq. They don’t, they attack them because they’re Western. The majority of the conservatives who accuse the Spaniards of cowardice and appeasement haven’t seemed to grasp either of these points themselves.

To deal with each of these accusations in turn,

Cowardice

“After terrorists slaughtered 200 people in Madrid, presumably in retaliation for Spain’s courageous stance against them, her feckless voters chose to reward the terrorists instead” - David Limbaugh, ‘Senator Kerry, Champion of the Appeasers’, Townhall.com, March 16.

At the end of the piece, Mr. Limbaugh described the actions of the Spanish electorate as ‘cowardly’.

“The Spanish on Sunday said they wanted more terrorism. They voted to reward it.”

“The Spanish electorate’s – why not say it? - cowardice and self-degradation multiply the terrorist dangers facing the world”. - Bill Murchison, ‘A Victory for Terror’, Townhall.com, dated March 16.

Appeasement

“Perhaps Sunday’s election, which removed the leadership that took Spain into the war against Islamist terrorism, means that after the home-grown terrors of the 20th Century, Spain, like much of the rest of Europe, wants peace at any price’. - A subtle example of the Chamberlain insult from George Will, ‘Political Dynamite’, Townhall.com, March 16.

“The reign in Spain died mainly on the train”.

“The Spanish electorate decided to defeat the government for seeming to bring Islamist terrorist slaughter to Spain. It is true that a large majority of Spaniards never supported their government’s decision to send troops to Iraq. Nonetheless, the day before the terrorist attack, every Spanish poll and political expert predicted a solid win for Aznar’s party.But after the attack, about three million Spanish voters changed their impending electoral decision. Thus, their vote was not out of anger at Aznar’s policy, but out of fear of the terrorists’ wrath.” - Tony Blankley, ‘The Spanish Disease’. Townhall.com, March 17

"Many Spaniards apparently switched their votes from the Popular Party, which garnered 38 per cent of the vote, to give the terrorists what they wanted”. - Debra Saunders, ‘Spanish voters say: Viva violence’, Townhall.com, dated March 16. Later in the piece, Ms. Saunders does make reference to the fact that ETA might have been a credible suspect for the bombings. However, she concludes her article thus:

“Basque separatists now must be looking at how al Qa’eda achieved victory through violence and must be wondering if they should be more ruthless too”.

After that outburst, Chuck Colson was really quite anaemic – “There is a white flag blowing in the breeze over the beautiful city of Madrid”, - ‘An Ill Wind from Spain’, Townhall.com, dated March 16.

All of the above writers have taken the view that a free people enjoying a free franchise have engaged in a mass hysteria of cowardice and appeasement. Such people would be likely to be the first to complain that the Europeans’ perceptions of Americans are filtered through the too narrow prisms of New York and Los Angeles. However, the reverse process is also true – some Americans’ perceptions of Europeans are filtered through the very narrow views of London, Paris and Berlin. London is no more representative of English life than Plymouth or Barnsley.

However, there is a dangerous intolerance at work here. If Messrs Limbaugh and Murchison wish a campaign on which to crusade, they might have campaigned against the adoption of Islamic law as a source for the new constitution of Iraq. That action means that Iraq will fail again, through no other reason than real moral cowardice on the part of the Coalition Provisional Authority, just as Afghanistan will fail again because of the adoption of the Sharia in that country’s new constitution. Neo-conservatism is surely about the propagation of liberal democratic values. If you go to the time and trouble of invading a country to allegedly disarm it and then to spread those values, it is a legal nonsense to say that its law will be derived from undemocratic and illiberal sources. As a result, it’s unlikely that Iraqis will be voting much after the first elections. Calling free voters ‘cowardly’ because of how they elect to use their vote is hardly democratic.

Similarly, if Messrs. Will, Blankley and Colson and Ms. Saunders wish to describe people as appeasers, they might consider this. For years, my country was subjected to a campaign of terrorism by Communists dressed as Irish nationalists, who abetted the deaths of over 3,000 people over 30 years. They operated death squads. They were appeased by the same man you all laud as a great hero, Tony Blair, whose government can no longer guarantee the safety of the people of Belfast. Much of the money they collected in order to promote their work came from the United States. What role did Americans play in supporting terror in my country? Campaign against them, if you will, but not against informed and mature voters.

For the Spanish peoples’ decision was informed. Aznar, on the verge of a historic third term for the Popular Party, tried to guarantee victory by immediately spinning the attack against ETA. This was spin, pure and simple. It was not a failure of intelligence, such as that which afflicted the CIA and MI6 prior to the Iraqi War. By claiming it was ETA, Aznar either lied or sought to maximise the political advantage for his party. What he did was the mirror-image of a Democrat or leftist using 9/11 for their advantage. If we believe in democracy at all, then we have to criticise Aznar. If the Iraqi coalition falls apart because of this election, blame Aznar. Ultimately, the cowards and appeasers of the Spanish electorate decide they didn’t like being treated as if they were dumb, and voted accordingly.

But what would I know? I’m just a European.

A Failed State Called Scotland

2006-03-23T09:37:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 18, 2004

Sunday March 14th can be recorded as the day on which the country of Scotland became a failed state. We are not subject, yet, to the Somali experience of 12 year old boys with RPG’s roaming the countryside in jeeps, however our failure, though more subtle and far less violent, is no less abject than that of any other hole on the map.

March 14th was the day on which it became public knowledge that Latin and Greek will no longer be taught in public school.

The study of the classics is essential to an understanding of the roots of Western culture and civilisation. Although the advantages of knowing your datives from your ablatives are not immediately apparent when you’re studying them, the fact that you are studying them exposes you to the influence of those responsible for producing many of the ideas that still shape our society. However, my alma mater the University of Strathclyde has decided to stop offering courses in teacher training for the classics when Scotland’s only teacher of teachers in the classics, Tony Williams, retires in the summer.

A society that does not enable its youth to know the truth of where they came from is one in deep trouble. It has lost touch with its true culture, to be replaced by an ersatz, manufactured culture that invariably plays to the worst aspects of the national character. This is particularly true in Scotland.

The same edition of the London Sunday Times that reported that monumentally significant snippet also reported on the outcry surrounding the publication of the most recent edition of the Lonely Planet travel guide. The author is reported to paint Scotland is less than glowing terms. He sticks the boot into our sectarianism, our drinking culture, our tendency to moan and our unfailing ability to inflict violence on others without provocation. It’s hard to see where the chap’s written a word of a lie.

Nearly every night, a drunk walking down our street singing a sectarian song breaks the still of our apartment, in a once-genteel neighbourhood. When Glasgow’s answer to the Montagues and the Capulets, Celtic and Rangers, play each other, it is safest to stay off the streets, and for me not to reveal my ethnicity in the presence of Rangers supporters. Like Mercutio, I say to them, ‘A Plague! A Plague on both your houses!’ The streets of Glasgow are filthy, covered in dog excrement and littered with the detritus of fast food. On Friday and Saturday nights, the city centre is infested by a species of urban poor for whom compassion is necessary, so unable are they to improve their lot for themselves by having been socialised. A kind word to a stranger is viewed as an insult, or worse, the worst offence you can commit against a Glaswegian – being ‘patronising’.

We were way on our way to failing before Virgil got chucked out of high school. We are a country that has been comprehensively failed by its political class, and this systematic failure is now being played out to its natural conclusion at the Fraser Enquiry.

This enquiry, being held by former Conservative Lord Advocate (Scottish Attorney-General) Lord Fraser, is into how the cost of the new Parliament building in Edinburgh has risen from £50 million to £430 million and counting. In the 1970’s when devolution was last a hot issue, a fully functioning parliament as built in the old Edinburgh Royal High School. However, for the Labour Party under Donald Dewar, the first First Minister, that building was synonymous with the 1970’s popularity of the Scottish National Party. Dewar’s solution to this was radical and innovative – build another Parliament.

He established an international competition so that Scotland would get the new Parliament it deserved. We sure did. We got Enric Miralles, who, it has been revealed at the enquiry, didn’t have current indemnity insurance when he took the job on.

There was also a wee problem- according to the evidence of civil servant Barbara Doig, Miralles’ design wasn’t the cheapest option – in fact, at costing it was the most expensive. However, this is where failed statism creeps in. It was the design that Dewar wanted.

Power, particularly power achieved after years of seeking for it, does strange things to men. It certainly affected Dewar, who committed the Scottish people to a building project in which the risk was entirely one-sided, which required constant design changes, the cost of which necessitated a committee of MSP’s being misled and a cover-up by the BBC! This is failed statism at its very worst. Ally to this madness that the stars of the first parliament were the abortionist David Steel and the Trotskyist Tommy Sheridan and the whole thing is a laughing stock.

Such is the quality of our leaders. In the sixty-six months it has been sitting, the Scottish Parliament is famous for two things – the building, and a policy of providing free personal care for the elderly, which is now reckoned to be too expensive to implement. In that time, there have been two changes of administration, occasioned by Dewar’s death and the resignation in disgrace of Henry McLeish. And all the while the people lose hope.

One would not expect politicians of vision from such a place. They deserve as many meaty vocatives as they get. However, when a nation is so down, so down that they stop teaching Latin, the language of culture, one need only echo the mournful words of Cicero, bitching out his teenagers:

O Tempora! O Mores!

Madrid and the Domestic Violence Analogy

2006-03-23T09:36:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 17, 2004

On March 12th, crowds of Spaniards gathered outside the headquarters of Jose Maria Aznar’s party to demonstrate their belief that Spain had brought the bombing atrocity on itself by supporting America in Iraq.

This is a belief that is directly analogous to a victim of spousal abuse saying to herself ‘I deserved it’. It is unhealthy and wrong in a battered woman, and unhealthy in a nation.

The Spanish Anti-War Left have shown the same soullessness as their comrades in the movement all across the world, and have been very quick to apportion blame to Aznar for his deployment of Spanish troops to the Middle East. However, that deployment is not the root cause of this bombing. For perhaps too long now, we have tended to fuse the war on Islamism into the war on weapons proliferation. These are different wars. The war on weapons proliferation is a proactive one, initiated by the Bush White House as a continuation of Clinton White House foreign policy. The war on Islamism, however, is a reactive one, begun three years after it should have, only after the New York and Washington atrocities. The war on weapons proliferation is a fight that nations can elect to stay out of, but the war on Islamism is everyone’s fight. The failure of the Anti-War Left to recognise this distinction is the root cause of their confusion.

This is a matter in which the mind of the conservative must be clear. The terror displayed in Madrid was identical to the violence exhibited on 9/11, long before the Iraqi war. The violence of the Islamists is not concerned with the doings of nations. They recognise no nation other than the Muslim ‘Umma’ so the fact that US service personnel would be entering Iraq to free Muslims from the oppression of a Muslim is for them an act of aggression against all Muslims, although the Ashura bombings in Karbala and Baghdad prove once again, if proof were necessary, that their love of the Umma is selective, sectarian and vicious. Saddam’s proliferation was rooted in his Ba’athism, a form of the pan-Arabist nationalism of Gamel Abdel Nasser, with a heavy dose of Stalinism thrown in. When he did invoke Islam, it was in the same context that Stalin invoked ‘Russian-ness’ after Hitler’s invasion of 1941, an expression of patriotism Uncle Joe had spent twenty years trying to wipe out. The fact that Saddam built the Mother Of All Battles Mosque and had the Koran written in his blood still did not prevent him from persecuting the Shi’a with almost Torquemaden zeal.

However, the Battered Spouse psychology on display from the Spanish Anti-War Left is truly disturbing. A battered woman can stay with her husband for many reasons- she might be petrified of having to become financially independent, she might still consider her husband a good father to her children or else, strangely, she might still love him, even although he was completely unworthy of it. But all of the battered women I ever advised all said that for as long as they were willing to put up with it, they considered the abuse they received to be their fault.

This nonsense is now on display in the aftermath of Madrid. It is not Spain’s fault that Islamist terrorists intent on destroying it decided to plant bombs on trains. It was the fault of the backwardness, ignorance and hatefulness of those responsible for doing it. The manoeuvring of the Anti-War Left to so quickly apportion blame onto the victims of terror means either they aspire to victimhood or else they have more sinister motives – the surrender and defeat of the West. Although they are products of Western values, many hate the West as only those indulged by it can. Accordingly, it’s no surprise that in parts of Europe, the Anti-War Left share platforms with Islamists. George Galloway MP has addressed the same public meetings as Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Hassan Al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Con Coughlin of the Sunday Telegraph captured this Battered Spouse psychosis perfectly, when he wrote on March 14th that

‘If the attacks turn out to be the work of Al Qa’eda, then Aznar’s government will be accused of provoking the Islamic fanatics by siding with the US and Britain in last year’s war in Iraq’.

On the same day, Galloway, writing in the Scottish Mail on Sunday, said “The Spanish state fully participated in the slaughter of Muslims in the wars since 9/11 and could hardly have complained if those motivated by those events had struck at the military or other assets of the ‘Spanish crusaders’”.

That’s as clear a statement of Battered Spouse Syndrome as I can recall reading.Fear of provoking an abusive partner is a terror that faces battered wives every second of their lives – the TV’s too loud: Why isn’t dinner ready? Did you buy beer?

Change the question, as Galloway does, to – Why did you Spaniards support America? Didn’t you know the Islamic fanatics would strike at your military or other assets? and you see the madness at work.

The great buzz phrase of feminism is ‘empowerment’. Empowerment is supposed to enable bruised women with shattered lives to overcome all their problems as if they can be waved away with a magic wand. Most divorcing women are only really interested in whether they’re going to lose their home, or whether the monster who’s made their life hell for years is ever going to find them and cause them or their kids harm. In the same way, Spain doesn’t need to be dragged down by a national out break of Battered Spouse Syndrome. Given the Islamist desire to reconquer Andalusia, it would have been inevitable that they would have at least tried to bloody the face of the infidels who humiliated them at Granada, over 500 years before. As abusers are backward looking and perversely sentimental, full of love when it suits them, so are Osama, his successors and his cohorts, who have nothing fresh and new to offer but instead can only trope grievances from half a millennium ago. Until the abusive partner that’s Islamism is defeated everywhere, be it on the field of battle or in the hearts and minds of Muslims, like battered wives we will forever be fearful of the next attack. Abusive partners are emotional terrorists. That much they share with the genuine article.

Destroying the Middle Class

2006-03-23T09:35:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 16, 2004

The BBC’s Newsnight magazine show has recently reported a disturbing crime trend in Iraq. A campaign of kidnapping and assassination is being waged against the Iraqi middle class.

Such a campaign displays a deep understanding of sociology on the part of the terrorists. Without a middle class, no society can function properly. However, the same thing is happening in a different way in the UK and USA. The elimination of an aspirational middle class is an unintended consequence of the Thatcherite effluvia that now passes for economic policy in both our countries. The Ba’athists destroy the middle class with guns and bombs to ensure that nothing good will come of the country. We do it with pink slips and P45’s, in order to enhance shareholder value.

It used to be good to aspire to bring yourself up from the bottom, but what the heck, if you’re going to get a cheque every week, what’s the point of going to school? If you apply to a college that applies an affirmative action entrance program, there’s not much point mugging up on your math. If you bite the bullet and keep going with college, what’s the point of becoming a doctor, as you’ll only be subject to penal rates of indemnity insurance facilitated by vote-hungry politicians eager to portray themselves as 'the working mans' friend'. You’re a doctor. You must be rich, right? No, not necessarily, particularly if you practice obstetrics in West Virginia, home of the jury award, soon to be a state without doctors.

Paul Craig Roberts recently wrote a brilliant article for Chronicles Extra called ‘Where Did All The Jobs Go?’ According to Roberts, there’s not much point in becoming an engineer in the USA, as nobody is making a job for you right now. You would be better going to law school, and seeing as the USA already has a full one-half of all the world’s lawyers anyway, this will mean that over the course of a very short period of time, lawyer’s wages will drop accordingly. This will be viewed by some, like the controversialist John Derbyshire, as being a good thing, as it will mean that what he recently referred to as the ‘guild’ will be broken.

Lawyers, as a whole, are a group that’s easy to hate. However, consider the cant last week of Stephen Byers MP, a close associate of Tony Blair’s. Byers, you might recall, is the man who refused to sack his press aide Jo Moore after it was discovered that she had referred to 9/11 as ‘a good day to bury bad news’ just as Flight 77 was ploughing into the Pentagon. This man attacked the ‘compensation culture’ that’s driving up the cost of delivering public services in the UK. For a socialist like Byers, the smooth operation of public services is of greater weight than mere trifles like justice, equity and the rule of law. But what makes the speech really notable is its failure to recognise the culpability of the group most responsible for the rise in compensation claims – the politicians.

California would not be facing a crisis in its workmens’ compensation system if the California Assembly had not produced such a system in the first place. One of the first acts of the Blair Government was to pass the Human Rights Act, specifically designed to give recognition of human rights and power to seek restitution for their breach. The fact that a number of claims are now being made under the Act by groups like failed asylum seekers and suspected terrorists is not the fault of the lawyers’ bringing the cases, but instead is the fault of the politicians who enacted the original laws. Another reason for smaller government. QED.

However, the brethren are being squeezed left, right and centre as a favourite target of those who hate the middle class. The brethren, being the brethren, never do things the easy way when they can pick the hard, and so it proves by their abject failure to rein in those among them who do abuse the system, like West Virginian tort lawyers. The outright political activism of the groups and individuals who funded John Edwards does not help the brethren’s image, if a group necessary for a society’s survival are constantly portrayed as being a special interest and not an integral part of the societal process. The existence of a lawyer class is necessary in any society that prizes freedom of speech, the rule of law and the open determination of disputes in open courts presided over by impartial judges whose decisions are open to appeal. If Shakespeare’s dull and often repeated advice ‘let’s kill all the lawyers’ is taken, it has the effect of killing all laws, causing instability and ultimately anarchy. Which is just what the Ba’athists and the Islamists are doing in Iraq right now.

The same process is taking place, with far less violence but no less subtlety, in the UK and USA. If you’re middle class right now, are you doing as well as you were five years ago? I thought not. If you’re about to send your daughter to law school, is the advice of your friend who’s told you of his daughter’s negative experience in the market place after seven years of college nagging at the back of your mind? I thought so. You might be in a position of authority, a doctor, lawyer or school principal. Are you finding that far more is expected of you now in terms of more being added to your job description allied to a decline in attitude of those for whom you provide a service? Again, I thought so. Would you advise your child to go into your line of work? I thought not.

The middle class is the bedrock of all civil, stable societies. Without a class to rise to, there is no aspiration. Without aspiration, there is only welfare and hopelessness. Politicians will always say ‘we’ve helped create jobs’. It doesn’t matter to them what the job is – their kids won’t be doing it. If the only jobs that are being made for college graduates are flipping burgers and tending bar, there is no point in college. And if there’s no point in college, there’s just no point. Period.

A Spanish Warning

2006-03-23T09:34:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 15, 2004

There is a powerful lesson to be learned from the carnage of the Madrid train bombs of March 11th, one of particular resonance for the people of the USA. It is that although that day the fiends responsible killed Spaniards, by November they will be planning another atrocity on American soil.

Conspiracy theories will abound. In a van apparently ‘linked’ to the bombings, there have been found Koranic quotes, and Arabic texts spouting the usual Islamist gibberish of ‘Crusader alliances’. Initially the finger of blame was pointed at the Basque separatists ETA, but, given ETA’s usual MO, it is safe to say that it should be pointed more firmly across the Straits of Gibraltar.

For all its bloody history, ETA are first and foremost Communists, and thus perversely informed by Enlightenment principles. They always give warnings – in this case, none was given, just like Al Qa’eda. Although they have regularly bombed, their past ambitions have never included spectaculars, the stock in trade of Al Qa’eda. Spain, being a liberal democracy, has its fair share of liberal apologists for ETA, a group whose support they need in order to give them a faint patina of respectability, of the ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ sort. The limited sympathy such support might produce would be destroyed by such wholesale slaughter. Instead, even at this stage, it’s fair to say that the act was the responsibility of those who consider themselves at all out war not with just the Spanish state in the form of the government of Jose Maria Aznar, but with all Spaniards. Just like Al Qa’eda.

Jose Maria Aznar has supported the Iraqi War in the face of a higher degree of domestic opposition than any faced by George W. Bush. Such a spectacular so close to polling day on March 14 can be construed as a direct attempt to undermine support for Aznar – ‘He led you to war, but he cannot protect you’. Such sentiment is blind to the fact that Al Qa’eda, with its medievalist dreams of Caliphate, hates Spain, and particularly hates the Castilians of Madrid, for daring to expel Muslim influence from Andalusia in 1492. It’s indicative of Al Qa’eda’s truly pathetic mindset that a historical grievance from 512 years ago should lead them to kill young men and women who may have been totally opposed to Aznar and the war on their way to work.

However, its timing is impeccable. So close to polling day, some Spanish voters may have been afraid to go to a booth, petrified that a jihadist would be waiting for them, shouting ‘God Is Great!’. If that did happen, it was only a small victory for them, for, as any nation that has suffered terrorists should, the Spanish will set their faces like flint, and resolve to drive Islamist influence from Spain with whips and scorpions, as Srjda Trifkovic beautifully put it.

Oh, for the British people to show such resolve! Oh, to banish the greatest weakness of American politics, special interest group influence, for the dead hand it would lay on such a gathering of steel! Instead, the Islamist apologists like the impertinently-named Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) campaign against honest men like Daniel Pipes, a prophet who spent years wandering in the academic wilderness until what he had been warning against came true that dreadful Tuesday morning, 911 days to the day before Madrid.

But the Islamists' real message of March 11 was to the people of America. As we do to your Crusader allies when they engage in degenerate democracy, so we will do to you when the Little Satan Bush stands for re-election. As we killed them coming into Madrid, so we will kill you on your way in from Falls Church and Bethesda. Just as we try to disrupt the democratic process of Spain, so we will endeavour to disrupt yours. We have turned our backs on your way of life – you love life, we love death. We do not care for those who oppose our jihad in Iraq. We hate you all for the power of the culture your fathers created, that allows you to stay one culture while you argue, for it shows ours to be weak and backward. We hate you all, black and white, Irish, Polish, German, Mexican. We failed in our first attempt to undermine you, but we will never stop. We hate you more because you did not bow to us then. We will make your fear us now. We will sow the seed of carnage in your midst, and you will know nothing but fear until the green flag of Islam flies over your Capitol Building and your White House. Until you bow to us.

To all that hate, there is only phrase that any American need say, regardless of their own view of the war. To hell with you.

The Mortal Crisis on Tony Blair

2006-03-23T09:33:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 9, 2004

Although he has been plagued by domestic political problems for 18 months, the scale of the crisis facing Tony Blair’s administration only became fully apparent last week. It is fair to say that this is a mortal crisis, causing the White House to intervene on his behalf. He is hanging on by a thread.

Politicians are dealmakers by habit and practice. In order to play the game, you need to have something to deal with. At the end of January, Blair survived a vote on the introduction of university ‘top-up’ fees by five votes. With a majority in Parliament of 160, five is the nearest you can come to a defeat and stay in office. All his political capital is spent, and threats of discipline won’t cut it anymore.

The British system operates on the basis of far fiercer ‘whipping’ than in Congress. Members are expected to toe the party line or face both Parliamentary and party discipline. However, the group that has never been satisfied by Blair and his government are the old ‘hard left’, those who still extol the values of socialism. Although, in a warning for this election year, Blair and the ‘New Labour’ project were the most electable option he had never been expel to cut the socialist cancer out of the Labour Party. As with all administrations, as time went on Blair’s particularly middle-class view of the world began to grate more and more on the old left causing them to rebel more and more. The January vote showed that, in terms of domestic politics, the Prime Minister has nothing more to trade with, and the next serious rebellion will be the end of him.

The architect of ‘New Labour’, Blair’s Dick Morris, is a man called Peter Mandelson. Mandelson, the grandson of a former Labour minister called Herbert Morrison, took the view in the mid ‘90’s that Labour needed to be re-branded, coming up with the ‘New Labour’ name and shifting the party’s policy focus on to more middle class friendly issues. Although he has left office in disgrace twice, Mandelson is still an eminence grise at Downing Street, and in February used a speech to lambast the old left for the damage it was doing to Blair.

He took the very hard line that a number of the old left enjoyed the freedom of opposition more than the responsibility of government, a perfectly true observation. The people who have been most constantly opposed to Blair have been those who were most vocal in their condemnation of the perceived sidelining of the United Nations in the run up to war, maintaining their classically socialist internationalism. However, that it should have come from the mouth of Mandelson so soon after the top-up fees vote showed how deeply Blair had been rattled by that vote.

During the past week alone, there have been four instances of evidence of crisis. The Home Secretary David Blunkett announced that the name ‘Crown’ was being removed from the Crown Prosecution Service. Although prosecutions will still be conducted in Her Majesty’s name, removing the word ‘Crown’ from the service’s title is the sort of footling tinkering common in governments that seem so pressed for time, with so much to do, that any and all action is seen as immediate and vital.

Secondly, with a sweep of his pen, Blunkett announced that those who had failed to make the case for asylum in the UK would no longer have a right of appeal to a court. This is the first occasion ever in English law that the actions of a semi-official tribunal will not be subject to judicial scrutiny. It produced an incredibly public and wholly unprecedented attack from the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, at a speech on March 4th. The English judiciary do not pass opinion on policy as a rule, and Lord Woolf’s outrage is a constitutional crisis the like of which we have not seen probably since the abdication of Edward VIII.

Thirdly, it was reported on the morning of March 5th that the IMF is looking to hire Gordon Brown, the hard left Chancellor of the Exchequer, as its new leader, following upon the retirement of Horst Koehler. Brown is reported to be ‘Washington’s candidate’, because of the sleight of hand he has performed in keeping up relative prosperity while constantly increasing taxes, a party trick that’s going to be exposed when the housing market collapses in the next 12 months. Brown is Blair’s most bitter political rival. The fact that they are next-door neighbours does not prevent Brown plotting and manipulating events around Blair. Blair only survived the top-up fees vote after securing the support of those on the left considered to be Brown’s power base. The IMF, for long viewed as the financial arm of the State Department, might just be a big enough job for an ego the size of Brown’s, if he still did not harbour ambitions to be Prime Minister himself. Sensing the possibility of moving next door to be so close, he is extremely unlikely to take it.

But the very fact the offer was made, and its timing, is very interesting. Given the level of influence that State has with the IMF, is it not strange that this job is offered to the greatest domestic political rival of the White House’s most constant ally, at a time when that ally is under intense and relentless domestic pressure? It’s just possible they might have looked at the criteria and decided Brown was the man for the job. However, conspiracy theorists are entitled to have a field day. If this is an attempt to get Brown off the UK political scene, it shows two things, Firstly, how important Blair is to the plans of the Bush White House, that they would be prepared to give an unreconstructed socialist access to one of the liberal world’s great toys, an bottomless piggy bank of pork, just to save his hide. Secondly, it shows just scared they are of the Labour Left that they will go to this length to save him. It is an offer straight from the neo-conservative playbook. If Brown doesn’t take the job, there is no other real path open to them to protect Blair.

Not that Blair should be protected. The fourth instance was a speech he gave on March 5th, suggesting a review of international law to justify pre-emption. That he should feel this necessary when in fact the war was perfectly legal to begin with shows the extent of his isolation from many in the Labour Party, willing to sell our sovereignty to Kofi Annan. The fact that the security services have prevented a 9/11 on our shores doesn’t stop the pack of hounds at his heels from blasting their political prejudices against him, or their sneering contempt for the person, mannerisms, speech and religious beliefs of President Bush, or their sympathies for the ‘death cult killers’ of the Middle East, or their belief in greater integration with the Brussels bureaucracy and kleptocracy. In his resignation speech last year, Robin Cook, the rogue Leader of the Commons, said that Britain was no longer a great power, forgetting to include that it was people like himself who have made us that way.

For too long Blair tried to run with them as well. Right now, he is being pulled apart. Although one would always wish a supporter of strong TransAtlantic alliance to be resident in Downing Street, it may not be too early to wish him a happy retirement.

Xanadu Falls

2006-03-23T09:31:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 4, 2004

Probably the greatest issue of concern for social conservatives right now is illegal immigration. Although the President’s public statement that he will promote a constitutional amendment that would deny confirmed bachelors the right to marry each other is welcome, on a more profound level the illegal immigration question is far and away the more important. Gay marriage affects how a society perceives itself. Illegal immigration affects how it actually works.

For those conservatives afraid of the tide on the shores, one would urge them to take heart and look at the experience of the fictional Michigan town of Xanadu Falls. If the experience of Xanadu Falls is replicated across the United States, as looks increasingly likely, then the issue of illegal immigration will solve itself, and all too soon.

Immigration is the demographic equivalent of blood donation – it enables the body politic to renew itself with new skills and new talents to face the challenges that any sophisticated society must face during the course of its development. As Victor Davis Hanson and others have charted, historically it is always a one-way street – the primary cause of any immigration is the economic opportunity offered by stable and mature societies. Therefore, although the Bayswater area of London is regarded as an Arab quarter, or the Garnethill area of Glasgow is a Chinese quarter, there are no similar Cockney quarters in Damascus or Scots quarters in Shanghai.

The secondary cause of immigration is that the stable society is less likely to govern through the mechanics of oppression. The language of societies that receive immigrants always adapts and introduces words that immigrants bring with them. Without immigration, it is unlikely that the word ‘pogrom’ would ever have been introduced into English. Stable societies are not perfect – in 1923, the Church of Scotland produced an official document arguing against continued immigration entitled The Menace of the Irish Race. In 1968 Enoch Powell, a former Conservative Minister who had become a Professor of Greek at age 23 and who enlisted as a private in 1940, ending his war as a brigadier, made a speech in Birmingham, England, saying that if mass immigration continued, ‘like the Roman, he saw the Tiber foaming with much blood’. Powell’s ill-advised words have hung like a thundercloud over any meaningful attempt by British conservatives to debate the positive as well as the negative aspects of immigration ever since.

It is, however, an undeniable fact that English-speaking societies succeed most readily at assimilating immigrants. The UK and USA were the first countries in the world to offer multi-ethnic citizenship. It is still difficult for the children of second-generation Turkish immigrants to Germany to obtain German nationality. France excludes its immigrants in slightly more subtle ways, by giving them the paperwork but effectively denying them opportunity. The Dutch liberal immigrant experience has been a disaster, proving that in order for the immigration process to be successful there must be a desire on the part of the immigrant to integrate. It is not possible, indeed it is unreasonable to expect, that a host nation tolerate the continuation of some practices deemed acceptable in the immigrants country of origin.

Which is where, right now, the whole immigration question becomes a moral car-wreck. The continued pursuit of social democracy in both our societies, through the promotion of welfare and calls for universal health care, have produced the philosophy of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism makes the unsustainable intellectual demand that one must regard all societies and cultures as being of equal value – therefore, the traditions of Anglophone liberal democracy have no greater or lesser historical weight than Islamist denial of the role of women in society. The extension of the franchise to all females was the sort of historical development that could only have taken place in the English-speaking world first, simply because our traditions of debate and free enquiry enabled us to speak openly of the matter – in some parts of Switzerland, women were denied the franchise as late as 1979. However, if a Muslim immigrant refuses to ‘permit’ his wife to vote, he is thumbing his nose at the historical and social traditions of the society in whose opportunities he has sought to participate, and which has permitted him to do so. Multiculturalism says that’s OK, and that’s the strain of thought that now governs all policy in the matter.

Added to the mix is the post war theory of welfare statism. The provision of industrial welfare has been a social disaster in any society where it has been introduced, only ever sucking up otherwise productive money to employ bureaucrats whose wages far outweigh the dole they dispense, while rotting the initiative of the recipients. Manual labouring is a classic case in point. Societies will always have a demand for manual workers – by our essence we need to feed ourselves, so there will always be a need for farm-labourers. However, the fact that, certainly in the UK, welfare provision provides a more attractive lifestyle for many than the demands of the self-discipline required to go out and get and then keep a job means that that particular section of the workforce is now manned almost exclusively by immigrants. This is not a healthy thing, as what old romantics call the ‘work ethic’ will, like the steam train or the horse and trap, eventually disappear.

Skilled immigrants will always be able to seek opportunity, as the children of previous immigrants become the first in the family to attend college and enter the middle classes. The principal effect of some practices like outsourcing, however, is that, while manual and industrial jobs can be replaced with low to medium grade ‘white collar’ jobs, once those jobs go overseas, unless there has been a continuous effort at private sector job creation throughout the economic cycle then there is nothing to offer the citizen other than welfare. This scenario seems, unfortunately, to be playing out in the USA at the moment, with recent high growth being stimulated by corporate profit without any substantive numbers of new jobs being created at all. In turn, this will only have the effect of destabilising the society that produced the opportunity to begin with.

Which is precisely what’s happening in Xanadu Falls, a fictional city of 50,000 about 20 miles outside Detroit. In 1911, General Alternators opened what became the world’s largest automotive components factory there, employing 20,000. The city grew up around the factory, with generations of its men working in the plant. However, disaster struck in 1983, when General Alternators was taken over by the South Korean giant Park Lights. Park Lights immediately closed the plant, putting everyone out of work.

The town was depressed for a year. It developed the social problems of all depressed areas. The divorce rate increased, due to the presence of the primary cause of divorce, lack of money. Drug and alcohol abuse increased. Then, thanks to tax-breaks and inward investment incentives offered by the State of Michigan, the town was saved.

In 1984, Deutsche Transistor (US), the American arm of German electronics giant Deutsche Transistor Gmbh announced the opening of a computer assembly plant in Xanadu Falls. At the same time, OmniDairies, a foods giant based in Omaha, took advantage of the same tax breaks and announced that it was opening a factory in the town for the production of in-flight meals. Both Deutsche Transistor (US) and OmniDairies received tax breaks worth $140 million each from the taxpayers of Michigan for their trouble. The problem was that the breaks only lasted for 10 years.

For ten years, everyone in Xanadu Falls had a job. This hadn’t always been the case – although the wages paid by General Alternators had been described as ‘uncompetitive’ by the CEO of Park Lights, they had been enough to ensure that men who worked at the plant earned enough to enable their wives to stay at home. Although Deutsche Transistor paid well enough in the climate of the mid-80’s, the wages weren’t at the same level, so many of the stay at home moms took part-time shifts in OmniDairies to cover the balance. The divorce rate remained at its new, increased rate.

However, inevitably, disaster struck Xanadu Falls again in 1995, when Deutsche Transistor’s and OmniDairies tax breaks ran out. Both corporations closed their plants.

Almost immediately, the hour was saved by Tim Rothelmann, a Xanadu Falls native and graduate of Stanford Business School, who was looking for a location to open not one but four call centres, for four new customer service contracts he had won with Ambleton Energy, Nefesix, The Creative Corporation and MacHaggis (US). The hometown boy came home and once again everyone in Xanadu Falls had a job. Xanadu Falls won a new reputation for excellence as the call centre capital of the Great Lakes, although its wage rate fell again and its divorce rate increased accordingly.

However, in the last quarter of 2003, a disturbing rumour hit the streets. Tim Rothelmann had spent three weeks touring Asia. He had been spending a larger and larger proportion of his time at his house in Florida, taking the sun. People were worried that their jobs would soon head over to Asia.

And it happened last week. 30,000 people in Xanadu Falls lost their jobs, for the third time in 20 years.

Don’t forget that illegal immigrants seek better opportunities. Once all of America is like Xanadu Falls, there will be no opportunity. And they will not come any more.

Rewarding a Killer of Americans

2006-03-23T09:29:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 2, 2004

Here’s an interesting poser. At the height of the Holocaust, just before the end of the war, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Birkenau were working round the clock, largely using Henry Ford’s methods of mass production to ensure the end of the Jewish people, to send them to the oblivion Hitler considered their destiny. There was an almost frantic level of activity to try to get what the Nazis considered to be such an important job done. One of Hitler’s most reviled middle managers, the camp commandant Rudolf Hoess, employed skills that would have made him a very capable and probably successful production manager to ensure that the Fuhrer’s hellish work was finished before T-42 tanks, blooded in the fields of Kursk or on the banks of the Volga at Stalingrad, rolled up the now universally chilling railway siding, underneath the sign that read ‘Work Makes You Free’.

Would Hitler and Hoess have been able to escape liability by paying compensation?

Here’s another one. Osama bin Laden is probably long dead by now. The best evidence for this is already in American custody in Cuba. The fact that his bodyguards are there leads one to surmise that the body isn’t worth protecting any more. However, if Osama were to make an offer of compensation to his victims, together with a firm commitment not to pursue Weapons of Mass Destruction programs, presumably that would ensure that he would not suffer further sanction for his acts of terrorism, which easily fall in to the Nuremberg classification of ‘Crimes Against Humanity’.

Although both of these examples sound ridiculous, they are both equivalent to the gavotte that is currently playing out around Muammar Gaddafi. Muammar Gaddafi is a killer of Americans. His agents are ruthless killers of London cops, residents of the Scottish countryside, soldiers and police personnel in Ireland and those most hated groups, German nightclubbers and GI’s out for a night on the town. Now, for reasons entirely in tune with 21st Century concerns but entirely neglectful of the debt Gaddafi owes the dead and the bereaved of the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany that he left in his wake, soon he’s going to be a good guy.

Forget that.

On February 26th, the State Department lifted a ban on travel to Libya. Muammar Gaddafi’s state subsidised but ultimately private war on the United Sates has never been undeclared. He has never expressed penitence for the strenuous and sometimes successful efforts he made to kill Americans during the 1980’s. Gaddafi never had access to the American mainland or the American people in the same way that Hitler and Hoess had access to European Jewry. However, it is not unreasonable to assume that, at that time, had he had access to technology that would have enabled him to make a Weapon of Mass Destruction that an agent could deliver into the United States of America, he would have used it. His aim has always been to kill as many Americans as he can, and the specifically neo-conservative agenda of ending the scourge of WMD proliferation ensures that he will get his reward for playing ball.

Justify that to the soul of Stephen Flanagan, the Last Victim of Lockerbie. He was 14 when all his family was killed in the obliteration of Sherwood Crescent, and 24 when he stepped under a train. Stephen came from a town where not much else happens other than the train passes through. He and his townsfolk, my countrymen, have never been and now never will be properly avenged for what was visited on them in the night.

The paleos’ views on Gaddafi are not much more enlightened. In the March 1st issue of The American Conservative, the much-maligned and misunderstood Pat Buchanan lays out a very cerebral case against neo-conservatism in the context of a review of An End To Evil, written by Richard Perle and the increasingly disturbing David Frum. Both these veterans of the Conrad Black era Hollinger (Perle was a main board director, Frum a columnist for the Canadian National Post) are comprehensively ‘fisked’ by one of the greatest minds on the American right.

However, in the article Buchanan makes a startling error. While daring to praise George W. Bush for leading the coalition in Afghanistan, he writes

“On Sept. 11, Al Qa’eda attacked us. Al Qa’eda is our enemy, not Syria, Libya or Saudi Arabia”.

At no point has Libya ceased hostilities. Libya is still as much the enemy of the United States as it was 20 years ago. While Muammar Gaddafi is in power, at no point will Libya ever give up hostilities. It is not in Gaddafi’s character to give up this fight. However, because his actions suit the agenda of some of those seeking to make America secure, he gets a free pass. He gets a lifting of the travel ban. If he pays compensation to the families of those he killed, that makes it all right.

It doesn’t make it right for everyone who lost money in Pan Am. Pan American Airways went out of business because of the actions of Muammar Gaddafi. Workers lost their jobs, investors lost their money. Some will say, well, they should have taken more care to screen their luggage. Why should they? Why should universal air travel, the product of free and open societies, be held hostage and have high costs because of the backward and corrupt cultures and fascist politics of a North African dictator? They shouldn’t have had to. The death of an American institution like Pan Am deserves consideration in the moral calculus ranged against Gaddafi.

Tony Blair’s going to see him soon. One day, he’ll have tea with the Queen. He might be invited to the White House, if age or the Islamists don’t get him first. There is only one way for the stain of Libya’s guilt to be washed away, which is for Muammar Gaddafi to present himself at the gates of Camp Delta to face trial for crimes against humanity and crimes against peace. He considers himself at war with America. His current accommodation is only for his own interest. He should be treated like a war criminal. On that day, all conservatives should rejoice.

It’s a great pity that the group Buchanan calls ‘AEI warlords’ will never let it happen.

Keeping an Eye on Russia

2006-03-23T09:28:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 26, 2004

In 1841, in a candlelit pressroom in County Cork, some long-forgotten commentarist coined one of the most famous phrases in the history of Irish newspapers. Writing for the Skibbereen Eagle, now the Southern Star, he wrote that the paper was ‘keeping its eye on Russia’.

After the publication of the list of 270 recipients of Saddam-era oil vouchers by the Iraqi newspaper Al-Mada, whoever he was had a point.

Forty-six of the names on the list, originally published on January 25th, are individuals or organisations based in Russia. They range from a total of 1.366 billion barrels for the Russian state to one million for an organisation called Tatneft. No area of Russian politics or commerce was untouched.

The list was originally the property of the State Oil Marketing Organisation (SOMO). According to a translation of the Al-Mada article posted by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) on February 20th, the game was very simple. Recipients of vouchers presented them, either directly or through intermediaries, to any one of a number of specialist companies in the United Arab Emirates, and the commissions payable to the recipients ranged from $0.30 per barrel to $0.05 per barrel, depending on the state of the international oil market. This was strictly a cash business, and voucher recipients could receive between $100,000 on the bad days to $300,000 on the good. Nobody who received a voucher ever had to lay their eyes on a barrel of oil, and everyone would have made money.

The problem was that, according to the MEMRI translation, the oil allocations covered by the vouchers were only intended for ‘end-users’ – refiners. Of the names on the list, most, for example the Russian Orthodox Church (5 million barrels) or I.N.M. Airways (6 million barrels) could not be considered end-users. Also, if a voucher had been used to pay for goods, that would be in contravention of the UN’s Memorandum of Understanding for the operation of the oil for food program, as the UN paid any creditors under the program from an escrow account in a French bank. So, who got the vouchers?

The Communist Party Companies are reported to have received 137 million barrels. The far-right Liberal Democratic party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky is reported to have received 79.8 million barrels. The Peace and Unity Party is reported to have received 34 million barrels. The Russian Committee of Solidarity with the People of Iraq is reported to have received 6.5 million barrels. The Russian Association for Solidarity with Iraq is reported to have received 12.5 million barrels. The Russian National Democratic Party is reported to have received 3 million. The Unity Party, a different entity from the Peace and Unity Party, apparently split 57 million barrels with the Ministry for Emergencies.

If the reports are accurate, then Saddam used the vouchers to buy political influence across the board in Russia. However, there are some names on the list which demand even greater scrutiny, given the amount of time and money that certain Russian nouveau riche spend in the UK.

The oil company Sibneft is down on the list for 8.1 million barrels. Sibneft’s two founders are Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich. Berezovsky, 58, is now a refugee in London, having been granted political asylum in the UK last year after taking the last stage out of town one step ahead of the marshals on charges of tax evasion. Roman Abramovich, 36, according the London Sunday Times the person with the most cash actually breathing and the governor of Chukotka Province in the Russian Far East, has been the Chairman and owner of London’s Chelsea Football Club since last summer. Chelsea is to soccer in London what the Yankees or the Giants are to New York, and although 8.1 million barrels is a tiny amount in relation to what Sibneft pumps on an annual basis, Chelsea’s supporters are entitled to ask what direct knowledge their club’s owner might have had of this arrangement, as a major investor in Sibneft.

However, it is not only politicians and businesses that are alleged to have benefited from the scheme. Also on the list are two agencies of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Al-Fayco (128.8 million barrels) and Yatumin (30.1 million). The Moscow Science Academy is down for 3.5 million barrels. The Chechnya Administration is down for 2 million barrels. The Chief of the President’s Bureau is down for 5 million barrels. Every single institution of note or consequence in the country is mentioned, with the exception of the Defence Ministry.

In the run-up to the Iraqi war, Russia was one of the most stubborn opponents of action. Although there are many conservatives who are opposed to the war for ideological, moral or practical reasons, the Russians have been exposed as having the most naked self-interest in the maintenance of the status quo. It didn’t matter to Saddam who held power in Russia- he seems to have been quite prepared to invest to ensure that whoever was in power was friendly. Every high school student who’s ever studied the October Revolution has heard the Russian saying ‘Fish rots from the head down’. Although Vladimir Putin has been touted by commentators, myself included, as a guy worthy of support, it shows how fragile a country’s democracy really is when a person like Saddam, with all his appurtenances of rape rooms, torture chambers and gas attacks can try to buy a country. And even try to buy its priests.

The Lost Boys of Belfast

2006-03-23T09:27:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 20, 2004

On February 17th, one of the main news items on all stations was the funerals of Belfast boys’ Barney Cairns and Anthony O’Neill. The boys, both 18 and Catholic, had taken their own lives after intimidation attacks by allegedly Catholic republican paramilitaries.

One of the Church’s more liberal and sensible rulings of recent years has been to change its view on the act of taking one’s own life. Anyone who’s ever seen up close what it does to those left behind would agree that it is brutally compassionless to regard the act of self-homicide as a mortal sin. The new Rome-speak of ‘being of disordered mind’ is a rather formalistic way of saying that a suicide committed through total despair and lack of hope is the act of a soul in torment, fully deserving of sympathy. Certainly Anthony, Barney and the other male teenagers who have taken their lives in Belfast this year fall into that category.

According to the Daily Telegraph of 18 February, Barney was abducted by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) two years ago and shot in the legs, becoming schizophrenic as a result. Anthony, who may or may not have committed the capital crime of joyriding, was ‘taken from his bed, tied up and thrown into a manhole where he was beaten about the head in an INLA punishment attack last year. The INLA left (Anthony) there for seven hours before he chewed through his restraints and escaped’.

Belfast has the problems of any major city. In recent years, millions of pounds have been spent regenerating the waterfront, and its name, once synonymous solely with sectarian murals, the Divis Flats and the Shankill Road, now means an exciting place to do business, or a great spot for a weekend break. The so-called ‘peace process’, that enables the likes of Gerry Adams, the alleged one-time commander of a death squad that killed a mother of ten, and Martin McGuinness, an unashamed former terrorist, to hold high positions within Ulster’s government, means that as long as the guns are holstered, everyone should be happy. The majority Unionist community, the most likely economic beneficiaries of the peace dividend, aren’t as happy as everyone else, possibly another example of them wanting everything their way, unfortunately a recurring theme in Ulster history. Of course, the vast majority of any new jobs that will be created will be funky, white-collar and well beyond the reach of young men like Barney and Anthony. They’re the guys that everyone crosses the street to avoid when the home improvement TV shows come to town to tell the world what an exciting place Belfast is. However, when the streets of the Ardoyne are turned into a vigilante playground by the INLA, the most vicious of all Northern Ireland’s terrorist groups, then it is no longer a civil society.

It is no longer a civil society because the government is more interested in keeping up a happy public face than protecting the young. It is no longer a civil society as the police can no longer protect and serve. And it is no longer a civil society when the wolves of the INLA can prey upon young men like Barney Cairns and Anthony O’Neill, neither of whom was probably very smart, neither of whom had the benefit of growing up in an ordered and peaceful society and neither of whom got to see their nineteenth birthdays.

Some conservatives look upon suicide with distaste. Some who preach the doctrine of absolute personal responsibility, like those who study the sinister and increasingly popular writings of Ayn Rand, will shrug their shoulders when they read about Barney and Anthony and say ‘Who Cares?’ A conservative should always care. Although I have my own beef with the phrase ‘compassionate conservatism’, where the people like Tony Blair attack us is that sometimes we do not seem to care. We forget that we are a movement that should be built from the ground up, not the top down, like the European Union. For too long, the public image of the Conservative Party has been tea at the Carlton Club with Financial Times 100 Chief Executives. From what one can divine of the Republican Party’s image, the last thing George W. Bush would need right now is mention of the word ‘Enron’. The liberal default setting of handing out welfare to ensure the continued existence of voting blocks isn’t caring – it’s the crudest form of social manipulation. However, conservative attempts to generate McHeadlines like ‘Tories promise to release the spirit of enterprise’ or ‘Republicans vow to save the city’ don’t mean anything unless they’re backed up with a holistic approach to everything that we know will set people free. If one makes funds available for new business start-ups, exempt the owners from corporation taxes and excise duties for three years until they’re in profit. If someone has to hire staff, ensure that they’re not burdened by prohibitive payroll costs. Help, don’t hinder, people from making a job for Anthony O’Neill and Barney Cairns.

And if you’re going to tout yourself as ‘a great place to do business’, make sure that your consumers of the future don’t end up spending seven hours down a manhole after being beaten about the head by vigilantes.

The Unprincipled Losers of the British Conservative Party

2006-03-23T09:26:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 13, 2004

Last year I called the British Parliamentary Conservative Party ‘undisciplined losers’. You can add ‘unprincipled ‘ to the list.

On February 10th, Michael Howard, the new Leader of the rabble, pushed the party of Churchill to the left of John Kerry by announcing his support for the concept of ‘civil unions’. This is a contemptible act by an organisation whose sole rationale is not the pursuit of principle but power, that will say and do anything to be elected and that ferociously crushes any advance of the agenda of social conservatism.

Howard’s dispensation took place during a speech to a group called the Policy Exchange. Previously viewed as a firm conservative, he proclaimed his new funkiness by saying, “to recognise civil partnerships is not in any way to denigrate or downgrade marriage. It is to recognise and respect the fact that many people want to live their lives in different ways. It is not the job of the state to put barriers in their way.”

A quick parsing of this fatuousness exposes some fundamental flaws. We do recognise that many people want to live their lives in different ways. Suicide bombers, or, as Thomas Lifson of The American Thinker has labelled them, ‘death cult killers’, want to live their life in such a way that it ends violently and ensures the deaths of many other people. We don’t need to respect that. The Justice Department has been assiduously hunting down Internet perverts. Although we recognise that many unsatisfactory humans enjoy that particular lifestyle, there is no need to respect that. The state has been putting barriers in the way of many citizens whose religious beliefs on marriage do not conform to the legal ideal. Under Mr. Howard’s dispensation, polygamy for devout Mormons and Muslims would have to be legalised. The state is putting a barrier in the way of their pursuit of their true beliefs. Tear it down!

What we are seeing here is the final surrender to the culture of ‘Yes’. Because gay marriage/civil partnerships/civil unions would be a popular policy with gays and liberals, should we adopt it? Yes. Do you apply your economic theory to social issues in order to market your ideas? Yes. Do you continue with this although it will be repellent to the vast majority of your supporters, who are the most elderly political demographic in the UK? Yes. If you want to do it, do it. Yes.

Anytime any prominent figure in the Conservative Party dares to fly a socially conservative kite, they get shot down. Earlier this year, David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, suggested that the British people might be interested in having a debate on the re-introduction of a death penalty. Davis was not advocating the immediate return of the noose, just promoting the perfectly democratic idea that a number of people wish to see the return of a death penalty. Shot down. Two years ago, Liam Fox, who’s also a doctor, suggested that the time might be right for a review of the abortion laws. Shot down. This is a particularly good idea, as we are currently killing 3,000 a month in a country with a welfare state and an aging population. However the Thatcherite precept of ‘choice’ makes the intellectual demand that you must have choice in everything, including the woman’s right to choose.

The same logic is evident in Howard’s speech. Because some gays might choose to enter long relationships, the parameters of the state have to alter in order to accommodate that choice. This is a utilitarian decision (this will help us get what we want) announcing a utilitarian policy (give them what they want, simply because they want it). It will buy Mr. Howard some votes, but his calculated disregard for the views of his own members, who are never consulted on anything, leads one to be extremely suspicious of his motives.

However, he is a politician, and like the scorpion for whom stinging is second nature, he has to play politics. In order to give the Conservatives an edge, a lead, he has adopted a policy that will get him some favour from the gay community. However, as with any pursuit of demographics, those morally serious gays more concerned with the survival of the state than with formal recognition of their domestic arrangements will view this policy like all other serious voters, as one of many on which to assess Howard’s credibility as a potential Prime Minister. Otto Scott coined the phrase ‘silent majority’ to describe those who keep their thoughts to themselves. Like George W. Bush, it is the silent majority Howard should be courting, but isn’t, or at best half-heartedly. There is no point in calling yourself a conservative if you don’t stand up to defend the institutions of your society, and marriage between man and woman has been a feature of every successful society that ever was. Now that would be a great policy. Yes.

The Martyrs of Morecambe Bay

2006-03-23T09:25:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 11, 2004

One cannot imagine the terror that filled the hearts of the nineteen people lost at sea on the evening of February 5th in Morecambe Bay, England. Seventeen of them had probably given everything they had to be smuggled to the UK, to be followed by the second part of the deal, unlimited servitude at the hands of Snakeheads and gangmasters. And they did it for the right to work. For the right to be free.

This tragedy had three direct causes. Firstly, the failure of Communism. Secondly, the unscrupulousness of people smugglers. Thirdly, the failure of a stodgy bureaucracy to react to circumstances they were reasonably able to anticipate would evolve.

China was the country of the origin of seventeen of the nineteen dead. China is a country that is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, which possesses Weapons of Mass Destruction, has the world’s fastest growing economy and has recently launched a man into space. It is utterly pathetic, a collapse of common morals, that no politician will ask, as they come from a country with such ambitions and capabilities, why is its manhood dying in the mud at Morecambe? It is because for the majority of Chinese, economic opportunity is shut off because they are not members of the Communist Party. These guys are not the guys turning out cups and saucers or running shoes for ten cents a day. These guys can’t even get those jobs. The deaths at Morecambe are a direct result of the repeated and historic failure of a centrally planned economy to provide anything other than a subsistence living for those who are not part of the central elite. For them, imperial prestige is everything, the value of human life nothing. Wherever Chairman Mao is now, I hope his feet are warm and dry.

May he soon be joined by the Snakeheads. These most vicious criminals extort a person’s life savings to pay for part of their passage to the west. These guys don’t get smuggled overseas, they go by land, at constant risk of the air supply in the flat-bottomed truck they’re lying in being shut down. The human stench in these trucks must be appalling. The journey from China takes weeks, and if they’re lucky enough to get to Europe, particularly Britain, in one piece, they then have to fill the second part of the bargain.

The Snakeheads really are evil, evil men. The second part of the deal is that the transportee has to work in indentured servitude, usually in crop-picking at rates well below minimum wage, with working hours well out with the range allowed by the Working Time Directive. One of the Chinese rescued from Morecambe was reported to have said that they were going ‘fish-picking’. The Snakeheads ensure that they perform by threatening their families at home. Some of the females are diverted to prostitution. Of course, because they come from a society where there is no concept of liberal civil liberties, as soon as they see a cop who might be able to help them, they divert their eyes and cross the street. These men and women are New Damned. One of the most disgusting aspects of this incident is that these souls died trying to work in a country that has six million people registered as being unfit, that permits the Islamist Omar Bakri Mohammed, who has made clear that his intention is to turn the UK into an Islamic nation, to claim both disability and housing benefit, where the principal health problem among the poor is obesity and where the median definition of poverty is measured in variables like how many vacations you’re able to take every year. The sins of the Snakeheads are almost biblical in their proportion. May their portion and cup be the wrath of God.

The reason those folks were out on the bay was the bumper crop of cockles available this season. Cockles are a delicacy that sells for two pounds per pound, about three dollars fifty, in Spain. According to reports, a group of Chinese had to be saved three weeks ago, in similar conditions. Morecambe, a favourite holiday destination before the coming of the Mediterranean package tour, has one of the widest bays in England. Its tides are notoriously treacherous. The relevant licensing authority had issued 800 permits since November. There had already been reports of a mass migration of Chinese illegals from the farmlands of Norfolk and East Anglia in anticipation of the cockle crop. Where were the authorities to protect these people? It is indicative of the political correctness that now pollutes all policy in the UK that while the USA is beefing up its military personnel in Baghdad, the UK has sent two gender-equality advisers at a cost of £250,000. Just as the people of Iraq have more pressing concerns now than the development of feminism, surely these souls should have been entitled to some protection from the State? Surely?

And so those souls who had crossed the world in order to work; who had given all they had; who had endured hideous travelling conditions; who lived like slaves; whose families were under threat; so they were led out onto the sands of Morecambe Bay, just as the tide was coming in. I don’t know if any of them were Christian, but may The Lord receive their souls. They did not deserve to die the way they did, struggling in the cold and dark, far away from home, to make money for some Snakehead swine driving a big Mercedes. One of the great British heroes of World War Two was Major ‘Blondie’ Hasler, of the Royal Marines, who led the infamous ‘Operation Cockleshell’ canoe mission, which resulted in the death or capture of all but two of his men. They were thereafter known as ‘The Cockleshell Heroes’. The men and women who died on February 5th are the Cockleshell Martyrs of Morecambe Bay, for their deaths, and the circumstances that brought them to their deaths, are a sin crying to Heaven for vengeance. In the words of the Irish prayer, may the road rise to meet them, may the wind be ever at their back and may The Lord keep them forever safe in the palm of His hand.

A Good Monsoon

2006-03-22T15:34:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 10, 2004

Monsoon 2003 was a good one, by Indian standards. Given the country’s climate, the billion people within its borders still rely on a good monsoon to ensure that the crops will grow, and keep starvation away for another year.

For several years, there has been another good monsoon falling on India, a monsoon of low to medium-grade white collar jobs being outsourced from the UK and the USA. This is a monsoon that spells the possibility of catastrophe for our labour markets, and one the consequences of which have to be addressed now by our leaders. They show a marked reluctance to do so.

Certainly, India has been the major beneficiary of jobs from the UK, however, outsourcing is now practiced across Europe. The Germans export to Eastern Europe. The French trend is to export to the Francophone nations of West Africa, and USA corporations also export to Central America. However, for English speaking nations, the Black Hole of New Delhi gets more of a cut than anywhere else, and is the place where the practice of market-driven policy comes face to face with itself, naked in the dark.

Marion Edwyn Harrison of the Free Congress Foundation recently put his finger on one cause of this cascade, failing western education systems, in an article for The Washington Dispatch. Certainly, public education in the UK has more or less stank since the abolition of publicly-funded selective ‘grammar schools’ in the 1960’s. In their place was introduced the ‘comprehensive school’, where children of differing levels of ability were taught in the same groups. According to the educational principle that a class can only move at the speed of its slowest student, this meant that standards rapidly declined. At the same time as this revolution was taking place, the teacher unions became more left-wing and militant, forgetting that their status conferred on them certain duties as well as rights. Any school system that permits its teachers to strike is in deep trouble, for, like the rising of the sun or the coming of the monsoon, the school-bell should be the clarion call of a healthy society.

So, according to Chris Woodhead, the UK’s former Chief Inspector of schools, there are now seven million adults in the UK who can’t spell the word ‘plumber’. No wonder their jobs have gone southeast by south.

That’s one side. Another is the deliberate decision of the Indian government to focus on the development of a ‘knowledge economy’. Where the UK spent money on maintaining a welfare state and a National Health Service, India pumped that money into schooling. They effectively jumped from being a rural agrarian society to a relatively sophisticated economy without passing through the phase of ‘industrialisation’, marked in the UK and USA with the exodus from the farms to the cities to work in factories. This has produced some anomalies. In a country that’s got one of the biggest economies in the world, there are still outbreaks of ‘Asian brown cloud’, a smog-like gunk caused by wood still being the major domestic fuel source. Although electricity supply is fine in the cities, in the countryside it can be erratic. Those images of the Indian railway system with guys hanging on the side and sitting on the roofs do not apply just to long distance journeys, but to commuter traffic as well. So, although the Indian economy is developed in some respects, it is woefully inadequate in others.

However, mass expansion of telephony and the low labour costs incurred in a less-developed economy naturally make it an attractive place, not to make money, but to save money. A call-centre worker in India can feasibly be paid between a third to a tenth of what they earn in the UK and still earn a professional wage by Indian standards. What all outsourcers forget is that these wages are paid from revenues generated in countries from which jobs have been outsourced. By expanding overseas, they diminish the economy at home. Also, having taken, they feel under no obligation to give.

One of the great conservative rallying-cries for cutting taxes is that, with a low tax rate, the dollar for dollar tax take increases. Those in higher tax brackets are more amenable to paying tax and accordingly do not seek the benefit of tax shelters. There is no reason why this principle should not apply to goods and services that have been outsourced. Among some of the British companies that have outsourced to India are the telecoms giant BT, BSkyB Television, affiliated to Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, HSBC Bank, a massive bank, and the insurer Norwich Union, part of Aviva. None of these organisations have passed on the savings they have made through outsourcing to their customers through reducing the cost of a telephone line rental, reducing the cost of a satellite subscription, bank charges or insurance premiums. None of them have cottoned on to the principle that, if you save money in one department, you will attract more willing consumers by passing on that saving, and therefore generating more revenue from themselves and higher returns for stockholders. Indeed, BSkyB seems so oblivious to this that they quite baldly state that their business aim is to maximise a figure they call the ‘Average Revenue Per Viewer’. Decades of unconservative corporatism have hardened them to the idea that, as one former director of Lloyds of London put it, quoting The Magnificent Seven, “If God did not mean them to be sheared, He would not have made them sheep”.

This is behaviour that’s easier to justify when a stock market is underperforming – obviously, investors are entitled to a return on their capital. However, the failure to do this now that markets are recovering means either that these corporations are interested only in the pursuit of profit or that savings to be made from outsourcing are not so great as might otherwise be widely believed.

The other major factor militating against outsourcing is more simple – relative geopolitical stability. The confession of Abdul Qadeer Khan that he was willing to tout Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to psycho regimes like Iran, Syria and Libya is proof that the security situation still prevalent on the subcontinent is not one conducive to the operation of stable markets. In recent weeks, India and Pakistan have officially made up. India’s economic ambitions combined with its proximity to Pakistan leads one to a scenario where a stable country is situated next to a failed one, in other words, what might happen if America were next door to Sudan. If Pakistan is not a failed state already it is surely a failing one, and President Musharraf cannot rely forever on the goodwill of the Pakistani military to protect him from the Islamists within their own ranks who have tried to assassinate twice in recent months. Given that the issue of Kashmir is regarded as a jihad, India doesn’t look like too safe a place to invest until both nations have disarmed, and even then, one can’t fully rely upon the sanity or good intentions of the Islamists with whom Dr. Kahn, Nuclear Traitor, kept company.

Some commentators, like Bruce Bartlett, see some cause for optimism in outsourcing, opining that as jobs go overseas, new ones are created at home. That may certainly be the case in the United States, where to all intents and purposes the traditions of personal initiative and free enterprise still apply. However, it ain’t so in the UK, given that the Labour Party’s dream of subverting our history of liberal democracy and turning us into a social democracy is almost complete. In a social democracy, they don’t have ‘citizens’, they have clients. Twenty-five per cent of the population now qualify for some form of means-tested befit, a figure that has shot up since Labour came to power in 1997. Their focus on the culture of rights, together with their collective foolishness in believing that by raising taxes now they will be able to avoid the calamity they inflicted on us by raising taxes in the 1970’s, means that they have totally abandoned the culture of enterprise. Any buck that’s to be made had better be a quick one.

At the end of last year, Dominic White of the Daily Telegraph submitted a couple of reports from the Indian outsourcing scene. He met a gentleman who was flush with confidence, and more than a little arrogant. This gentleman told Mr. White that a chap called John Bull came to India once and stayed for two hundred years. Now he was going to pay John Bull a visit. That would be fine, if John Bull hadn’t brought representative democracy, an educational system, the English language and the railroad with him, without any of which there would not now be a place called ‘India’. John Bull also suppressed the practices of suttee (widow-burning) and thuggee, homicide perpetrated in the name of the Hindu goddess Kali. That gentleman should remember that a good monsoon has its own economy. After a good monsoon, devout Hindus place small offerings of devotion and thanks in roadside shrines. Many of these are stolen by the thieves and robbers that a good monsoon brings out. Let the Buyer Beware.

Honouring Churchill

2006-03-22T15:24:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 6, 2004

On February 4th, President Bush opened a Washington exhibition on Winston Churchill. He is certainly the most-quoted Prime Minister of the last century, and probably the most-quoted chief executive from the English-speaking world, but his rhetoric is not what made him great. Too many public figures try to hide their human failings from the rest of us, as if they cannot acknowledge their humanity. What makes Churchill an attractive figure is that, although he was possessed of many unique talents, his feet were of the same clay as the rest of us.

In the 1890’s, he served in the last cavalry charge of the British Army, at Omdurman in the Sudan, under Kitchener. His opponents were the remnants of the army of the Mahdi, who considered the establishing of an Islamic caliphate to be his destiny. After leaving the Army, he was a correspondent in South Africa, serving some time as a prisoner during the Boer War.

His capacity for alcohol was staggering (twenty-two units a day, mostly a hellbroth cocktail of champagne and brandy), his political expediency and opportunism phenomenal, once switching from the Conservatives to the Liberals and back again when it suited his purposes. Like Abraham Lincoln, he was a melancholic, prone to bouts of depression he called ‘Black Dog’. However, when he became Prime Minister as a poor second choice in 1940, he had read enough history to conclude that fascism could not be reasoned with, it could only be fought, and made it his business to lead the nation in a way that no successor of his since has even tried. It is not for nothing that no Prime Minister ever invokes the words of Churchill. They would be shot down in flames. However, the greatest compliment that can be paid them is to be described as ‘Churchillian’.

By 1940, he had been a public figure for decades, having been Home Secretary as early as 1910. Churchill was, to my knowledge, the first Home Secretary to have to deal with the threat of foreign, non-Irish terrorism, in that case from the anarchist gang responsible the incident now known as the Siege of Sidney Street, led by ‘Peter the Painter’. As First Lord of the Admiralty during World War One, he was largely responsible for the disaster of the Gallipoli campaign. This caused many veterans of the Great War to be very wary of Churchill’s appointment, and he never fully won them round.

However, Churchill regularly told anyone willing to listen what drove him. David Niven recounted meeting him at a country house during the war. Apart from learning that Churchill had a crush on Deanna Durbin, that holder of the Legion of Merit who gave up a career in the movies to pursue what he saw as his duty, and whose father was killed at Gallipoli, reports that he asked him why he was set so firmly against the philosophy of the Nazis.

‘Because, young man’, Churchill replied, ‘I study history’.

Santayana’s precept that ‘those who do not remember history are condemned to relive it’ is now a cliché, uttered with a weary cynicism by the seekers of nuance. When one lives in a political culture dedicated to compromise and the deal, people like Churchill are the intellectual equivalent of an in-grown toenail, an incredibly irritating thing you try to do your best to sideline. The only leader who comes close to him in that single-minded opposition to a philosophy that their own learning of history tells them is wrong is Ronald Reagan. In many ways, they are very similar, Reagan having been elected when the United States was not only down, it was in a decline that started with Watergate and that culminated in the unwillingness of Jimmy Carter to take the threats the country faced seriously, simply from an inexcusable lack of understanding of Communism’s true nature. Reagan knew.

One other thing unites these two great men, and it’s nothing to do with either political philosophy or religion – Churchill was not, you might say, ‘Gospel-greedy’. All their lives, they both wrote their own stuff. The vast majority of Ronald Reagan’s radio commentaries were his own words, and show a very sophisticated thought process in league with a deep humanity and compassion for his fellow man. You should always, therefore, trust conservative leaders who write their own stuff – it shows that they can think. If George W. Bush is the American Thatcher, then Ronald Reagan deserves the title American Churchill. And what higher compliment could a Brit pay him than that?

A Conservative Manifesto

2006-03-22T15:15:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 5, 2004

George W. Bush was elected to office on a promise of ‘compassionate conservatism’. Upon reflection on his time in office so far, this phrase is an insult to anyone who ever called themselves a conservative before 2000, as it makes the insidious and perhaps unconscious assertion that the conservatism of Ronald Reagan and of his own father was not compassionate.

Baloney. Ronald Reagan proved his compassion for his fellow man time and time again, through his actions and policies. If anyone living deserves the label ‘compassionate conservative’ it is Reagan. Because of his compassion for his fellow man, Dutch stared down the Communists in the Screen Actors Guild. His compassion for his heirs and successors like Diane Lane, Majorette for Michael Moore, led him to cut the deal with the studios that created the repeat fee. According to Michael Reagan, his father disqualified himself from this deal, to avoid an impression of personal interest. His own struggle against Communism was born from compassion at the suffering of those who suffered under it, a struggle that his successor Republican Presidents have seemed remarkably unwilling to continue.

In the mind of Mr. Bush, a half-cocked pseudo-Thatcherism is preferable to the purer blend of Reaganism. Although it helped create wealth, Thatcherism is not a conservative philosophy. Socialism preaches redistribution of wealth through confiscation. Socialists therefore believe that wealth is limited. Conservatism should be the ultimate refutation of this idiocy, as we believe wealth is constantly being created through individual enterprise and initiative. Thatcherism preached only the pursuit of profit for its own sake. Profit is an essential part of conservatism, as it increases investment and employment opportunities. However, unlike the conservatism of Reagan, under Thatcher profit remained concentrated in very few hands. Although the release of funds for investment ensured that there was a wider variety of products for us to consume, the standard of living did not increase very much in real terms under the Iron Lady. The culture that Thatcherism helped produce has made the UK a very much less pleasant, coarser place to live, with very much more grasping, unpleasant and coarser people than it had thirty years ago.

Reagan was a conservative. Thatcher, ultimately, was a promoter of dog eat dog.

In the mind of Mrs. Thatcher, the pursuit of profit at all costs was allied to a marked reluctance to scale back the influence of government. Her ‘conservatism’ was not persuasive but coercive. Her great economic policy, ‘privatisation’, led the way in creating the disaster in energy supply that now seems to afflict both Europe and North America. The UK should have at least 25% spare production capacity at any one time; it now has only 16%. This is a gap caused by poor management, profit rather than investment-driven. While the bills go up, the bonuses for the big guys go up, with the integrity of the infrastructure always a poor second best. The Conservative Party touts privatisation as a great success, forgetting that, by raising money for the government through selling public assets on the stock market, the people most likely to benefit were those who already possessed capital. As soon as most little guys bought shares in a privatised industry, they took advantage of a one-day bull market and bought themselves a VCR or a Spanish vacation with the proceeds, and man, did they feel rich! This was not true capitalism, but a phoney capitalism, based not on investment and trading but solely on trading. Under Thatcher, new business failure rates and personal bankruptcies both increased, aided by avaricious banks eager to turn profits of billions of pounds every year.

Economically, Thatcher partially failed.

There was no genuine attempt on her part to promote social conservatism - indeed, under Thatcher, it was enshrined in law that in an unmarried relationship that bore children, the father had no rights. Although the Local Government Act of 1988 did ban the promotion of homosexuality in schools, in the face of the screams of the militant left, Thatcherism had no place for a debate on the death penalty. It had no place for a review of the abortion laws. It had no place for wholesale reform of public schooling. It had no place for a wholesale reform of the welfare state. It had no place for dismantling the publicly funded race relations industry, which has been a politically motivated gravy train for all those concerned since the passing of the Race Relations Act in 1976, a piece of legislation that smeared whites and infantilised the ethnic minorities. It did enable occupiers of public housing to buy their own homes, with a generous subsidy, which, given the economics of the housing sector, has left the state out of pocket and thousands of people with properties they can’t sell. It had no place for any large scale increases in national defence. It had no place for wholesale reform of the criminal justice system. Its attempts to reform the National Health Service were entirely economic in nature, such as introducing the ‘internal market’ where bureaucrats were employed to attempt the impossible trick of getting a state industry to run like a private corporation by spending all day billing each other for the supply of bandages and screwdrivers.

Socially, Thatcher failed.

Her challenges were of a different nature to Reagan’s, to be sure – organised labour in the UK in 1979 had a political power in a different league to that of American Big Labor, Dick Gephardt style. As Reagan struggled with foreign communism, Thatcher had to fight that fight on her doorstep, leading to the breaking of organised labour and the death of the coal industry. The UK sits on an ocean of coal, enough to enable us to be energy sufficient for five hundred years. Thatcher’s public scepticism of the European Union did not prevent her from signing up to open borders and, ultimately, greater political integration, meaning that our policies on fossil fuel emissions are now made from Brussels. Margaret Thatcher, perhaps unwittingly, colluded in the withdrawal of liberty from the British people, who have never had American-style liberty, and whose own great struggles for liberty are rapidly becoming a folk memory at best, at worst an uncomfortable thought that sends them off in search of a beer can and the remote. Thatcherism’s ultimate arbiter, the bottom line, is that Thatcherism benefited far fewer Brits than Reaganism benefited Americans. So it’s Reagan’s lead the President should follow.

The Republican primaries were held in New Hampshire on January 27th, with Mr. Bush taking 79% of the vote. The scale of his victory should not be his ultimate concern. That should be reclaiming his lost 21%. From now on, the most important demographic he will face is the group that should be called the ‘twenty-one percenters’. These are some issues on which he should campaign vigorously, as he might find them coming back into his camp.

If Mr. Bush cannot cut the deficit he created, he should not be President. This should be done as follows.

Freeze Public Sector Recruitment

Rule one from the Dutch Reagan playbook. He did it in California, and then again in Washington. Worked every time. Every day a wealth creator in the private sector is subjected to the humiliation of the redundancy notice. Their colleagues have to shoulder the burden caused by their absence. There is no reason why the servants of the public should not have to work under the same pressures as those who pay the taxes that pay them, particularly when they enjoy terms and conditions of employment that many in the private sector can only dream of.

Cut Regulation

Rule two. What is the function of regulation? One directive recently introduced from the European Union is that there must be competition in the provision of telephone directory services. In the UK, this was always dealt with by one company, BT, whose service, 192, was as well known as the emergency services. Instead, we now have the stupid position of having a multitude of service providers, all of whose numbers are prefixed 118, and whose service and reliability fall far below anything ever provided by BT. Rich Lowry of the National Review has reported on the great form of trade protectionism operated by the florist trade in Louisiana, the home of licensed floristry. The licensing process includes an exam, which prospective florists fail regularly. Doctors and lawyers are well accustomed to having the first twenty-five cents on every dollar they earn consumed by mandatory professional indemnity insurance, but florists? Of course, it suits those who are already florists to insist on high standards, as it means they can restrict competition. These two industries are being destroyed by regulation. In any practical sense, you only ever need one telephone directory service. On the other hand, if an enterprising person with green-fingers wants to open an outlet besides the Governor’s mansion, in order to follow the conservative ideal of independence from the state, they are made to jump through hoops of fire to justify a licence they’ll need to renew annually and no doubt pay a fee for every time.

Cut Taxes, Cut Taxes, Cut Taxes

Thus spoke a genius, Milton Friedman. What are the functions of government?

Firstly, to ensure that the borders are secure. Secondly, to ensure that the highways are clean and passable. Thirdly, to ensure the security of citizens through the maintenance of a military. That, folks, is really just about it. It most certainly is not the function of government to give. It has nothing to give – all of its revenues re derived from individual citizens in the form of taxation. Corporate taxes, a favourite tool of socialists because the ultimate consumer at the end of the supply chain doesn’t see an increase in income tax, are bogus, because the price of goods and services available to the ultimate taxpayer always increase in line with any rises in corporation tax. The President should undertake not to cut, but instead abolish, all of these taxes in his second term – dividend tax, inheritance tax, any stamp duties, capital gains tax, airport taxes, all fuel taxes and sales taxes. He should commit himself to a further reduction in income tax rates and a reduction in the rates of corporation taxes. The abolitions are plans for the medium and long terms. Another income tax cut would produce another spurt of growth, signposted by job creation and consumer spending, sending him surfing into November. A cut in the rate of corporation tax would increase the availability of funds for investment.

Cut Services

By any means necessary. It is not the historic function of a Republican President working with a Republican Congress to sign into law one of the biggest public spending programs ever, Medicare. They’re not supposed to do things like that, in the same way that whales aren’t supposed to spontaneously combust. Bad news for The President. A whale spontaneously combusted in Taiwan last week, and if it can happen to Moby, it can happen to you. There is only one sure-fire way of reducing deficits, and it is reducing the services they fund while keeping an eye on the essentials of Apache helicopters and 5-pound robot drone aircraft. Something’s got to give.

If a conservative does not believe that all should live free, they are not conservative. What differs between conservatives is how liberty is to be achieved. This is how to tackle that dilemma.

Liberty Through Strength

Reagan realised that deterrence is only achieved by being stronger than your opponent. The threats have moved on, but the capacity of hatred of the Islamists and the remaining Communists remains undimmed. Strength can now be projected in different ways than by having tank divisions facing each other in Germany. Strength can be achieved by ensuring that there are enough Arabic speakers in the CIA. It can be achieved by ensuring that all non-resident aliens who outstay their visas are returned to the country from which they entered the USA immediately. It can be achieved through adopting a holistic, universal approach to all aspects of security policy, that you have the courage to implement. Oh, and by the way, still keep spending plenty on guns.

Liberty Through Trade

Since when did conservatives subsidise Communism? Whenever you buy anything hallmarked ‘Made in China’. China’s ability to export goods to the USA should be based on its commitment to ending the Communist system and adopting the liberal democratic system.

Similarly, the House of Saud is permitted to hire Americans to do jobs that Saudi citizens are unwilling to do. In the past, the ruling house has then used the revenues these Americans have generated in order to fund extremism in America. There is no reason why every expatriate American working in Saudi Arabia should not be required to cease and desist from working for any Saudi employer until full, free, fair and absolutely representative elections are held in that country.

Reclaiming Conservatism for All

There is too much time spent debating fripperies like ‘neo-conservatism’ and ‘paleo-conservatism’. Conservatism seems to have been reduced to the sort of bickering we used to criticise the Communists for.

What follows is a good example of how dumb this is. In March 2003, David Frum wrote an article called ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ for National Review Online, attacking those conservatives who had publicly spoken out against the foreign policy of George W. Bush, including Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak and the editorial board of Chronicles. Frum, whose attitude is sometimes unhelpfully selective, goes back to the beginning of this debate in the 1980’s, outlining every instance of divergence. Chronicles shot back by publishing a partial reply called The Lies of David Frum. These are people who agree with each other on just about everything social, everything economic, and everything judicial. They have one principal area of difference, foreign policy, and it ends with both camps calling each other liars. This is conduct one step removed from the straightjacket. It is ludicrous of David Frum to mention the name of Pat Buchanan in any article called ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’. Whatever else your opinion of Buchanan the critic or Buchanan the thinker and ideologue, it is disgracefully disrespectful and unfair to accuse him of lacking patriotism. Similarly, neo-conservatives will praise Senator Zell Miller to the rafters for endorsing President Bush, while actively criticising those who have expressed many of the same views as themselves for many, many years. Is there not a palpable contradiction here?

As a campaign pledge, the President should reach out to all those he should have in his pockets and pledge to try to unify them. If he can’t unite the conservative movement, he won’t have a cat’s chance of uniting America. The greatest area of contention is, of course,

The War

The President has announced a probe into the intelligence failings that have led to the resignation of David Kay. For critics of the war, there has been a consistency in the President’s actions since his focus switched from the defeat of the Taliban to Iraqi WMD in 2002. Firstly, yes, Saddam had refused to publicly disarm. He had not co-operated with any UN Resolution, most particularly 1441, which demanded that he show he had got rid of the weapons. Iraqi regime change has been official American policy since at least 1998, so a very strong case can be made that if the war was an error, it was at least a consistent error. My own view is that any WMD’s Saddam had in his possession were removed from Iraq, and are probably now in either Syria or Lebanon. Also, one cannot really divorce oneself from the idea that he was a bad guy and it was a good and worthy end in itself to remove him.

However, there is a dangerous and foolish proposition abroad, which is gaining increasing currency. It is that Saddam’s officials knew they didn’t have WMD, but lulled Saddam into thinking they had. In any socialist autocracy, nothing happens without the top guy’s say-so. If Iraq didn’t have WMD, Saddam would have known about it, and therefore would have had no reason not to comply with 1441. The President might make this point by maybe ditching or moving sideways one of the neo-conservatives in the Administration, as a gesture of reconciliation towards conservative sceptics. He might also think, now, of firing George Tenet, nearly thirty months after he should have walked anyway.

Preserving the Family

Being inclusive is great, if the folks you’re including have the same values and beliefs you have. Laws are intended to be an expression of the people’s will. If a legislator or executive acts against the people’s will, like tripling the car tax, the people will very soon make their frustration known. Liberals don’t buy that. They believe that if a society doesn’t conform to their belief system, the square peg of conservatism has to be made to fit into the round hole of inclusion. Their preferred tactic is through the use of the historic scope given to the American judiciary to interpret the Constitution according to the facts of the cases in front of them. As more and more liberal judges are appointed, the likelihood of any unconstitutional judgment being reversed diminishes due to the increased number of liberal judges in the appellate courts, a phenomenon played out to perfection in Goodridge. For all their distaste for markets, liberals seem to have a great taste for families a la carte, where you can pick the type of family you have like going for a buffet lunch or buying a bespoke suit.

This is not the case. The President should make the passage of a Constitutional Amendment preserving the status of the family a matter of the utmost importance, combined with, just for once, a public statement of principle towards the complete adoption of the socially conservative agenda. People, by and large, are socially conservative. The fact that liberal intellectuals and opinion formers are so physically and mentally distant from the guys in the lunch queue at the car plant, a group whose moral seriousness and attention to detail is often grossly under-estimated, that they can’t see this is one of the biggest tools the President might have. By re-connecting with the little guys, the group by whom the Republican Party stands or falls, and helping them know that the integrity of their families is of the same importance to him as it is to them.

These might just be a few pointers along the way. The most important thing for George W. Bush, though, is to learn the ultimate lesson of Margaret Thatcher. Although she achieved something, she will forever be remembered for sticking to her own plans. More often than not, she gave the impression of not being willing to listen. Look what happened to her.

A Drawing Down Of Blinds

2006-03-22T15:11:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 2, 2004

On January 28th Lord Brian Hutton published the report of his enquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly. The substance of his findings is that after he unwittingly acted as a source for the BBC’s Andrew Gilligan, and his full confession to his bosses, the circumstances surrounding the Blair Government’s decision to make Kelly’s name known were entirely proper, although the Ministry of Defence could have given him more notice that this was to occur. The blame, such as it is, is apportioned entirely to the BBC for sloppy editorial control and refusing to back down when Hutton believed it should have been clear to them that their position was untenable.

Accordingly, the Hutton Report clears Blair and his acolytes of any wrongdoing, a perfect end to a day that could otherwise have seen the end of his Premiership.

The most pathetic thing about the whole episode is how a little guy, albeit a very distinguished little guy like David Kelly, can be chewed up and spat out by those whose agendas are self-promotion and the maintenance of position. When he went for his last long walk in the countryside, the implement that Kelly took with him with which to slit his wrist was not a kitchen implement, but his old pen-knife from the Boy Scouts fifty years before. The desire to have something of great sentimental value at hand as he took his own life shows him to have been utterly crushed by a process that a senior judge has called legitimate. If the circumstances of the release of his name were legitimate, so therefore must have been the three days of debriefing beforehand, where he is alleged to have been threatened with the loss of his pension rights at the age of fifty-nine. The process where he was hung out to dry by the Ministry of Defence, compelled to appear before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee without a lawyer, must also be legitimate. The process whereby he was given five minutes notice to leave his house before the press arrived must also be legitimate. To paraphrase the magazine Private Eye, if that is legitimacy, I am a banana.

The immediate repercussions for the BBC have been dramatic. Its chairman, Gavyn Davies, has resigned. Davies is a former partner in Goldman Sachs whose wife, Sue Nye, has been the head of the private office of Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer and effectively Prime Minister in waiting. Brown is godfather to one of his children. A little tarnish has settled on his gild, a gild burnished to a lustre on the backs of people like David Kelly.

Hutton’s criticism of the BBC is probably accurate. Andrew Gilligan’s first claim, that the September 2002 dossier presented to Parliament claiming that Iraq’s WMD could deploy within forty-five minutes had been ‘sexed-up’ on Government orders and based on a transcript of an interview with Kelly, had been unscripted and unedited, a hideous oversight even at 0607 hours. Thereafter, given the very aggressive nature of the BBC’s opposition to the war, both Davies and Greg Dyke, the Director-General and Editor-in-Chief, backed their man all the way down the line, even when he was discovered sending e-mails to members of the Foreign Affairs Committee suggesting questions that they ask Kelly. For years, the BBC has been a disgrace, an Augean Stables waiting to be cleaned. It is a pity it has to be washed in the blood of David Kelly, whose patriotism and desire to achieve disarmament were never in doubt.

However, as in all power games, the most successful is the least deserving. For Tony Blair, everything’s coming up roses. The day before, he had won a vote on the introduction of back-ended tuition fees by just five votes, by exhibiting his usual cavalier contempt for our unwritten constitution. Imagine a scenario where State Senators from Ohio are drafted in to vote on education policy in Wyoming. That’s a rough approximation of the evening of January 27th, when Scottish MP’s, whose constituents would have been unaffected by the proposed change, supported the Government preventing it from being defeated by a majority of only five. Blair lives to fight another day, and we now know for the record that it’s possible for people like Blair to chair meetings where a decision is made to name a man, deny you did it and not be a liar. Like his pal Bono said, It’s A Beautiful Day.

Meanwhile Gavyn Davies has lost his job, Tony lives to fight another day and David Kelly’s dead and gone. In his great anti-war poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', Wilfred Owen, killed in action a week before the armistice in 1918 and writing of the flower of his generation slaughtered in the mud, hacking on the mustard gas David Kelly spent his working life tracking down, described their deaths thus:

“What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of silent maids,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds”

Brian Hutton has drawn down the blinds on the death of David Kelly without giving all due credit where it belongs. Kelly lives on. The public will not forget what Blair did to him. Or forgive.

Beaker People

2006-03-22T15:09:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 28, 2004

The Beaker Peoples were prehistoric Celtic tribes, so called because of the earthenware they produced. A story I’ve heard about one such tribe, supposed to have lived in the west of Scotland the time of the Roman invasion, may be entirely apocryphal, but would explain why their civilisation didn’t survive. Like the Gauls a century before, they were undone by superstition.

Julius Caesar knew he could beat the Gauls when he learned these ferocious warriors were petrified of the sky falling on their heads. Similarly, the Beaker People believed they could make themselves invisible to their opponents. They believed that this was affected by standing in individual pits of shoulder height, from which their heads were clearly visible. They didn’t stand a chance against a Roman cavalry charge.

Many superstitions, masking dogmas, still dominate liberal thought, threatening us in the same way as the Beaker Peoples’ superstition destroyed them. Four such superstitions appeared in the UK last week, largely as a result of our fetish for now creating life in beakers as opposed to families, showing that our civilisation is far more fragile than we might wish, for if the bonds of family are cut, or if there are no children being produced, how can a civilisation have any future at all?

The first instance was the depressing news that two lesbians from Liverpool had paid over £1,500 for sperm over the Internet, and that one of them is expecting. How thrilling, though I’m sure little Jimmy Osmond would be appalled. So great was their desire to have that they did not think whether they should, as not only does this form of conception carry grave risks (they were presumably more willing to turn a blind eye to whether the donor was honest in his submission than with a man whom they had met face to face), it is one of the ultimate proofs of the new, middle-class, and it has to be said, gay-driven fad that having kids is a right. I hope they all live Happily Ever After.

Secondly, the improbably named Suzi Leather, head of the UK’s Embryology Authority, has made a public proclamation that she doesn’t believe families need fathers. I’m not sure of what her own domestic background, but the appointment of man-hating uber-feminists to jobs so sensitive as hers is yet another example of the politicisation of gender gone mad. Unlike how you vote in the booth, when you’re alone with your principles, the fact whether one possesses two ‘X’ chromosomes or an ‘X’ and a ‘Y’ is a matter that is sub-political. Put simply, it merely is, it is not a matter politics can change. Fatherhood is one of the planks of civilisation. There have always been bad fathers, yes, but there have always been bad mothers as well. Unlike the slavishness of Suzi Leather’s ideology, families are families, only one thing, a father, mother and children, and if she’s too dumb to hear that, I can hear the approaching hoofs of the Dacian horsemen.

Very much more sinister than this, however, are the views of Professor John Harris. Harris, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester and the government’s leading adviser on the subject, said in largely unreported evidence before the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee –

“I don’t think infanticide is always unjustifiable. I don’t think that it’s plausible to think that there is any moral change that occurs along the journey down the birth canal”

Thus spoke Tony Blair’s top adviser on bioethics issues, a Beaker man if ever there was one. That’s a man who influences policy. Ave atque Vale, Hail and Farewell.

Lastly, and most footling, the rights of children born of sperm donors got a big boost when it was noted that plans are afoot to give them the right to have information about the donor’s identity. Sperm donation is an odd hobby, one I’ve never really considered taking up, which as just as well, as the prospect of there being forty others like me is just too horrible to contemplate, although it might work wonders for Scottish conservatism. At a time where our borders are patently insecure, the best effort of Government is directed towards pacifying a demographic so tiny that their political influence would need to be measured with an electron microscope.

The Beakers didn’t make the grade, no matter how great their plates were. If we keep this up, neither will we, which is sad. As Bertrand, Earl Russell, author of Principia Mathematica and an avid supporter of unilateral nuclear disarmament said in the 1950’s ‘Some of us feel the elimination of western civilisation would be something of a pity’. Your Grace, I couldn’t agree more, and yet, I still hear the hoofbeats approaching. God help us all, because Suzi Leather and John Harris certainly won’t.

The Glories of your Ways

2006-03-22T15:05:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 27, 2004

Watching American politics from the safe distance of 3,000 miles reminds one of the importance of culture. Your system is bound with many glories, to which many of you sometimes seem wilfully blind. The effluvia released into common thought since the 1960’s, such as the idea that you are divided by race, does not factor in that you are united by culture. It is only the culture that unites you that could produce ideas designed to divide you. There is nowhere in the world where a guy like Julian Bond (‘The FDNY is a racially restricted guild’) could be taken seriously other than in America, as a result of American values and American culture.

Similarly, there is nowhere in the world where a hypocrite like Michael Moore could prosper so well as in the USA. I sometimes wonder if he’s of Scottish extraction, as he seems to exhibit the same brand of sneering, arrogant obnoxiousness shared by all too many of my countrymen. However, because he’s an ardent student of American culture, he’s been able to make a hypocritical fortune for himself out of trying to smash down the edifices of American society, earning himself a Park Avenue pad, an Academy Award and most importantly, and incredibly, a degree of credibility in the process. Only in America.

The controversial Appropriations Bill has just passed through Congress, and according to Townhall there are many dollars in the pot for both Alaska and West Virginia. Just as you were starting to save some money, Robert C. Byrd rides to the rescue of the Federal government yet again! One can imagine him thinking of Congress like a barber’s shop or shoe store. Which particular Robert C. Byrd Institute of Bovine Dental Health/ Particle Accelerator/ Blue Ridge Mountains Windsurfing Centre is it to be today, sir? In other societies and at other times, people like Byrd and Ted Stevens, the Great North Republican porker, would have been put in the stocks and had rotten vegetables thrown at them, because at some point one or other of them will dare to criticise President Bush about the cost of the Medicare program. There are words for people like Byrd and Stevens, the proper usages of which have fallen into desuetude. From now on, Byrd should be called a rogue, Stevens a rapscallion. But Byrd, Stevens, Arlen Specter and the other noted porkers would not be able to operate the scheme without the uniquely American system of complete separation of powers, requiring the consent of both President and Congress, the ultimate politics of compromise. Given that Jefferson and the Federalists envisioned loose government, Central Pork would have been the last thing on their minds. However, maybe the pork shows the system does work, to the benefit of the Robert C. Byrd Institute for the Study of Standards in Public Life.

In this coming election year, folks, please take some time to reflect on the nature of your society, history and culture. Whether it’s from the practice of democracy, which you do better than anyone else, to the esteem in which you hold your veterans, to the dynamism of your traditions of free speech and free enquiry, remember that not only are those out there in the world who hate you, remember there are others who love what you are and what you stand for and who are very grateful for the fact that you’re there. America is indeed a glorious country. While there are still people in the world who want to be free, she will forever so remain.

The Hellfire Club

2006-03-22T15:03:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 26, 2004

If one must sin, then sin big. The Hellfire Club, a group of dissolutes who terrorised London in the late eighteenth century, lived and died by that principle, once kicking a stranger to death for kicks. That time in history also produced Deacon William Brodie of Edinburgh, by day the Dean of the city’s Guild of Cabinetmakers, by night its crime boss, with a hand in everything from burglaries to cockfighting. Brodie’s story so frightened the young Robert Louis Stevenson that he used him as the model for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

On January 23rd, the Deacon was abroad again, 216 years after he was hanged. Dr. Jenny Tonge was forced to stand down from her post as a frontbench spokeswoman for the British Liberal Democrats, after making a comment that if she were a Palestinian, she would consider becoming a suicide bomber. That is not a stupid comment. It is a very calculated statement of support for killers from someone who so hates the State of Israel they are willing to incite others to kill for no reason other than hatred of Zionism. It is particularly incendiary given that the person who holds the title of Leader of the Opposition, Michael Howard, is Jewish, in a country where one in five are reported to be uncomfortable with the idea of having a Jewish Prime Minister. It could only have come from someone living in conditions of affluent free speech, earning a good wage at someone else’s expense (mine) and with the ability to indulge their preferences and prejudices unfettered by any form of self-discipline. By thus praising the homicide bombers, Jenny Tonge expressed a desire to feel the Devil’s pain.

There are many others, of course, who aspire to membership of the Hellfire Club. Old Bandy Legs himself, Robert Duvall, has taken Steven Spielberg to task for saying that the time he spent in Fidel Castro’s company was ‘the most important seven hours of his life’. The meal stuffed into the mouths of some liberals forces them to call homicide bombers ‘activists’ or ‘dissidents’, while calling Castro a democrat. Right now, Castro, once portrayed as a comic opera brigand, is holding a real dissident and activist, Dr. Oscar Biscet, in conditions more suited to the days of Devil’s Island, for daring to have the courage to be a seeker of liberty. What, surely, is more American than to seek liberty? And why isn’t President Bush focussing more on the Devil on his own Doorstep, who, according to Insight Magazine in 2002, might have been aiding Saddam with WMD programmes?

What has happened here seems to be a reversal of the Monroe Doctrine. Saddam bad, Fidel, like, we ignore, dude, OK? Are the Americas the only place in the world where people aren’t supposed to be free? No, actually. The world’s fastest growing economy is China. China, the land of genocide on the female foetus, is a country where a billion people suffer under the yolk of a dead philosophy, maintained only to ensure that a small imperial elite get to keep the good jobs, the big houses, the big cars and the kickbacks. All governments in the European Union and both governments in North America are complicit in this, by continuing to permit the tsunami of cheap imports the Chinese produce. The Chinese people should not have to suffer so that Europeans and North Americans can buy cheap cutlery. According to the Milhous-like George Trefgarne of The Daily Telegraph, the wealth of the Chinese elite is increasing at a rate far out of proportion to any trickle down reaching the poor schleps who are losing limbs in the foundries. Such satanic hauteur will meet an accounting far more desperate than anything the most vicious apostle of the Cultural Revolution could produce. Their Great Leap Forward will be a Great Fall Downward, but like Lauryn Hill said, they still have time to repent.

Sometimes, it seems that nations and civilisations are beyond redemption. Mugabe, Black Hitler, is without doubt Africa’s Enemy of Liberty Number One. The Zanu-PF movement he leads is exactly like the Hellfire Club. There have been two reports recently of two white farmers being beaten to death for no reason other than that they are white. For all his other failings, President Bush has banned senior associates of Mugabe’s like Nolbert Konunga, Episcopalian Bishop of Harare from travelling to the USA. What, ahem, is Senator Kerry’s position on Zimbabwe? Or Governor Dean’s? Or, dare we ask, Reverend Sharpton’s? Zimbabwe is a country and people crying out to be free. For them, liberty is still within living memory, they just want their country back, a country that is one of the planet’s most beautiful and productive spaces, to be free from the tyranny of a nasty old man with a stupid looking wee moustache. We don’t seem to be doing anything substantial to help them.

Jenny Tonge apologises for evil because of the living conditions of some Palestinians. Tony Blair fails to take action against the evil of Robert Mugabe because he is petrified of being called a racist. Whichever witchdoctor thought up racism made powerful juju. Failing to recognise the presence of evil, even when it’s shouting ‘God is Great!’ is the easiest way for it to win. When Osama decided to take on the USA, Bill Clinton, just about the only modern political figure who could trump the Hellfire Club in his desire to satisfy his own appetites, sat on his behind and did nothing of any substance whatsoever. All the Hellfire Club needs to do to win is for us to ignore them. That is a principle that Hamas, Jenny Tonge, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe and the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party know all too well. Hell Mend Them.

Parsing the President

2006-03-22T14:57:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly

January 23, 2004

The very words ‘State of The Union’ have a dignity, majesty almost, that has no comparison in the boorish politics of the House of Commons. The day after the apple-cheeked Democrats of Iowa threw a curveball into the Presidential ambitions of Howard Dean, proving that punditry is dead and giving Republicans the opportunity to publicly pick over the carcass of John Kerry’s Senate voting record, the President gave the State of The Union address for 2004. It was, to say the least, odd.

I don’t pretend to understand the complexities of things like your Medicare system – indeed, one imagines there are few who do. But reading the transcript of SOTU 2004 raises at least ten points that are either downright inaccurate or only capable of leading to further confusion and expense.

“Inside the United States, where the war on terror began”

That’s an assertion with which survivors of the Beirut Marine barracks bombing of 1983 might disagree. Similarly, relatives of Americans killed in the Lockerbie bombing or the kin of Leon Klinghoffer, thrown over the side of the Achille Lauro in his wheelchair, might also take some issue with it. Indeed, relations of citizens killed by the Unabomber, the Weather Underground and the madman McVeigh, a man who obviously had no idea how lucky he was to have been born an American, also might disagree with it. Regular drinkers at the world’s most bombed hotel, the Europa Hotel in Belfast, would certainly disagree. What woke the American political establishment to terror was not the absence of terror, which was always there, but the shocking realisation that the wolf was not only at the door, he was in the house, prowling round the furniture and probably carrying a Saudi passport. Although the President made a formal declaration of a war posture, he still did not frame it properly. This is a war not on terror, but on terrorists.

“(Afghanistan) has a new constitution…guaranteeing full participation by women"

Well, we’ll see. Given that the new constitution gives supremacy of place to Islam, all that’s needed is a few good fatwas and the rocky path of Afghan feminism will once more be headed down the mountain.

“We will expect….a higher standard from our friends”

So, Mr. President, when do you plan to move on Riyadh? Given the reluctance of our sybaritic nomad friends to at least try to give some form of liberty to their people, while retaining their staggering appetite for opulence, it’s perhaps too easy to say that you now expect a higher standard from them. Maybe not letting them enter America so easily might be a better start.

Doubling the endowment of the National Endowment

If he is sure that this will be money well spent, then well and good. However, history shows that immediate doubling of budgets sometimes translates as the immediate purchase of very nice office equipment. There is nothing public servants love more than having money to spend, particularly someone else’s and lots of it. If the measure is passed, keep an eye on the expense accounts.

Is George W. Bush the Patron Saint of Further Education?

“(He will help) Americans gain the skills to find good jobs in our new economy” – A very bold, sweeping statement that neglects two critical factors. Firstly, what is a good job? Do you class a good job by salary and benefits, or by flexibility of working hours and time it gives you with your family? Do you class it by the opportunities for promotion, or by the opportunities for training that the post offers? Does your boss strew rose petals in your path when you come into work every day? The naked truth of economic life is that there is a job for everyone. It might not be the job you want, it might not be what the President classes as a ‘good job’, but they perform the function of providing a wage. A job has no other function. When politicians start talking about ‘good jobs’, it’s emotive and wholly unrealistic. A good job is usually the one you have. Ask Saddam Hussein. The President wasn’t altogether concrete in the amount of money he proposes should be spent on the massive expansion of further education he’s proposing. With good reason.

The Jobs for the 21st Century Program

Any program inviting civilians into schools must have at least two basic safeguards built in. Firstly, those civilians must not pose any form of danger to students, and secondly that their provenance as experts must be above criticism. If either of these fail, the program fails. A third safeguard will be necessary to prevent some employers billing the federal government for the services of workers who were in the office when they should have been in class. In such cases, a prolonged period of detention should be required.

The Temporary Workers Program

Might one suggest that it is made an integral art of this program that if any person in the USA under the Program commits a felony or is arrested as a threat to national security, the program is suspended? That should be a sufficient threat to all those who plan to abuse the program for their own purposes. After 9/11, any new immigration program should have teeth.

“Four hundred thousand fewer young people…taking drugs”

This is an incredibly specific statistic pointing to an incredibly big change in social habits. Wait! He almost had me! Firstly, he provides no definition of a young person. Although I still feel young at heart, my shaving mirror tells me something different. Manipulated demographics and a wholemeal diet can keep you young at fifty. Secondly, he provides no data on whether the drugs being abstained from are soft or hard. He could be talking about half a million kids giving up cannabis, while a hundred thousand have taken up heroin. He has made an intellectually lazy, feelgood assertion that demands further investigation.

Drug testing in schools

My dad, a retired grade-school principal who was in post for twenty-three years, has an excellent observation on the use of the school as an instrument for the advancement of social policy. JPK says that if you want to kill something stone dead, you teach it in school. Literacy declined with the advent of mass education. The practice of Catholicism has declined at a rate inversely proportional to the availability of Catholic education. The function of the school is to teach, it is not to act as the parent, the priest or the cop. It will be very interesting to see how this policy plays out in under funded sink public high schools in deprived inner-city areas all across America.

“3 million teenagers contract an STD (each year)”

The population of America is what, 300 million, tops? Of those 300 million, assume that at most, one in six is between the ages of 12 and 20. Takes you to 50 million. The President is asserting that six percent of all American teenagers contract an STD every year. I don’t believe that. Again, it’s based on incomplete statistics. He does not say where in the USA the majority of these illnesses are contracted. He does not give the breakdown between the comparative rates of male and female contraction. He does not specify the breakdown of contraction rates between life-threatening and non life-threatening STD’s.

This was a speech with something for everyone, just as might be expected in an election year. However, the people the President shouldn’t be looking to alienate are not those he should know he’ll never win, but the people who supported him in 2000, still consider themselves conservative but who are tired of public-interest spending, such as giving massive boosts to further education. This year of all years, he should know that he cannot be all things to all people. That way leads to Crawford.

Britney Spears – Pioneer of Law Reform

2006-03-22T14:46:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 14, 2004

What a silly lady she is. Britney Spears’ 55-hour, horror-movie-inspired, drink-fuelled marriage to Jason Alexander was ended in annulment, providing a million headlines and a rotten example.

One can’t take too many issues with her. She is out of her minority, certainly, but the nature of the life she’s led, probably pushed into from her early minority, is not known for its adherence to the principles of Carmelite monasticism. Conservative columnists are sometimes blind to the idea that conservatism is different from censoriousness, and of the importance of forgiving acts which, although stupid at the time and embarrassing afterwards, are unlikely to cause long-term moral harm to either Miss Spears or Mr. Alexander, no matter how many newspaper deals either of them might do to discuss the union. They did not deliberately set out to insult the idea of marriage. Their ability to contract a marriage under the daftest of circumstances is no reason for introducing gay marriage – it is very clever of advocates of gay marriage to use Miss Spears’ wedding as a counterpoint to gay couples in committed relationships unable to marry. What Miss Spears did was just dumb and is no excuse for the massive reform of the law that gay marriage would be.

However, in the January 9th National Review Online, in a desperately ungallant article the controversialist John Derbyshire, writing about the Spears-Alexander marriage, perhaps unwittingly stumbles onto one solution for limiting the divorce pandemic sweeping the English-speaking world. The solution is to make getting married harder.

What is not strange about this case is that two boozed-up twenty-two year olds should decide to do something stupid. What is incredibly strange is that they can decide to get married, complete all the necessary legal formalities (presumably both reeking of drink as only twenty-two year olds can), find a wedding chapel and do the deed - all in the middle of the night! Does Nevada ever sleep? I know we live in a 24-hour world, but it is madness to permit weddings at five in the morning. Who would want to get married at that time, other than boozed-up twenty-two year olds?

In my country, forty days need to pass between publication of intention to marry and the actual wedding itself. The shortest marriage I ever advised on lasted two weeks. The shortest that I know of broke down at the wedding reception. It can take years to get out of a marriage, which is perhaps why the State of Nevada factors in the likelihood of frivolous marriages within its borders by allowing the kind of easy annulment that Miss Spears has had.

The guy who said that love is blind was onto something. There is nothing in the world more contrary than the human heart, with bonds of genuine love and affection surviving even the most traumatic experiences. I cannot count the number of times in which a woman, and it was always a woman, would sit crying her heart out mourning the end of a marriage that was hideous for her to endure. Human love is the most powerful of all emotions. There is no reasoning with it. Although any experienced divorce lawyer should say that the number of divorces in which the fault for the breakdown is entirely the fault of one party is miniscule, a couple’s commitment to the idea of marriage is the one thing that can’t be tested when they apply for a marriage licence – at the moment.

Long marriages break down. The longest I ever advised on lasted twenty-five years. The longest marriage I know of to have broken down lasted an incredible fifty-seven years. The fact that couples stay together for long periods is no guarantee of success. However, the one thing that should be tested prior to applying for the licence is commitment.

What facilitated Miss Spears’ midnight madness was the ability provided to her by the State of Nevada to marry on a whim. If the whim factor were reduced, and she knew that Mr. Alexander and herself would have to wait for twelve months after applying for a marriage licence in order to actually marry, none of this fiasco would ever have happened. To use an old legal expression ‘the scales would have fallen from their eyes’, they would both have sobered up and felt just stupid. Instead of stupid and married.

Some couple wait for years before getting married. There is no guarantee that their marriages will work, however, they will go into marriage having a far better idea of that their spouse is really like than in crackpot, hole in the corner affairs like Miss Spears’. You can forget liberal laws on community property, liberal laws on custody or access, feminist laws on spousal abuse or reform of inheritance law as ways of regulating good behaviour within marriages. What makes marriage work is knowledge and commitment. And waiting for a year will enable both parties to a marriage have a far better idea as to what the other is actually like without later having to engage the state in providing resources to deal with the social aftermath of marital breakdown, judges and counsellors.

Any brave Member of Congress up for it?

Arabia's Ugly Truths

2006-03-22T14:43:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 13, 2004

It is an unfortunate truth of history that on September 11th 2001, Arabs danced in the streets on hearing of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Men slapped each other on the back. Adults passed candy out to kids. The murder of 3,000 people was treated as a cause for celebration, like winning a soccer match.

On January 9th, a British talkshow host, Robert Kilroy-Silk, was suspended for pointing out not only that Arabs did that, but that Arabs also carried out the attacks, in an article for the following weekend’s Sunday Express.

The Arab and Islamist lobbies will make short work of Kilroy-Silk, formerly a Labour MP. Silk is not above reproach, having written the same article for the same column about nine months ago. However, the example that the BBC will make of him out of fear of being branded ‘racists’, is a perfect example of aggressive lobbying by special interest groups without any interest in anything other than their own advancement.

The cheerleader for Kilroy-Silk’s ostracism is Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Great Britain. There is not, to my knowledge, any Protestant or Catholic Councils of Great Britain, but hey, whatever. Bunglawala is an ever-present professional Muslim, whose soft tones belie the fact that his aim is the advancement of the religion of Islam in secular societies. Like the more overt and aggressive Omar Bakri Mohammed of al-Muhajiroun and Abu Hamza al-Masri of the Society for Sharia, he is able to use westerners’ fear of ‘The Other’ to promote his own agenda. His agenda now includes dictating the content of programming provided by taxpayers for their own information and entertainment.

Not that Kilroy-Silk’s show is entertaining. It is sub-Donahue pap, on a moral par with the Jerry Springer show without the violence. His show is a sad parade of Nietzsche’s ‘the bungled and the botched’ parading their frailties for fifteen minutes on television. There is nothing whatsoever in his show that either elevates or edifies. But the fact his show is garbage doesn’t mean it should be off the air. If it’s to be taken off the air, better by viewer power or for breaches of broadcasting standards.

The truth that is so unpalatable for Inayat Bunglawala is that Robert Kilroy-Silk wrote a scrap of truth. There has never been any apology offered by the governments of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt for the conduct of their citizens in the aftermath of that dreadful act of war. With the exception of Egypt, only forced to do so by the power of superior arms, there has never been the slightest degree of willingness on their part to offer the olive branch to their beleaguered Jewish neighbour. There has never been the slightest intention on their part to show true brotherliness towards the people of Palestine. Why is it that in Lebanon, there are still camps called ‘refugee camps’? This was all over in 1949. It is because it is not in the political interest of the government of Lebanon to permit Palestinians to assimilate into the Lebanese population. Without the refugees, they have no stick to beat the Jews with.

Indeed, as Victor Davis Hanson and others have often rehearsed, there does not seem to be any intention on the part of the government of France to return those parts of Alsace-Lorraine it reclaimed from Germany after the Treaty of Versailles. There is no mass movement to return to German ownership the estates lost to Poland after the Second World War. The Turks aren’t so willing to return parts of their coastline to Greek control. Why then is Israel the only land in the world required to cede land it is perfectly entitled to claim under the law of conquest?

It is because for decades that area was the cockpit of the Cold War. The Jews were on the side of the Americans, so everyone else was with the Russians. Sandro Magister’s fine Catholic affairs website www.chiesa.com recently recounted that in Muslim countries, a Christian Church or a synagogue can only be built on top of existing ones. To build in another location is haram, forbidden, as that land is sacred to Allah. The same principle is why there will never be peace in the Middle East. The whole of the state of Israel is haram. It’s just got to go.

While we should at all times be understanding of their true plight, the plight of tyranny, we should never be blind to the sectarian nature of much Arab hostility to Israel and ultimately to ourselves. It is not possible to have the goodies, Internet, cellphones and satellite TV, without the cultures of free speech and free inquiry that make them happen. We in the West quite like our way of life. The sooner the Arabs learn the trick of doing it the way we do, we’ll all be better off.

Crimes Against Restraint

2006-03-22T14:34:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 12, 2004

One of Britain’s most eloquent commentarists, the doctor who writes under the name ‘Theodore Dalrymple’, has penned a rather sad little article for the January 3rd issue of The Spectator. Jay Nordlinger has called Dalrymple a modern Dickens for his trenchant but sometimes extremely sympathetic observations on the doings of the British underclass, a compliment with which it’s hard to disagree. The doctor has decided to call time on his medical practice and move to France. Although he is by no manner of means blind to the social problems facing France, he hopes to find a country where the city centres aren’t turned into no-go areas on Friday and Saturday nights, where there is still some understanding of the value of high culture and where there is some definite proof of the benefit of investment in public services.

I can’t say I blame him. Before I quit legal practice, my own dealings with the underclass can be encapsulated in a conversation I had with a client I was advising in a custody dispute in 1996. That lady had had no income other than benefits for at least twelve years. I suggested to her that, to aid her self-esteem, it might be in her personal best interests, and might aid her case, if she got herself a wee part-time job.

She laughed in my face. I will never forget that. Andy Obermann had the same experience when he saw the lady buying soda and gum with her food stamps.

What Theodore Dalrymple writes about is the same problem that affects both Britain and America, and is more fundamentally rooted than, is actually the father of, the death of shame. It is the almost complete absence of any form of restraint in the very highest and very lowest levels of society with the middle classes huddled in the lifeboats, a lack of restraint that in many cases has been forced upon the people by their politicians and opinion-formers without any regard as to whether the people themselves might be keen on the breakdown of the social barriers that have been their props for centuries. A good example is the career of Rupert Murdoch.

All those who praise all the works of Fox News should remember the foundations on which it is built. In 1969, Rupert Murdoch bought an English redtop called The Sun. Little more than a comic, it is now the best-selling daily newspaper in the UK. In order to give The Sun an advantage, Murdoch immediately introduced an image of a topless girl on page three of every issue, a practice that continues to this day. Like all of the most ruthless tycoons, Murdoch, with complete lack of restraint, was prepared to do what the others were not, and as a result introduced pornography into peoples’ homes on a daily basis. You can say, people don’t need to buy it. That’s true, but for most people, their newspaper is like their baseball team- - once you’re with it, you’re with it for life. Add to that the fact that it’s language is extremely simplistic, a testament to the general decline in literacy, and Murdoch has a winning combination. Although I’m sure Fox deserves praise for some parts of its perspective, it is part of the same NewsCorp family that produces The Sun. Although that’s no fault of the producers and executives of Fox, they are different expressions of the same mores. Those mores have been willing to introduce porn into the home in order to sell newspapers, which, although good economics, has nothing to do with conservatism. Indeed, they’ve probably helped to produce the social environment that Dalrymple is flying from, one where, in his own words, ‘blood is thicker than water, but lust is thicker than blood’ (Sunday Telegraph, August 2002).

The increase in the benefit culture in which my former client was so immersed is also entirely down to the breakdown in restraint. In the January 7th issue of the Daily Mail, John Bird, an advocate of homeless rights and founder of the campaigning magazine The Big Issue, only sold by the homeless on street corners, charts the real revolutionary change in the British approach to social security to the introduction of ‘supplementary benefit’ in 1968. Many on the left look back fondly to that year. For the majority of British citizens, it is memorable for being the only year in which a British soldier has not been killed in combat since 1945. For leftists like Christopher Hitchens, the thinking man’s Timothy Spall, it’s of course the year of the Prague Spring and the year when the French government was nearly brought to its knees by rioting students and Renault factory workers. Indeed, in one of his most pretentious statements, Hitchens recently described himself as a ‘sixty-eighter, or rather a soixante-huitard’, in an interview he gave to Front Page Magazine before Christmas.

According to John Bird, however, the introduction of supplementary benefit brought the idea that benefit could be paid indefinitely without any need to account for continued unemployment or indeed any desire to find work. Bird also makes the claim that there are now six million Britons who are classed as unfit to work. Six million is one in ten of the whole population, including infants and the retired. That is a statistical impossibility brought about by two different lacks of restraint. The first is the lack of restraint shown by some, if not many, claimants in making immodest or false claims for themselves. The second is the unwillingness of politicians to restrain abuses of the system.

This brings neatly into point President Bush’s recent initiatives on illegal immigration. On my only visit to the United States, a college trip in 1989, I saw a Central American sandwich waiter getting the Mother of All Dressing Downs from his supervisor at a very nice hotel in Washington D.C. I don’t know where that poor bloke is now, but I can still see the embarrassment on his face in front of the diners. I remember thinking, I wouldn’t do that guy’s job for all the money in the world. The problem is, certainly in the UK, there are too many people who think the way I do, which is why in a country with six million registered unfit to work, we need to supplement the work force by about 250,000 a year to do the jobs Brits won’t do. The Brits consider themselves better off claiming social security, and all the other materials that the Daily Mail produces, the horror stories about illegals claiming social security and organising crime gangs, is just footling in comparison with the unwillingness of some Brits to support themselves. And in case anyone thinks new immigration procedures are tough, in 1989 I had to declare on my visa application whether I was connected in any way to the government of Germany between 1933 and 1945. I was able to answer in the negative.

But the one group that always has to show restraint at all times and under all circumstances are what used to be called ‘the middle classes’, although the actual reality of middle class life is nothing like as secure as it used to be. One of the factors that Dalrymple cites in making his dash for freedom over the water is the familiarity with which he is addressed by the patients at his surgery, who call him ‘mate’, instead of ‘Doctor’. This is something with which I can absolutely empathise. The explosion in publicly-funded Legal Aid in the UK between 1949 and 1972 meant that it became not just possible but practical for lawyers to set up small practices on their own. As a result, the number of street level lawyers proliferated from 1972 onwards. The economics of competition came into play, and as a result the underclass became the primary consumers of legal services, courtesy of the state, and going to see a lawyer eventually had no more mystique than buying a pound of potatoes. I loathed being introduced to new clients as ‘Martin’, as the client would assume an air of equality in the relationship that my training and experience did not merit.

The reality of life for the middle-classes has always been hard work, however it is now harder to stand still. For all that conservative commentarists might write about how we are much more affluent than we have ever been, the reality is that more and more people are struggling. Affluence is relative. We are affluent in the sense that there is more available for us to consume – prior to Christmas, a leading electrical goods’ retailer in the UK was advertising a child’s karaoke machine for £199. Twenty-five years ago, such a thing was unheard of. However, the combination of stealthy price and tax increases eroding relatively fixed incomes is hurting the people whom groups like the Republicans and the Conservative Party should be helping most, the little guys who turn up, do a day’s work and want to do their best for them and theirs. Both parties stand or fall by the little guys. Michael Moore boasts that sales of his books have put him into the tax bracket most helped by the President’s round of tax cuts. It’s not the Michael Moores who should be getting some slack, it’s the little guys. Maybe more cuts are envisioned for the second term, in which case the dreaded prospect of cuts in social programs might be unavoidable.

While there’s partying going on above decks and anarchy below, the middle classes keep rowing the boat, turning up on time, paying their taxes on time, paying city taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, taxes left, right and centre. The ship of state is anchored in the restraint of the middle classes. If the middle classes ever decide to abandon their restraint, then we can all go on home, because Margaret Thatcher’s great dream will come true and we will have no such thing as society.

Afghanistan is Lost

2006-03-22T14:31:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 7, 2004

On 4th January, the Afghan loya jirga, or grand council, that is considering a draft constitution, decreed that no law can be passed under the constitution if it is incompatible with Islam. Effectively, Afghanistan has reintroduced Sharia law despite the best efforts of the Americans, Brits and others to free the country from an Islamic regime.

Afghanistan is therefore lost.

The news was contained in a sad report from the Daily Telegraph’s Hamida Ghafour. According to Ms. Ghafour, the amended wording of the constitution reads ‘no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam’. Less than three years after Islamic law was justified to hold mass stonings at Kabul’s main soccer stadium, the same law has been enshrined in a constitution which will no doubt receive the stamp of approval from the Foreign Office and the State Department. Those of us who supported the effort to remove the Taliban for their support of Al Qa’eda did not expect to see the laws which were the Taliban’s philosophical engine being cast in stone for all future generations of Afghans to live by.

In other words, if a law that government is not entitled to establish a state religion is good enough for the United States, why isn’t it good enough for the Afghans?

The stampede to sensitivity of the soft-left multiculturalists we tend to keep hiring as diplomats might be one factor. The rush that happened three years ago to have an Afghan, Hamid Karzai, as the head of government, might be another. Maybe a Paul Bremer figure might have been better. However, right now there are mainly American soldiers engaged in some nasty, brutal trail fighting in the country’s more remote areas, like Marshals of old, trying to track down men who will kill for no motivation other than hatred. If they encounter a Muslim suspect who is being sheltered by a law abiding Muslim, the law abiding Muslim will be unable, under the new constitution, to assist them in apprehending the suspect. That would be a breach of Sharia law.

Poppy farming has flourished under the coalition, to the extent that the street price of heroin has been falling. Although poppy farming is directly contrary to Islam, will this most valuable cash crop be prohibited? Or even better, stamped out? Where is the Afghan Eliot Ness, taking down the poppyfields one at a time? Hopefully, the same aspects of Sharia that demand the prohibition of the poppy will be applied with the same enthusiasm as those which demand veiling and the stoning of blasphemers.

In every country where Sharia law is applied, conditions of free speech perish. The list induces despair. Iran, a country that’s rejected disaster relief because it comes from Jews. Nigeria, where a fashion correspondent was threatened with stoning for a light hearted remark about a beauty contest, later resulting in sectarian rioting instigated by Muslims. Sudan, a great big hole in the map where nothing is produced or sold except hatred and suffering. Pakistan, whose blasphemy laws induced a Catholic bishop, John Joseph, to commit public suicide five years ago. This is what America, Britain and the United Nations have allowed to come to pass in Afghanistan. It was never going to be Switzerland, but we didn’t have to give up on liberal democracy so easily, because as sure as eggs is eggs within five years the Afghans will be back to square one, with an Islamic party having seized power in a coup. They didn’t even need a Swiss model. They could have used the Turkish one. No, the Afghans just had to be left to do it their way, despite their way never working. Fine. This is the result. Now we all have to live with the consequences.

Those responsible for the handover of power to the Afghans still have it in their power to say No to this, to demand a full separation of church and state, to demand that gender equality and free speech, including speech critical of clerics and religion, is permissible, but they won’t do it. Instead, they have helped to consign the Afghan people to more years of watching what they say, of Afghan women being compelled to wear the veil if an Imam decrees. That is not why the Taliban were overthrown. That is not why servicemen and women put themselves in harm’s way. Mark Steyn once wrote of the Taliban that they were a ‘loser regime and like most losers, they tend to lose’. By allowing this constitution to reintroduce Islamic law, we are the losers. The war has been lost on our behalf. And that, friends, is pathetic.

One Triumph to Rule Them All

2006-03-22T14:24:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
December 30, 2003

Once upon a time there was an old man who decided to build a tower. His neighbours laughed at him, and still laughed as the tower got taller and taller. However, once the tower was finished he climbed it. He was astonished to discover that he could see the ocean.

Want to read more? Good. That’s what its author, J. R. R. Tolkien, intended. Tolkien wrote it to end a lecture he once gave to the British Academy, on the subject of fairy stories.

In the era of cinematic cynicism that’s made stars of Jack Black and Sean William Scott the great fairy story that’s the Lord Of The Rings movie has been unfolding in three episodes over two years. Jonah Goldberg recently stated the blindingly obvious on National Review Online, that this is one movie, not three. Of course it is. Its makers Peter Jackson, Miramax and New Line Cinema have used the principle of ‘Want to read more?’ brilliantly, and a ten-hour movie has been released in three sections, obviously to whet the public appetite and necessarily to maximise the cash flow to be generated from the project. The picture is a towering achievement of cinema for its own sake, and it is fair to say that film scholars of the future will one day mention Jackson’s name in the same breath as Abel Gance and Sergei Eisenstein, for their similarly epic biographies of 'Napoleon' and 'Ivan The Terrible'.

If anything, Jackson’s was the harder task. Firstly, Tolkien told the story straight, as a history. To have any vestige of credibility, Jackson required to do the same, something not in the zeitgeist of modern cinema. Although Jackson had access to technologies undreamt of in Eisenstein’s time, those other two pictures were straight biography - in other words, Napoleon was always going to win Austerlitz and lose Waterloo. Literary adaptations are very much more problematic, and lovers of the book, no matter what the book, will always in some way be disappointed that some lines or characters require to be cut or re-written. For example, Jackson and his scriptwriters made the cinematically sound decisions to cut seventeen years of inactivity from the novel, to cut the character of Tom Bombadil completely and to radically telescope the Passage of the Marshes and the Journey across Mordor. Although Tolkien purists, such as those who perpetrate the disrespectful and macabre burlesque of visiting his graveside on his anniversary in order to sing Elvish laments, would be horrified, there is no way in which these parts of the book as written are filmable.

However, some of his other decisions show less judgment. Jackson has been quoted as saying that after five weeks into a fifteen-month shoot, he felt his imagination was deserting him. Unfortunately, this sometimes shows, particularly in 'Two Towers'. The scene where Merry & Pippin try to escape while the orcs are cannibalising one of their own is straight from the imagination of the horror movie director that Jackson once was, even down to the flying guts. Also, in the book of Two Towers there are neither skateboarding elves nor tossed dwarfs. However, at times across the whole range of the movie there is an almost astonishing faithfulness in the adaptation. The destruction of the Ring as dramatised by Jackson and his collaborators and performed by Elijah Wood and Andy Serkis is exactly as it appears in the book. Although one can cavil about Jackson’s skill as a dramatist, for the very major part of the movie his skill as a director keeps it all crisp, and, most importantly, keeps the story moving, the real challenge in filming this book.

Who is this picture’s star? In any other movie, Sir Ian McKellen would carry that accolade, however, this is not any other movie. In 'Fellowship' McKellen gave a performance that can only be described as towering, dominating it before Gandalf’s disappearance. The changes occasioned in Gandalf after his re-appearance are such that McKellen required to take a different tack, and although his acting is still excellent, he does not dominate the other two in the same way as in 'Fellowship'. 'Lord Of The Rings' is a fitting testament to McKellen’s general versatility. His casting as Gandalf was a brilliant stroke that should not have been entirely unexpected, for although he deserves his reputation as a great classical actor capable of delivering Tolkien’s sometimes unwieldy dialogue, McKellen has appeared in actioners since 'Alfred the Great' in 1968. Fans of cinematic sword fighting should remember that McKellen gave one of its greatest displays in 1984, in Clive Donner’s 'The Scarlet Pimpernel'.

To put it bluntly, Elijah Wood was too young to play Frodo. As originally written, the character is fifty when he sets off on the quest. Wood must have been no older than eighteen when principal photography started. Frodo is required to visibly age under the burden of the Ring. Wood is so youthful that he and Jackson do not attempt to carry this off, instead concentrating on the Ring’s psychological impact. For all the problems he faced in credibly playing this part Wood is an actor of great subtlety, intelligence and maturity, and at no time does his performance fall below a very high standard. I cannot think of one occasion in ten hours of movie where his accent slipped. He did a difficult job very well, and in the end was a perfectly honourable Frodo. Where his performance is weaker, such as immediately after the destruction of the Ring and at the very end of 'Return', he carries less responsibility than the script and the director.

The acting honours most certainly do not go to Viggo Mortensen. 'Lord Of The Rings' has three main characters, Frodo, Gandalf and Aragorn. Frodo is naturally noble and self-sacrificing. Gandalf steers the action. Aragorn is required to grow into greatness, to change from a wanderer into a great leader of men and a King. Mortensen does not make us believe in the phenomenal personal journey of Aragorn. For a movie actor his face is unusually immobile, and I can think of perhaps three occasions in this whole movie where Mortensen actually acts, because he can act ('Boiling Point', 'Crimson Tide'). They are in 'Fellowship', at the bridge, and 'Two Towers', encountering Gandalf in Fangorn and greeting Haldir at Helm’s Deep. In every other scene, Mortensen appears, to my eyes, to be either sleepwalking or disinterested. Billy Boyd has been quoted as saying that Mortensen would join the rest of the cast in the pub when ‘he wasn’t off in the woods killing a deer with his bare hands’. Boyd’s Glaswegian facetiousness masks a deeper truth. Mortensen’s level of self-absorption shows in his performance. It is fortunate that the skill of Peter Jackson prevents it from marring the whole movie, for this is entirely the fault of the actor. The script gave Mortensen ample opportunity to portray the gathering of kingly resolve.

The movie has made a star of Orlando Bloom. While you always wish a young man well in his career, Mr. Bloom’s agents and advisers should note that, to this critic, he suffers ‘Charlton Heston Syndrome’. Heston always looked great in period costume or sportswear, but put him in a suit and he looked stiff. Orlando Bloom’s look, when added to the slightness of his build and a voice that is not the strongest, means that he should concentrate on period roles. Indeed, it was a pleasure to see that he’s cast as Paris in Wolfgang Petersen’s forthcoming 'Troy'. Paris is the perfect part for Orlando Bloom. Spoon with Helen, go kill Achilles, your only contribution to the war effort in the war you started then go spoon with Helen again.

Of John Rhys-Davies’ performance as Gimli, one need only say that he, the character and Tolkien were ill served by having the character turned into the comic foil, a graceful and well-mannered being becoming a belching knucklehead from Edinburgh. However, the revelation of the whole film was the performance of Andy Serkis as Gollum.

The art of physical acting is dying out. Some actors, such as Jackie Chan and Gene Kelly, are intensely physical because of the genres they act in. The physicality of Burt Lancaster in his early movies, when his presence and movement dominated the screen, obviously depended on his training as an acrobat. However, Andy Serkis’s performance is the most physical, and physically demanding, I can recall seeing in a modern picture, and he carries it off brilliantly. Was he helped by the CGI? No, the CGI guys were helped by Serkis. Serkis’s performance is the one thing about this movie that the phrase ‘made in the camera’ could apply to, and the movie is far the better for it. He carries off the acting honours for 'Two Towers' and shares them with Sean Astin for 'Return Of The King'. Every intonation and cadence of the voices Serkis created is perfect. Every movement, from crawling as Smeagol to standing up to be Gollum, is perfect. He was playing a character that nobody had played before, so he did have an entirely blank page to work with. However, the challenge of depicting Gollum, and finding an actor of the calibre required to play him, must have been one of the most daunting prospects facing Jackson as he sat down at the typewriter. As Al Pacino is forever Michael Corleone, or Harrison Ford forever Han Solo or Indiana Jones, Andy Serkis will be forever Gollum. Bravo.

However, the real star of this movie is Peter Jackson himself, sometimes to the detriment of the story. The Lord Of The Rings is about the destruction of the Ring. Everything else in the story is secondary to this. Jackson loves battles. In the book of 'Two Towers', as much time is expended on the re-appearance of Gandalf as on the Battle of Helm’s Deep. In Two Towers the movie, the battle is the star of the show, and Jackson does a very capable job of it. The overall progress of the story does not suffer as a result. However, 'Return Of The King' does suffer from battle fatigue. In Return, I got the impression that it was the story of the battles that Jackson was intent on telling, rather than doing the more rounded job he did in 'Fellowship'. It may be no coincidence that of the three episodes, Fellowship has the most limited battle sequences. As a result, although the destruction of the Ring is very dramatic, I was disappointed that Jackson did not direct Wood at least to show relief now that the burden was finally lifted. It came as anti-climax, not climax. Frodo came out of Mount Doom wearing the same expression he brought in, and went into the West almost as if he were catching a bus, such was the lack of scope that the script afforded the actor. It may have been that they were all tired. Or that Jackson’s imagination was failing.

Although in other movies these would be critical failings, they are not so in this one. For decades it was said this book was unfilmable. Tolkien hated the movies of Walt Disney. Bearing that in mind, it was slightly disappointing that Jackson included a homage to 'Fantasia' in 'Two Towers', 'the departure of the Elves from Rivendell. This movie shows that you can film any book, particularly if you have six years, $180 million dollars and the country of New Zealand to work with. However, as a work of art for its own sake it will endure, no matter how many small plastic figures or Happy Meals it helps to sell. It will endure because its makers believed in it, and wanted to make it happen, not for the money but for telling the story for its own sake. They wanted to tell the story of how good will always win over evil; how insignificant beings can come to greatness; how there is hope for men. They came to Tolkien’s work with good intentions, and did it justice. As a result, one can only hope that Professor Tolkien, sitting in his chair and smoking his pipe, a man who dreamt up great battles but hated the prospect of moving house, would quietly cough his approval.

The Offer They Couldn't Refuse

2006-03-22T14:19:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
December 24, 2003

The country of Sri Lanka has several claims to fame. It has a very respectable cricket team, who recently held England in a test match in Colombo. It’s the home of the world tea industry, and has a booming trade in paedophile sex tourism. However, Sri Lanka’s enduring contribution to political discourse has been the suicide bomb. It was during the vicious war carried on by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, ‘The Tamil Tigers’, in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s that hordes of wee lassies were encouraged to strap on belts and blow themselves up for Tamil independence at the behest of their headbanger leader, Vellupilai Prabahkaran.

Prabahkaran was interviewed by 'The Times' of London in the early ‘90’s. When his interviewer asked him who inspired him, Prabahkharan replied ‘Clint Eastwood’. Thinking he was joking, the interviewer asked him again, and he received the same reply. Vellupilai Prabahkaran sent dozens of young people to their deaths out of a desire to emulate the 'Dirty Harry' movies, and one just can’t be sure if the former Mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea would be happy to be considered a role model by such a profound leader.

Life always imitates art, and never more so than in the case of Libyan disarmament. What one sees being played out in North Africa is not 'Dirty Harry' but 'The Godfather'. In all practical terms, Gaddafi’s offer to disarm is the offer that George Bush and Tony Blair couldn’t refuse, an entirely cynical ploy motivated by his own self-interest in continued survival, to ensure the lifting of all sanctions, to seal his status as an elder statesman amongst his peers and his desire to find a new export market for his oil. You think Enduring Freedom was about oil? This one’s entirely about oil.

Gaddafi has been dictator of Libya since 1969. Although The Don’s politics are broadly Nasserite, self-preservation has been the rule for his regime since the day and hour he seized power. Lest we not forget, during the 1980’s he was a major sponsor of terrorists, resulting in the US bombing Tripoli in a targeted assassination attempt in 1986. They very nearly got him. Last year, Libya admitted responsibility for blowing the Clipper Maid Of The Seas out of the sky over Lockerbie. The man most directly responsible, Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, now resides in the most expensive and comfortable jail cell ever built by the Scottish taxpayer. Even though his guilt is clear the Furies of the Left, from Tam Dalyell MP to Nelson Mandela, Gaddafi’s closest ally, will still speak for him, propagating every excuse from a miscarriage of justice to homesickness.

However, in the fifteen years since that night, one would be hard pushed to think of any major terrorist incident that has been publicly pinned on Libya. Even then, the Don was slipping. Hole Man’s invasion of Kuwait forever changed the calculus of terror, with the House of Saud’s refusal to accept the help of Osama bin Laden radicalising the poor little rich boy even further. Prior to the invasion, and for many years afterward, Saddam provided a refuge for the killer of women and children Abu Nidal, who later committed suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head. Concrete overcoats were obviously not the vogue in Baghdad this year, and it looks like the other icons of Ba’athist bella figura, the regulation moustache and jaunty beret, will be going out of style for the new season. Like Luca Brazzi, Abu Nidal sleeps with the camels. The state of his soul is none of our business, but one hopes that he has time to reflect upon all the innocent lives he took in his maniacal desire to destroy Jews. S

o, for over a decade Muammar Gaddafi has not apparently been a major player in the Terror Wars. Although he’s as belligerent as ever, recently encouraging Libyan women to learn how to blow up their children and their purses, his pariah status hasn’t helped him with the big boys like Osama, who before his own demise publicly called for Gaddafi’s extermination as an apostate adulterer –The Don has employed female bodyguards. Also, his most recent political posturing has been to assert Libya’s African-ness as opposed to its Arab-ness. In the same speech in which he encouraged wallet self-detonation, he cursed the Arab League for interfering in the affairs of Sudan and Djibouti. For years, Gaddafi has been throwing money around Africa like a made man out on the town. As well as being the major ally of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, he is the number one North African ally of Robert Mugabe. With such alliances, the erstwhile Organisation for African Unity must have resembled the Commission, even down to the guys with sunglasses and dark suits hanging around outside, ostentatiously packing heat.

But the most important reason for this sudden outpouring of candour is economic. Whatever else he might be, Muammar Gaddafi is a pragmatist, not a penitent. Earlier this year, a massive oil pipeline was opened from his southern neighbour Chad to the Atlantic coast of Cameroon. Prior to the opening of this line, Libya was the major oil supplier in North Africa. Not any more. The pipeline ensures a steady supply of oil from North Africa to western markets without the necessity of freighting it through the suicide bomb alleys of the Persian Gulf or the Suez Canal. The most intense oil exploration in the world is taking place in West Africa, to ensure continuity of supply, which is why the current precarious state of ecumenism in Nigeria is a threat we ignore at our peril.

Gaddafi has owned up to having a Soviet-era reactor and to enriching uranium. He will limit the scope of his missiles to 300km, and will abide by the Chemical Weapons Protocols. That’s all well and good. However, the leftists have already pounced like sloths with their preferred next steps. On BBC’s breakfast news of 20th December, Dan Plesch, the military analyst who said that the American invasion of Baghdad would produce the same kind of supply problems that led to the British failure at Arnhem, Holland in 1944, sang the first verse of a song we are going to hear over and over again as a result of this announcement. Dr. Plesch, a lecturer at the Royal United Services Institute who moonlights as a columnist for the left wing 'Guardian', said that the Libyans’ decision to disarm would increase pressure on those other countries in the Middle East with WMD programmes, specifically Israel, to follow suit. It was inevitable that Israel’s WMD programs would eventually be mentioned sooner or later, conveniently forgetting that Israel is the only country in the region to have undergone long-range missile attack, courtesy of Trap Door Boy, and also that Israel is the only country in the region surrounded by twenty-three hostile neighbours all of whom think the country’s existence on that spot is an offence to their religion. Israel will always be Haram, forbidden, to them, so let’s not take her nukes away just yet.

Libyan disarmament, although a good aim in itself, is less meaningful than it first appears. Gaddafi’s politics ostracise him from the main terrorist threat, the Islamists. It might be the case that he couldn’t deal with them even if he wanted to. He has been turning his back on other Arabs, so is out of the equation on that count as well. He is proving himself to be an adept Cold Warrior (after the end of the cold war), and the bottom line is that he needs all trade sanctions lifted in order to protect his own economic position. Also, he’s enough of a survivor to know when to quit. His motives should always be regarded with suspicion, if not downright hostility. On the other hand, maybe he’s looking forward to the day when Muammar Gaddafi, elder statesman of African politics, can appear at the UN General Assembly and say:

Your Eminence, the Corleone family is completely legitimate.

Murdered by Correctness

2006-03-22T14:15:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
December 23, 2003

On December 17 Ian Huntley, a school caretaker from Cambridgeshire, was sentenced to two life terms for the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. Holly and Jessica, both 10 and pupils at the school where Huntley worked, were murdered in August 2002, and his conviction for their murders has cast into relief the extent to which political correctness, and liberal social policy, now dominates every aspect of work with children. In this case, political correctness has proved fatal.

Amid the usual spew of emotional incontinence that always surrounds such cases, several disturbing elements have become clear. Huntley seemed to have no qualifications for the job he was doing. He had been the subject of suspicion on no fewer than ten occasions over six years in his native Humberside in relation to sex attacks and statutory rape. Each time, because none of the allegations proceeded to prosecution, the Humberside Police Service destroyed details of his questioning after a month. This was in order to comply with the duties placed on them by the Data Protection Act and the Human Rights Act to protect Huntley’s privacy. The requirement that every adult who works with children in the UK must have a clear history from the Criminal Records Bureau has predictably produced a bureaucratic mega-backlog. Even when Huntley gave his correct details, there was no record on him apart from a minor conviction for driving a motorcycle without a licence.

As usual with all that’s sensational and slightly salacious, it’s been a press field day. Those in the press who pine for Victorian values of decency and respect forget that some of the most ruthless child-killers of all time were the ‘baby-farmers’ of nineteenth century England, who would take in the wee mistakes of serving girls and country lassies too afraid to make their condition known and petrified of the workhouse. Having taken the baby for a few shillings and a promise to care for it, if the mother ever came back to reclaim their child they would be told that the baby had died of a fever, or had been sent to Australia, and the mother would be none the wiser. Indeed, it was during the nineteenth century that ‘Concealment of Pregnancy’ was made a crime, specifically to tackle that problem. The good old days weren’t all that good after all.

The Great Madness of Liberalism blossomed in the mid 1960’s. Less than ten years after Harold Macmillan had said Britons had never had it so good, Parliament had abolished the death penalty and introduced abortion – all of its own accord. No political party had ever stood for election on a manifesto promise of enacting these policies but Parliament, using the fig-leaf of the tradition of a free vote on matters of conscience, i.e. any substantive issue of public policy, had tyrannically taken both these steps, largely against the wishes of the British people. The abortionists still invoke the spectre of the ‘backstreet abortionist’, the dirty old man with a wire-coat hanger, although their imagery lacks imagination as much as it does morality. The social case for now limiting abortion has never been clearer. In a country with an aging population, mass healthcare and a declining birth rate, chanting the trope of ‘It’s a woman’s right to choose’ now provokes a serious case of Tin Ear. These guys should move on. In the age of Dolly the Sheep (RIP), it’s the back street cloners we should be worried about.

However, the pendulum of common sense has swung the other way and the term ‘child abuse’ is now depressingly regular in public discourse. The fad, and it is a fad, began in the mid-eighties, when two overly enthusiastic junior paediatricians, Marietta Higgs and Geoffrey Wyatt, began diagnosing child abuse where none existed in the North Eastern town of Middlesborough. Hundreds of parents were falsely accused, and at the resulting public enquiry Higgs and Wyatt were roundly criticised for letting their own beliefs cloud their professional judgment, but the fear of being accused of child abuse if your child is failing to thrive took such deep root that the belief that every adult is a potential abuser now governs every aspect of work in the education and childrens’ voluntary sector.

Added to this mix is the hardened ideology of the Labour Government. Tony Blair has made it clear that he wants Britain to be a European social democracy. Social democracies don’t have citizens; they have ‘clients’ or ‘consumers’. Very sorry, Prime Minister, but the first person I pay who calls me a consumer is going to be sued to the rafters for denying me my status of citizen. Such arrogance can only rise not from ignorance of history, but actual denial of history. In other words, it was England that produced the Magna Carta. It was England who executed Charles I for his insistence on exercising the divine right of kings. It was England that turfed out Charles’ goofy younger son James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It was all three of these sources that informed the Brilliant Mind from Monticello when he sat down with a scroll and an inkwell in the summer of 1776. Don’t take my word for it, he said it himself. That great mind, who like all his cadre considered himself a proud Englishman, knew and understood more of English history than Tony Blair, who considers the European Convention on Human Rights, a document cobbled together in the 1940’s to prevent another Holocaust, a document of more lasting consequence than anything that informed Thomas Jefferson.

And one of the rights that Thomas Jefferson would very probably not have considered worthy of Constitutional protection would have been the privacy of Ian Huntley. His right to privacy was formally enacted by the Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights in to English law. In an age that makes a fetish of protecting the child, a child-killer with a history of being investigated for statutory rape was able to get a job in a school. This happened for two reasons. Firstly, in order to court popularity, Blair directed that all persons have to go undergo checks before they’re considered fit to work with children. Secondly, Blair, with the arrogance of all liberals, thinks that legislating against behaviour is going to make a difference. It’s not. Having lived an extremely safe, middle-class existence all his life, at the age of fifty he still sees the world in the way it should be, not the nasty way it really is. That altruism is great, until you have to balance the budget and you find you don’t have money to buy ammunition for the rifles, as happened earlier this year. Because of his refusal to trust in the experience, common sense and discretion of police officers, no officer from Cambridgeshire could pick up the phone to Humberside and say ‘Do you know anything about a guy called Ian Huntley?’ Would that they could. Such ‘Chinese Walls’ used to exist in the Department of Justice, courtesy of Janet Reno, with catastrophic consequences. In typical Churchillian fashion, an enquiry has been set up, and the Chief Constable of Humberside will probably fall on his sword. Having shouted ‘Something Must Be Done!’ (Or is it ‘Action This Day!’? With Tony Blair I have a hard time keeping up) the Labour Party will never see that the solution lies not in doing something new, but in undoing something they have already done. And if you’re messianic, like Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, you’ll never cough up to that one.

The Best Possible Outcome

2006-03-22T14:11:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
December 16, 2003

On Sunday 14th December, if you leant out of the window in Glasgow, Scotland and craned your ear to the West, you could almost hear the shout of joy in the White House at the announcement of Saddam Hussein’s capture. If you turned your ear in the other direction, something of a collective gulp could be heard coming from the direction of Paris, Berlin and Moscow. Saddam Hussein, corner boy turned tyrant, the man with all the secrets, who knows where all the physical, technical and financial bodies are buried, was arrested hiding out in a cellar, disguised in a beard, the Anti-Claus who rained poison and death, not peace on Earth, who inspired fear and loathing, not goodwill to all men. Merry Christmas, Iraq.

The arrest of Saddam is the best possible outcome for the people of Iraq. It is the best possible outcome for those wanting to see a safe and speedy return home for all those servicemen and women of whatever nations currently under arms in that region. It is the best possible outcome for the restoration of balance to the moral compass of European nations. It is the best possible outcome for those who work to cut the sources of money and munitions to the agents of international terror. It is the best possible outcome for whose who wish the doctrines of Islamist fundamentalism driven from the political calculus of the Middle East. It is the best possible outcome for facilitating an early reckoning for those in our countries who spoke in his support. And, entirely incrementally, it is the best possible outcome for those who wish to see the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004. Some days are wrongly described as momentous, but, if ever a day was momentous in the history of the world since 1945, then December 13 2003 will one day rank along with November 22 1963 and September 11 2001, and of those three dates, it’s the one that’s the most positive, the one that brings the most hope. It is the best possible outcome.

His sons are dead, his power gone, now, how fitting it is that like the rat he is he has been found in a rat’s lair. Like all hoods and gangsters, he scuttled back to his old corner, his old stamping ground, ever the coward, always letting other people take a bullet for him but too scared to put the cyanide capsule under his tongue. That would require a measure of physical courage from a man whose political career began by organising drive-by shootings. Like the criminal that he is, he will now face a court, probably comprised of his own countrymen, and he will have to take his turn at the bar of justice and plead in his own defence.

Of course, amid the imagery of Iraqi males firing automatic weapons into the air in celebration at the news (how many of them are going to get killed this time?) his interrogators will have some searching and immediate questions for him. Where are the Weapons of Mass Destruction? Who is organising the terrorists? How are they being paid? Did his regime’s commercial allies in France, Germany and Russia actually know that the equipment they supplied included munitions and materials necessary for the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction programs? If so, where is the documentation with their signatures on it? Possible outcomes range from the cessation of terrorism to the withdrawal of the American Ambassador from Paris. The mind boggles with possibilities! Never again will one have to listen to the whining and bitching of nay-sayers like the rogue elephant of British politics, the deeply unserious Charles Kennedy of the Liberal Democrats, who in an interview on the BBC this morning has said, his voice wavering, that it’s a sign of hope for the Iraqi people, but the coalition shouldn’t turn Saddam into a martyr. Although I’m quite sure that the American Special Forces responsible for his arrest are quite physically, intellectually and morally robust fellows, they aren’t assassins. Neither are they stupid. Such is the blatant bigotry of the European Left that they still believe America to be the personification of evil. Until the kids want to go to Disney World. Or else they get a job lecturing at Columbia.

On the day that Saddam was arrested, the European Union announced that it could not agree a new draft constitution, courtesy of the Poles, who refused to be steamrollered into a treaty that would give a disproportionate voting strength to France and Germany. It is no coincidence that the Poles, with long memories of fascist occupation, should refuse to bow down in favour of an agreement drafted by two nations who scorn them and call them ‘impertinent’. Poland, we salute you. One day, because of your wish to see them live as free men and women every Iraqi will salute you as well.

By capturing Saddam, the American Special Forces, guys with names like Dwight and Clayton Lee have been able to do what every protesting Hugo and Jocasta has been unable to do from London or Paris- help preserve human rights in Iraq. What greater human right is there than to be able to go about your business without fear of the knock at the door? By capturing him, America says that the human rights that every American enjoys, from the prohibition against unlawful search and seizure to the rights to be able to sue a coffee-shop for $20 million, will one day be theirs. Hopefully, people like the playwright, media person and toxic America-hater Harold Pinter, who once said that America was causing rectal bleeding in Iraqi children, will see the importance of this day, and see how the aims of the liberation and occupation have been identical to what he fundamentally believes as well – that al men have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For them, this is the best possible outcome.

What will it mean for those who in the West who apologised for Saddam, some of them making good livings in the process, like my old Member of Parliament, George Galloway? For them will come a reckoning more terrible than they can comprehend. On his website on December 11, the Great Canadian Mark Steyn posted a letter from a student at the London School of Economics, quoting a comment Galloway made at a recent public meeting there –

“He made the usual anti-Bush comments, but then said something more shocking. When asked what he thought of the Iraqi resistance, so-called, which was killing British troops, he said: "I can't fault them; like the Palestinian suicide bombers, they are resisting an occupation and for that I support them completely."

The man who said that draws £56,000 a year, roughly $83,000, from his fellow taxpayers. Indeed, for those who have been offended by Galloway’s outrageous behaviour for years and years, revenge will indeed be a dish best served cold. It was perhaps natural that a onetime ward boss like Galloway should have an affinity with a corner boy like Saddam. For those of us opposed to Galloway, the arrest of Saddam is the best possible outcome. Party on, George. It’s later than you think.

What will it mean for The Islamists? It will show that America and the world are capable of defeating outright those who claim to share the objectives of those who want to deny the possibility of political pluralism to a billion people, because of how they pray. As well as being the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein was the primary financial sponsor of terror against the State of Israel, with the dole of $25,000 that he paid to the families of homicide bombers. The actions of the homicide bombers should certainly give the political classes in the UK and USA pause for thought. We decry Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Chechens for encouraging females to become homicide bombers. Why then do we demand of our women that they serve in the front lines of our wars? Conservatives always accuse the left of moral equivalence. President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld, should declare this an issue of moral unequivalence, strike a blow for womanhood, not feminism, and immediately bar women from serving overseas. In one respect, that may be the very best of all possible outcomes.

What will it mean for the Democrats? Last week the papers and the Net were full of how much damage Howard Dean could do to George W. Bush. Assuming that the basis for much of his cant and bile are the perceived shortcomings in the operation of the war so far, there is no better possible outcome other than the capture of the enemy head of state, the man’s whose perpetual psychosis started this whole thing. In one of those absurdly lucky moments that seem to follow President Bush, the enemy is captured just in time for one of the major holidays. The man is incredible! Over the next few days and weeks, the formulations, spin and pirouettes of those Democrat candidates for the Presidency who have been actively criticising George W. Bush for the conduct of the occupation will be a marvel to see. How dumb does this capture make Al Gore look now? How much of a relief, then, that the Electoral College remains, and that he did not become the 43rd President. How bitter and rank will be the mood of people like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, having seen Bush succeed in one of the biggest gambles that any President has ever taken with his administration. Maybe the little guy wasn’t so dumb after all. They can’t complain about the war. They can’t complain about healthcare, with the signing of the Medicare Bill. They can’t complain about the economy, with growth at 8%. They can’t complain about jobs, with something like a million created last year. Ah, well, there’s always abortion and gay marriage to fall back on. The Democrats are going to have to fight hard to find something to actually campaign against the President on next year.

All in all, it’s not wrong to say that December 13 has been one of the most significant days in recent history. More than anything else, it signifies to the Iraqi people that the bad guy isn’t coming back. If the toppling of Saddam’s statue in April was their Boston Tea Party, the arrest of Saddam is their Declaration of Independence. Some people might follow the example of George III, whose diary entry for July 4th 1776 was ‘Nothing important happened today”. Other will see it for what it rightly is, the shining of a new dawn in the world’s darkest and most troubled corner. For all war-mongering super-hawks, the question now is - How far away from Iraq is Zimbabwe? Just kidding. We can’t have all our Christmases at once.

Another Year of Hatred

2006-03-22T14:07:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
December 12, 2003

On October 8 2002 I wrote in this newspaper that the left was addicted to hatred. At that time, I really thought that like any addict they could be weaned from their hateism, retaining their craving but declining to indulge. Vice-President Gore’s seedy endorsement of Governor Dean, the most blatantly hateist serious contender for the Presidency in recent memory, tells me my belief was wrong. The left has become hatred itself, and its reason has been suspended in the thrall of that evil emotion.

The crowds who follow the demagogue Dean shout their anger and hatred not only of Bush, but also of all conservatives. Dean has made clear that his economic program will include the reversal of the tax cuts President Bush has pushed through Congress. Unless he is an exceptionally astute economist, this will have the effect of slowing, if not reversing, the recent spurt of growth. But hey, the rich can pay, right? Wrong, Governor. It’s never the rich who pay. It’s the guys who are shouting for you who will pay. They’re the ones who always pay. So unless some sound economic reason for reversing the tax cuts can be divined, then Dean would deliberately reverse the progress of the American economy for one reason only. Hatred of Bush.

Some of his acolytes, and many more sinister actors, hate the state of peace that predominantly American soldiers are trying to bring to Iraq. Some conservatives, the editor of this newspaper included, have taken principled and rational stands against the invasion and liberation, a stand I respect, though I don’t agree with it. I’ll respect any liberal, no, anyone, who says that their opposition to the President’s actions is based on a genuine fear of internal American security being threatened by the war. 9/11 must still be too raw for any European to dismiss what happened that day, and besides we don’t have the right. I will understand the fears of any liberal who says that the invasion contravened international law, although the small toe on my left foot has forgotten more about international law than many anti-war protestors will ever know, and there was no way that war was illegal. However, too much of the Hateist Left’s position has been based on the lockstep repetition of tasteless slogans, allied to their complete unwillingness to debate. Their minds aren’t just closed, they’re lockboxes. However, the temper of the Hateist Left is now raised so high in relation to the Middle East and Iraq that their views can properly be described as Bolshevik, Red Fascist. Some commentators have noted that on my home continent, some extreme anti-war elements have hooked up with the Islamists. Such a union should be called Total Hatred, for it has nothing else to offer.

Of course, they say they protest the war, but in fact they protest the peace. Their hatred is not of America – I mean, where on Earth can you get lattes like the ones in Seattle – but of American values, which, perhaps surprisingly to them, tend to be universal and quite Christian in origin. Look after your own. Don’t do the other guy down. Hard work has its own rewards. Be a good citizen. But when you’ve renounced Judeao-Christian values in favour of growing your hair, chanting mantras and banging on domestic appliances to protest the economy that keeps you in sneakers and welfare cheques, then I suppose your mind is weak enough to worship Hatred. The one thing that you can’t possibly stand is the promulgation of the values you hate in a country sufficiently far away that you’re powerless to stop it. So you enjoy a wee self-satisfied smile to yourself when a soldier gets killed in a suicide bombing, and you spread lies like ‘this war’s for oil!” the most febrile of the calumnies levied against the President. Most haters aren’t very smart. Nick Griffin, the leader of the far-right fascist British National Party, is touted as an intellectual because he has a degree from one of our most ancient universities, Cambridge. Nick Griffin proves the truth about all learned haters, of both left and right – all of their learning has not grown them an ounce of brains.

Hatred of Israel – is it Hatred of Zionism or just the slightly more in your face Hatred Of The Jew? If the left’s hatred of Israel is about good old-fashioned Euro-style Jew hatred, can they not at least have the intellectual honesty to say so? Earlier this year, the UK’s 'Independent' newspaper ran a cartoon of Ariel Sharon eating a baby, with a caption saying, ‘So you’ve never seen a politician kissing a baby?’ I don’t think anyone’s ever been prosecuted in England for circulating the Damascus Blood Libel, but that cartoon was as close as I’ve ever seen any British paper come to an outright declaration of anti-Semitism. The cartoon won a press award for best British newspaper cartoon of the year. The 'Independent'’s former editors include Andrew Marr, now Political Editor of the BBC, and Rosie Boycott, co-founder of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, now a BBC arts pundit. After running that cartoon, can any Jewish reader ever trust the Independent to report any issue relating to Jews or Israel impartially again? I don’t think so.

It’s not just everyone else they hate – so profound is the hate of some of the left that they start hating themselves. After the Jayson Blair fiasco, can the New York Times be trusted with anything it says ever again? Possibly, but it will take a long time. My innocence may derive from not being an American, but from the managerial point of view, I don’t think the leaders of the New York Times realised that when they cut slack to Jayson Blair because of his race they were very possibly threatening the survival of a huge global brand. In their case, race, and self-loathing based on race, didn’t just trump sense – it trumped economics. Howell Raines fell into a classic newspaperman’s trap of actually believing that all his readers thought the way he did. For Howell Raines, Jayson Blair performed a function straight from the pages of Herman Melville – he was ‘a morsel for his conscience’. And a heavy, heavy morsel it proved to be, costing him far more than any discrimination lawsuit Blair would have brought if Raines had done his job properly to begin with. Ultimately, Howell Raines, one of the most deservedly distinguished newspapermen in America, lost his job, a job to which few newspapermen can ever aspire, through his own self-hatred, easily modern history’s dumbest bout of self-loathing. Merry Christmas, Howell Raines, prime Bush Basher and Self-Hater Of The Year, the man who perpetrated a hate crime on himself.

I would love to wish America a Happy New Year, but I don’t see it happening. Such is the apoplexy of hatred that now grips the left that next year’s Presidential election promises to be so bitter, so divisive that one can only hope that lasting damage is not done to the American body politic. If Howard Dean is elected, it will continue, for sure, to the detriment of us all. If the President wins, then it will subside until at least 2008, by which time the Democrat Party will have had enough time to drift sufficiently far to the right to make themselves electable again. Any conservative unhappy with the performance of George W. Bush, and there are many who have cause to be, should at least consider this – is Howard Dean the man you want to run America? Bush versus Dean seems more like Hope, or what’s left of it, versus Hatred. Choose wisely. 2004 is not a year for protest votes.

The Death of Shame

2006-03-22T14:01:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
December 10, 2003

Our moral decline, exhibited by the licentiousness of popular culture, the desire of manufacturers and retailers to package their goods using sex as their primary marketing tool and the willingness of politicians to do and say anything to achieve or stay in office (‘We just have to win, then’), all really come from one source – the death of shame. Shame, once an emotion so powerful it drove people to kill themselves, is now gone. A person’s capacity for shame is directly proportional to their ability and desire to be a good citizen. The words ‘shame’, ‘shameless’ and ‘shamelessness’ don’t have any meaning any more. They need to have their meaning back. Bring on the shame.

My heart leapt the day that Shane Cory told us that 'The Washington Dispatch' was joining 'Townhall'. I love Townhall as it enables me to read and learn from commentators like Cal Thomas and Kathleen Parker, whose work I would never otherwise have access to. These two great writers both do their readers the great service of writing as their tempers take them, and one of Mr. Thomas’s recent articles, 'The Embarrassing GOP', shows how necessary the immediate return of shame is. Mr. Thomas’s temper was definitely tweaked that day.

He castigated the last Congress for failing to take any meaningful steps to reduce the size of the Federal Government, and for the lashings of pork it has distributed. It is fair to say that when the Republican Party behaves in this way, they behave without shame. They say one thing and do another. Instead of calling them ‘hypocrites’ or ‘liars’, as Mr. Thomas suggests, why not call them shameless instead? It fits the bill just as well, and will at least be a novel insult on Capitol Hill.

In the UK, we have just been through one of the most excruciating moments of public shamelessness in recent years. Margaret Hodge is the current Minister for Children. During the early 1990’s, she was Leader of London’s Islington Borough Council, and during her tenure the social work staff uncovered a paedophile network operating in Islington’s children’s homes. Although there was never any suggestion that Hodge was involved, she was the politician in charge and her council was roundly criticised in a report into the scandal.

Segue forward ten years. The ultra-loyal Hodge accepts her Ministerial post. One victim of the scandal suggested that she was an unfit person to be Children’s’ Minister. Margaret Hodge then sent a fax to the BBC saying that the man was unstable. She was later forced to issue an apology and pay a sum to a charity of his choice. In spite of all this, she refuses to resign. Blair, always mindful of those loyal to him, doesn’t seem to want to sack her. However, if nothing else, her credibility has been fatally compromised. She lacks the sense of shame necessary to make her see it.

The Black Hitler Robert Mugabe, with a particular affiliation to fascism and an unswerving belief in his own style of fiscal management, Mugrabonomics, is a shameless exponent of Big Lie Theory. As first expounded by Hitler and Goebbels, BLT says the bigger the lie you tell, the more people will believe it. Therefore, it is the sacred duty of every Zimbabwean to resist the colonialism they suffered under the British.

Wrong. Try again, Adolf. Southern Rhodesia was never a colony. It was instead a dominion territory. It was like Canada or Australia, not Zambia or Tanzania. The old demon’s shameless lies, his evil still enduring, poison the minds of Zimbabweans discouraged from believing that anyone other Mugrabe himself is the root of their trouble. That most useless of the world’s talking shops, the British Commonwealth, has at least excluded him from its councils for the time being, a grave and noble step for them to take just as he’s starving more opponents and expropriating more farms for himself, his wife, Gorgeous Grace, and his pals in the Zanu crime family, sorry, party. Hopefully the moral instruction Mugabe received from the Jesuits will one day let him see the error of his ways. Personally, one would hope that St. Ignatius Loyola can’t wait to get his hands on him for letting the side down.

The Augustinian tradition of Catholicism encouraged shame. Although the shame element of its teaching taught the faithful to consider themselves almost irredeemable, with mortal sin lurking round every corner, it did serve the useful function of ensuring that people knew the necessity of having a moral framework for their lives. So much more bitter, then, for those who feel the pangs of scruples brought on by a teaching insensitive to the emotions of childhood to see how some men had betrayed the Church by permitting known pederasts to continue in pastoral work. Not much sense of shame from Boston’s boys in black on that occasion.

Is there hope to be found in shame? I think so. If a man knows he will feel bad about himself if his conduct falls out with limits he’s set, he won’t step outside those limits. A sense of shame would dramatically reduce crime. It would strengthen the resolve of ordinary people to improve their moral environments, i.e. no sex-shops near grade schools. It will have the massively beneficial effect of improving the quality of our discourse. Kids might once again be encouraged to read good books, as opposed to piercing themselves and getting high. We would have a world where moral certainty is more likely to flourish. At the moment we have a diversity of political and ideological certainties, but true moral certainty is eluding us. This might be our Plan B, our parachute, our Yellow Brick Road. Let’s see where it leads.

War and Punishment

2006-03-22T13:57:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
December 9, 2003

On 3rd December, the Metropolitan Police formally charged Sajid Badat, a 27-year old native of Gloucester, with conspiracy and possession of explosives. He is also charged with conspiring with Richard Colvin Reid, who famously described himself as being at war with the United States.

The arrest of Badat shows how badly we still misunderstand the motives of the Islamists. The Anti-War Left still will say that Badat would have been polarised by the Iraqi War, which is just wrong. The area of the Midlands he grew up in is target-rich, with plenty of opportunity for a spectacular to hail the advent of suicide terrorism on our shores. Every Saturday afternoon, tens of thousands pack Villa Park, St. Andrew’s and Molyneaux to cheer on Aston Villa, Birmingham City and Wolverhampton Wanderers against Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool. Even more, now that England is flush with success at having won the Rugby World Cup last month, with the rugby season just kicking off, the opportunity to do away with the World Cup winning stars of Bath or Leicester might just be too good to resist for someone convinced Heaven awaits if he can kill a second row forward or scrum half.

Sajid Badat, like Osama, Atta and all the head boys of terror, is not a product of social exclusion. The child of Muslim immigrants from Malawi, he got good grades at school before taking up full time Islamic study. Although there is much in our society with which all devout people can disagree, it takes a psycho headbanger to protest it by trying to blow himself up at a soccer or rugby match, no matter how devout he, or she, is. Indeed, according to reports published after 9/11, Osama planned a spectacular against England at the 1998 Soccer World Cup in France, with the particular aim of doing away with England’s then captain, Alan Shearer, and the goalkeeper, David Seaman. Such is the lunacy of these people that Osama, by all accounts an Arsenal fan who visited Highbury to watch them on his last visit to the UK in 1994, would kill Arsenal’s hero goalie.

However, by the reports we get in the press, Sajid Badat’s a kind soul, always very observant in the mosque and respectful to his elders. On 3rd December, Daniel Pipes published a commentary on Front Page Magazine that struck home about that kind of reporting. It was entitled 'And he was good to his Mother', and it didn’t help but bring to mind the words of all those weeping mothers whose sons were about to be hanged for murder, that ‘He was a good boy!’ Sad as it is, Sajid Badat may have conspired with one of the worst terrorists the UK has ever produced, who if he had been successful, would have killed more people at a stroke than the IRA ever did, and whose actions since have shown no sign of penitence or remorse, only regret that he did not succeed.

How long will all this take? It doesn’t matter how long Iraq takes to be stabilised, this is not specific to nationality or nationhood. Unfortunately, it’s as clear as it’s ever been that the terrorists, not ‘terror’ or ‘terrorism’, but terrorists, will not be defeated until they are not only crushed but also seen to be crushed. The British experience in Northern Ireland, Zimbabwe, wherever, is that once you let terrorists or their apologists come to the table, the game is over. If an Iraqi Islamic Party, with Saudi or Iranian backing, is allowed to make a breakthrough, the war might as well not have been fought. All of the torrents of money being spent in Iraq might as well stay in your bank accounts if secularism is not being promoted as the primary aim of any putative Iraqi liberal democracy. This is one thing in which the American people are owed a progress report as a matter of urgency. Thanksgiving in Iraq was good theatre. From the genuine reaction of the servicemen and women who appeared on the BBC, the emergence of George W. Bush from behind the curtain certainly seemed to be welcome. However, although it was probably the best piece of politics for its own sake we’ve seen this year, it will be meaningless unless all the agencies under his control are working to ensure that the Iraq of tomorrow will be a beacon for the Saudi Arabia of today. That means an open celebration of Midnight Mass, broadcast on Iraqi TV, as I’m sure it’s done in the United States.

You’ll never get the profound inverted racism of Tony Blair to come up with an idea like that. Instead, one of the most prominent political stories in the UK is the controversy surrounding Chris Bryant MP. Mr. Bryant, an openly gay former Church of England priest who represents a very conservative constituency in South Wales, has taken a photograph of himself in his underwear and posted it on a gay dating service on the Internet. Although the well-documented sins of the Kennedys are legion, one wouldn’t ever imagine any of them ever doing anything like that. Such behaviour makes it all the more difficult to believe that there is any redemption, any future, for the Western way of life. The young folks who are taking the bullets in Nasiriyah need to believe that at the end of this is something worth fighting for. Exhibitionist Members of Parliament isn’t it. Seeing Wolves or the Gunners’ getting blown up at half time isn’t it. Seeing Sharia law in the UK isnt it. A truly free Iraq might be it. However, for as long as those who associated in the war plans of Richard Reid are at liberty, we’ll never get it. We don’t get it now.

The Philadelphia Conundrum

2006-03-22T13:54:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
December 4, 2003

The commentary surrounding the 'Goodridge' case that I’ve read so far only seems to reflect on the technicalities required to constitute a gay marriage, and whether it is possible that two people of the same sex can contract to a concept called ‘marriage’. There can be no gays-only sub-category of ‘civil union’. For a moment, let us assume that the court’s decision is valid. The validity of the decision will raise another, very much more difficult issue for the advocates of gay marriage, which can properly be called The Philadelphia Conundrum.

Back to Family Law 101. In civil society, where law exists permitting marriage, there must also exist provision for divorce. The very essence of civil marriage is that it is a civil contract. No party to any contract anywhere in the English-speaking world can be held to a contract indefinitely. There must be provision for either the termination or frustration of the marriage contract under certain circumstances. The name given to marriage termination is divorce. The name given to the recognition by the state that a marriage did not exist is civil annulment.

Grounds for divorce vary between jurisdictions. However, one of the most universal grounds is that of adultery. Civil marriage everywhere recognises that the most important obligation imposed by the marriage contract is that the parties to the marriage remain sexually faithful to each other. In other words, the law of the land requires monogamy between the parties to a marriage contract. Although the words ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ are often used by laypeople solely to describe criminal conduct, adultery is non-criminal but definitely illegal. Conducting a non-sexual relationship with a person of the same or the opposite sex out with the bounds of the marriage contract may in itself be grounds for the contract’s dissolution, and given a title like ‘unreasonable behaviour’. However, if that relationship is consummated, that action strikes at the very heart of a married person’s ability to perform the obligation they have contracted themselves to.

Every aspect of divorce law as it is practiced across the world flows from this one root. Monogamy, not affection, is the historic standard of civil marriage. Therefore, in order for a gay marriage to be a marriage in any civil sense, there must be, firstly, a recognition that the parties are expected to adhere to each other, and secondly, be faithful to each other. If you don’t have either of these things, you have something, but it isn’t a marriage. Any proposed law on gay marriage must recognise both of these criteria, for if one or other of them are not met, you would then also have a monstrous injustice being perpetrated upon straight people, that they would be required to observe their marriage contract to a higher standard than that expected of gays.

Adultery is such a blow to the marriage contract that I am unaware of any jurisdiction where condoning and forgiving adultery prevents its deployment as a ground for divorce. It doesn’t usually have a statute of limitations and in my jurisdiction it is competent to sue for adultery that has taken place even after the marriage has otherwise irretrievably broken down.

Divorce’s alter ego is civil annulment. This is usually only applicable in cases where either the marriage has not been consummated, or else the marriage was entered into under duress. Where there is gay marriage, there must be gay annulment. It would be a monstrous injustice to gay people to be trapped within marriages that do not offer identical means of termination as straight marriages.

Of course, every family law statute in the United States of America will need to be re-enacted, for the simple reason that, unless the forces of political correctness have really taken hold in the statehouses, they will all be framed in a very gender-specific way. Civil marriage recognises that one party to the contract is called ‘the husband’, the other ‘the wife’. New terms of art will have to be devised in order to describe the parties to a gay marriage.

Which brings us at last to The Philadelphia Conundrum. Two men are in a stable relationship. One visits a cinema for casual sex. He goes only three times. On one of these visits, he contracts HIV. The couple stay together. The unfaithful party dies of AIDS. No medical condition developed by any party to a marriage can be used as a ground for terminating it, although the circumstances in which the condition was caught might. If they were contracted to each other in a marriage, did the surviving partner have the right to a divorce before his partner died?

I don’t know. I sure hope Chief Justice Marshall knows. The scriptwriters of 'Philadelphia' didn’t know. However, one fact remains true for sure. Equality of rights demands equality of conduct. If any permitted inequality of conduct is ever proposed, then it will be a black day for America, because nobody’s marriage, not even Mom & Pop’s, will mean anything.

The Grinch Who Stole Scotland

2006-03-22T13:48:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
November 26, 2003

(With apologies to Dr. Seuss and William Topaz McGonagall)

At the end of November, Two thousand and three

The people of Scotland were astonished to see

A report that they read in the bold 'Daily Mail'

That should get their First Minister thrown into jail.

Ah, yes, wee Jack McConnell, that stout party hack,

With a smile for your face and a knife for your back,

Had made the decision, his heart like a boulder,

To publicly polish the chip on his shoulder.

‘We’ll cancel this Christmas malarkey’, he thought,

No-one’s insight or counsel was thereafter sought,

And in their contentment, up there on The Mound,

Labour’s busy wee elves had made nary a sound.

Until brave Margaret Mitchell, our proud Tory queen,

Stamped her foot on the ground as she threatened a scene.

She’d found out that McConnell, in his manic delusion,

Thinks that missing out words will help combat exclusion.

She’d bought Christmas cards from the Parliament shop,

But once she had read them she was ready to drop.

On the inside, an expression of a Scotsman’s great fear,

Some political mug had just cancelled New Year.

The reason they gave, while they kept their straight faces,

Is that ‘Christmas’ and ‘New Year’ offends other races.

‘We’ll have plain ‘Season’s Greetings!’ said the Parliament’s boss,

And the rest of us stared around, quite at a loss.

Scotland’s Muslim panjandrums didn’t know what to say,

They’d been quite looking forward to 'Going My Way',

And McConnell has proved, without need for a herald,

That he’s no Arnie S., more like Barry Fitzgerald.

Oh, now, what should we call him, this political Jack?

A machine politician? Or a Lanarkshire flack?

No, I’ve got it – this one’s really just such a cinch,

From now on, Jack McConnell is labelled –The Grinch!

He’s the Grinch who stole Scotland, from under our noses,

And as usual he’s through it all, smelling of roses.

Having saved us from Christmas’s stark racist danger,

He’s completely forgotten that wee Child In The Manger.

But Our Lord, in his vantage point high up in Heaven,

Is just waiting His turn, in two thousand and seven.

Lethal Frivolity

2006-03-22T13:45:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
November 25, 2003

I have not taken the opportunity to read the decision the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in the 'Goodridge' case. However, as a totally impartial observer, it seems to be the cause of an outburst of moral frivolity that can only be described as lethal in these present times, and the principal culprit is a man I used to admire, but for whom my respect is slowly diminishing, Andrew Sullivan.

Reporting the publication on his blog, Sullivan headed the item with the words ‘Thank God Almighty, We Are Free At Last’. I envy Andrew Sullivan to bits. A hugely talented writer, he must lead an absolutely fascinating life, reading great books, writing great articles and getting to enjoy and participate in the conversation of some fascinating people. My own view is that one’s orientation is, for many people, not a matter of choice. As Sullivan himself has shown, being gay is not an excuse for lockstep liberalism. However, when someone whose moral compass otherwise seems to be so centred equates the issue of gay marriage with the black man’s struggle for civil rights, then something is badly, badly wrong.

I am sure that, both in England and America, Andrew Sullivan will have met his fair share of bigots and rednecks, people who hate him not for who he is but what he is. Nothing excuses ill manners and bad behaviour against fellow citizens who behave within the parameters of the law. As another famous gay Englishman, Noel Coward, wrote in his diary the day that homosexuality was decriminalised, ‘Never again will young men commit suicide from shame’.

But Andrew Sullivan never faced down the dogs at Selma. He was never held incommunicado at Montgomery. All his adult life, he has been able to express his sexuality without criminal sanction or fear of a knock at the door. It is therefore wholly unsatisfactory to appropriate the language of Martin Luther King, whose struggle was to ensure that the black man got his right to be recognised as an equal, with a judicial decision that has conjured up a civil right from nowhere. This is not an issue of morality or ethics. This is a point of law. When a court makes a decision of this kind, it cannot take into account the fact that social conditions have changed since the passing of a law it is adjudicating. If that is a factor, it is the job of the legislature to address that, and it is only their job. What Andrew and other gay activists feel they lack is equality.

However, right now in the UK and USA gay people don’t suffer segregation. They don’t use separate washrooms. A gay man’s earning capacity and life expectancy are not predicated by their being gay, as many black men’s were by nature of the fact that they were black. Equality of pension rights and recognition of a ‘civil union’ is not in the same league of issues of saying that a man or woman needs to sit at the back of the bus. Many rich liberals use the phrase ‘at the back of the bus’ as being totemic of their own desire for equality. Thankfully for them, they never had the demeaning experience of having some bull-necked bigot pushing them aside to get the best seat, and feel powerless to stop them.

Another factor, I’m afraid, is Andrew’s Englishness. For a gay Englishman, it must be great to wake up in the morning and look out at Washington D.C. You’re in the Land of the Free, far away from the land that created the industrial marvel that was the Austin Princess, our Edsel. You can sup full at the well of liberty, and revel in the freedom that comes from being away from the narrow-mindedness of the class system. However, the fact that Andrew was born in England perhaps means that he perhaps still does not appreciate how profoundly black Americans took the civil rights movement. For them, it was a life or death struggle, one for which one of the 20th Century’s greatest men gave his life. Although gay marriage has its strident advocates, I can’t see anyone throwing themselves in front of an assassin’s bullet for equal pension rights.

But violence does abound in our world, from our own street corners to your skyscrapers. What an American word! It symbolises all that is good and wholesome in your society, just as ‘bullwhip’, and ‘lynching’ symbolise much that was bad. Although the ugliness of the past still rears its head from time to time, I’m sure many, many black men and women of a certain age will look upon younger blacks who race-bait and demand reparations and say, ‘They never had it so good’.

At the moment, our culture is fighting for its survival against a Salafist Muslim culture that does not recognise culture as we know it. It is vastly scarier than Soviet Communism, as its adherents are prepared to turn themselves into weapons. Like The Terminator, they cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be pleaded with and they positively will not stop until we are dead. Our failure to devote 100% of all our time and attention to this issue only weakens this further. These are foes who, unfortunately, can only be caught or killed. Gay marriage doesn’t figure at the moment. Not for any morally serious person.

I think it was Rosa Parks who said ‘Once, my soul was tired, but my feet was resting. Now, my feet is tired, but my soul is resting’. Right now, I’m sure Andrew Sullivan’s soul is probably resting. His mouth should follow suit.

A Local Hero

2006-03-22T13:42:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
November 20, 2003

When a movie like 'Master and Commander' gets impromptu reviews from both William F. Buckley, Jr., and Charles Krauthammer, it’s probably of some quality. However, for me, what will make this movie is the presence of Glaswegian actor Billy Boyd in the supporting role of helmsman Barrett Bonden. Boyd’s story deserves to be widely known, as it’s as applicable in the Bronx or Watts as in Glasgow. He is living proof that poverty, certainly in the UK and USA, is sometimes nothing more than a state of mind, and, in a small way, it’s a nice wee story of the triumph of the human spirit.

A number of actors and singers play at coming from the ‘hood. Billy Boyd’s the genuine article.

Boyd grew up in Cranhill in the East End of Glasgow, a part of the city blighted by years of neglect, bad city planning, crime and the benefit culture, and was orphaned in his teens. According to an interview in the Glasgow Daily Record on 15th November, he first wanted to become an actor at secondary school, and was brushed off by a teacher he asked for advice. Such is the history of the Daily Record in knocking down Glaswegians who actually achieve something consequential that they are probably already sharpening their knives for him. He became a bookbinder to trade, and only decided to try again for drama school in his twenties.

Since graduating from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Boyd has enjoyed theatre success, and came to prominence as Pippin in Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings trilogy. It’s satisfying to see a guy who survived a comprehensive school education in the East End playing in an adaptation of one of the most challenging novels in the English language.

Billy Boyd could have given up on himself, but he refused to do so. He could have lapsed into the mores of the society he saw around him and become nothing more than an outstretched hand and a walking vote for the Labour Party. He held on to his dream. He didn’t have the advantages I’ve had in life, the support of parents and a private education. The constancy of his dream means that he’s doing rather better for himself than I am, and good on him.

I couldn’t care less what his politics are. He might be a rabid supporter of the Scottish Socialist Party. However, Billy Boyd himself refused to be socialised, to be told that the circumstances of the area he grew up in meant that he would never be able to achieve the dream that was obviously very dear to him. An intelligent and accomplished man, if 'Lord of the Rings' had never happened, he would probably have still made a good living as a performer. The fact that he is well on his way to becoming a star is the proof that if you have the commitment to your dream, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter where you’re from. It doesn’t matter what the social attitudes around you are like. You can do it.

Very many on the left patronise the poor. The fact that that particular social group provides their support means that the maintenance of the poor in poverty is a desirable political aim for them. In the run up to Christmas, the children’s charity Dr. Barnardo’s has been running a shock advertising campaign, including an image of a baby mainlining heroin. This has produced mass revulsion. John Humphrys of The Sunday Times has written that he is withdrawing his support until the adverts are pulled. In the Sunday Telegraph, Ross Clark has made a very much more challenging point, that poverty as Thomas Barnardo came face to face with it in 1867 is almost unknown today. There is nowhere in Britain where ten children are sleeping in a cardboard box. What defines poverty for us, certainly in the UK, is ‘not having’. Billy Boyd proves that in Britain at least, the principal form of poverty is sometimes the one between the ears.

So here’s to wee Billy Boyd from Cranhill, last seen jamming with Russell Crowe in Baja California, a real master and commander who never gave up on himself. May his road go ever on.

Trashcan Bangers and the Neoconservative Mind Ray

2006-03-22T13:35:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
November 19, 2003

The President’s state visit to the UK is giving the radical left an opportunity to display their most prominent feature, more prominent than even their arrogance and narcissism- their paranoia. Leftist paranoia has been on parade since the phrase ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ took hold of the public imagination, and is manifested in the actions of those professional protesters, usually veterans of the anti-globalisation movement, who turn any form of protest into a kind of circus, with stilt- walkers and those guys with greasy pony tails who spend all days banging trashcans. It is almost as if they believe their own propaganda. Well, let’s let them into a secret –it’s all true.

Neo-conservative politics is spread by exposure to an invisible mind ray developed by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. George W. Bush, not originally a neo-conservative, was turned after being kidnapped by Douglas Feith, who carries copies of 'Project for the New American Century' in his toecaps like Rosa Klebb in From Russia, with Love, and Michael Ledeen, who works the mind ray with what’s left of his hair standing on end like a mad scientist, shouting ‘Faster, please!’

These vast right-wing conspirators fear only one thing – the sound of banging trashcans. It is to them like a silver bullet to a werewolf. Whenever a neo-conservative appears near you, pick up a trashcan and bang it as loud as possible. It might help if you throw in an incantation like

One, Two, Three, Four, We don’t want your bloody war,

Five, Six, Seven, Eight, We don’t want your racist hate!

Man, that really gets them quaking with fear.

However, the only viable defence against the mind ray is that old stalwart, the tinfoil hat. Rather than draw attention to themselves, celebrities have been very discreet in protecting themselves against any invasion of their synapses. In some cases, this has been more through a desire to protect the remaining shreds of their credibility, rather than any desire to publicly acknowledge fear of mental corruption. Michael Moore has started lining his baseball cap with it (he thinks Wal-Mart’s own brand provides the right thickness to refract the ray into gun-selling bank managers), and rumour has it that senior courtiers have advised Her Majesty to commission Asprey’s, the royal jewellers, to discreetly glue some on to her tiara.

No, that’s not it! What was I thinking? They’ve got to me! Yes, Bush is a puppet, but he’s not the right’s puppet. He’s a puppet of - the Zorgs!

The Zorgs are an incredibly hostile race from the planet Nincomzoon. Interested only in invading planets so that they can rape the resources, their favourite policy is ‘Divide & Conquer’. These guys are cunning. They will lie in wait for decades, even centuries, before making their move. They infiltrate the political process, making sure their number two man, Narcolept, gets into a position of authority, usually high political office. Then they unleash hell.

Their leader, Zacomboop, takes the form of an aggressive dissident, and his Praetorians, the Zacomboopies, form a fifth column to sow unrest and paranoia. Their favourite stunt is burning giant dolls of Narcolept. In some more primitive societies, this has been known to lead to immediate surrender, with Zacomboop being hailed as a visionary and Great Leader. I see it now! Michael Moore is Zacomboop! He and Bush are on the same side!

Great paranoia, but not half as daft as thinking burning giant paper dolls and banging on trashcans is going to change American policy.

The Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq

2006-03-22T13:31:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
November 18, 2003

'If the UN in the end chooses not to enforce its own resolutions, then the US should give Saddam 30 to 60 days to disarm, and if he doesn’t unilateral action is a regrettable, but unavoidable, choice.’

Governor Howard Dean, salon.com, February 20 2003

It’s time the air was cleared about the issue of Weapons of Mass Destruction. A WMD is any device designed to kill human beings and damage property on a large scale. Therefore, a laser guided GPS missile, which can hit a target the size of a nickel from three hundred miles, is not a WMD. It is instead a precision munition. Pearl Harbour, although an act of craven aggression, was aimed at degrading the US Navy’s capacity to wage war in the Pacific. It was carried out with recognised battlefield weapons, and had a specific military aim. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although WMD attacks, were only carried out with the express intention of ending a war against an opponent so ferocious that they would have fought to the last man, even to the gates of the Emperors’ Palace. However, on that dreadful day in September 2001, Mohammed Atta and his cadre turned four airliners into Weapons of Mass Destruction. In their intent, the hijackers were themselves Weapons of Mass Destruction. Therefore, anyone who says the USA has never suffered a WMD attack is either foolish or lying.

In the same way, the Israeli bus system is subject to the constant threat of WMD attack, given the desire of Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade to kill and maim on a large scale. Their targets are of no military significance whatsoever, ordinary Joes going to work on the bus. The World Trade Centre had no military significance. Although neither Washington nor Moscow would have survived long had the Cold War gone hot, the mutual attacks on those two cities would at least have had the effect of corrupting the opponents’ command and control structure. Any chemical and biological attacks in the field would have had the military effect of reducing the opponents’ troop strength.

It is therefore disingenuous of us now to think of WMD’s in purely nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological terms. Anything used to kill people on a large scale is a WMD, and anyone who kills themselves deliberately doing it is also a WMD. This may hopefully bring some moral clarity back into the argument.

In particular, it should hopefully bring some moral clarity into the arguments of people like Governor Howard Dean. According to a brilliant article called ‘Dean’s Rhetorical Twister’, written by Jim Geraghty for the March 28th, National Review Online, Governor Dean has not always been so strident in his opposition to the occupation of Iraq as some of his statements may have seemed. In a January 31st interview with the Los Angeles Times’ Ron Brownstein, Gov. Dean said that if

‘President Bush presents what he considered to be persuasive evidence that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction, he would support military action, even without UN authorisation’.

The same month, Abdel-Aziz Al-Rantissi, the Goering of Hamas, made the following declaration, reported by Reuters;

‘Iraqis should prepare explosive belts and would-be martyrs to combat the US occupiers. The American aggressors, the American invaders are now on Iraqi soil, therefore Iraqis must confront them with all possible means including martyrdom operations.’

On February 21st, the day after the outburst of moral clarity he suffered at the start of the article, Gov. Dean, in a moment of political opportunism worthy of Charles Kennedy, leader of the British Liberal Democrats, told the Associated Press that he would not

‘support sending US troops to Iraq without specific UN authorisation’.

According to Geraghty, on the February 25th issue of PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Gov. Dean said,

‘We need to respect the legal rights that are involved here. Unless they are an imminent threat, we do not have a legal right, in my view, to attack them’.

Osama bin Laden, an engineer, never had a legal right to try to destroy New York City. Abdel Aziz-Al-Rantissi, a gynaecologist, never had a legal right to call for the death of Americans. Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, a corner boy and hired gun, didn’t possess the legal right to gas the people of Halabja or attach cattle-prods to his opponents’ genitals. The fact that bin Laden, Al-Rantissi or Saddam didn’t possess legal rights never stopped them from their courses of action. The legal right Gov. Dean would uphold is one of those that stems from the postwar constructs of the UN Declaration of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms and the European Declaration of Human Rights, that whoever held Iraq’s UN seat had rights, not the Iraqi people themselves. That’s the legal right that all those on the Anti-War Left were fighting to uphold. That particular right helped to keep the peace until European Communism fell. Indeed, there’s a very strong case to be made that the only people whose security was ensured by that right were some Western Europeans. The appalling progress of democracy in post-colonial Africa gives the lie to the idea that signing up to a statement of rights guarantees that the people will have them.

But you’ll still get the diehards who want the President to show them the nukes. The fact that people like the late Dr. David Kelly, an Unscom Inspector with 37 trips to Baghdad under his belt, the man who probably knew more than anyone else in the world about Iraq’s bioweapons programme, held the view that Iraq should be disarmed by force, cuts no ice with the Anti-War Left. Dai Kelly was the guy who sat across the table from Rihab Taha, looked her in the eye and formed the opinion that she was telling him a pack of lies, and she did it again and again. In a country the size of California, there are plenty of hiding places. Patience is still required.

However, courtesy of Abdel-Aziz Al-Rantissi, courtesy of the remnants of Al-Qa’eda, courtesy of Saddam Hussein Al-Tikriti’s lust for power, blood and carnage, American and coalition troops face the regular threat of WMD attack. The Red Cross, the only body in the world whose neutrality is guaranteed by international law, has suffered WMD attack. Gov. Dean’s statement on salon.com showed that he at least understood the failure of the UN to enforce its own resolutions. He understood then the necessity of disarming Saddam by force, no matter what he says now. On February 20th he was clearly satisfied with the evidence presented by the Bush Administration that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. Accordingly, his statements show he endorsed the principle of the war, and accordingly, he endorsed the war itself. Gov. Dean and others like him on the left who seek to twist and turn in the breeze of public opinion about the war should be very careful. Their voters have long memories.

It’s 1982 All Over Again!

2006-03-22T13:27:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
November 17, 2003

A political leader unpopular with the media elite had won a military victory that was bringing them massive popularity among the people. Their opposition, having lost the last election because of their extremism, reacted to this by accusing the leader of a war crime. With the next election only a year away, they drifted even further to the left. Some of the opposition’s leaders publicly disassociated themselves from it, which caused a massive split in their ranks. In the meantime the leader’s economic policies were jumpstarting prosperity at an incredible rate, and people were starting to feel good about themselves again, after a short recession. Sound familiar? Welcome to Britain in 1982, and I’m glad to say that what’s happening in America now seems to be an almost direct replica of what happened here that glorious summer. The reason I’m glad is that if the model plays out, the Republicans are going to win in 2004, and probably 2008 as well.

Margaret Thatcher was riding the crest of her ‘Falklands Factor’, the feeling of national unity inspired by her leadership of the campaign to liberate the British South Atlantic possessions from Argentine occupation. Conducted at lightning speed with less than 200 fatalities, the Falklands War was not by any manner of means as divisive as the Iraqi War. However, for the politically disengaged, Thatcher represented strong, honest leadership, combined with our innate senses of pride and respect for those who wear the uniform. The people felt she was one of them. I suspect the vast majority of politically disinterested Americans now feel the same about George W. Bush. The late Hugo Young, the Oxford educated son of an industrialist who became one of the leading liberal opinion formers in the UK, published a biography of Thatcher entitled ‘One of Us’. It was of course a hatchet job, designed to show that a grammar school girl from Lincolnshire wasn’t one of them, a fact with which the Iron Lady was remarkably comfortable.

The left hated Margaret Thatcher with the sort of fury now being exhibited towards George W. Bush. It was not uncommon to hear feminists referring to her as a ‘bitch’, a complete misunderstanding of Thatcher’s own very powerful brand of feminism. She felt no need to say ‘I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar!’ She never, ever tried to play the Mother of The Nation routine. She just got on with the job of leading. She was castigated for her dress and her hairstyle and her husband, the late Sir Denis Thatcher, a very clever and accomplished man, was lampooned as a clubhouse buffoon in the same way that the fabulist Michael Moore attacks Laura Bush.

The President seems to have the same ease about himself as Margaret Thatcher. The obloquy heaped on him for being born into an Old Yankee family, for his education and for his speech, seems to bounce off him. Seeing him interact with ordinary Americans shows a man who appears to be totally genuine. There is a common belief that voters are suckers. Not so. Voters can spot a phoney at a thousand yards, and they react to nothing better than a politician who’s genuine. That’s why you never see Bush doing the lip-biting routine of his predecessor. There is a case to be made that a thus far successful campaign has introduced a Falklands Factor into the President’s poll numbers, an event I’m pleased to say I predicted over a year ago.

One of the seminal moments of the Falklands War was the sinking of the Argentine battleship General Belgrano. The hard left of the Labour Party latched onto the sinking like a vice, and for years afterwards Tam Dalyell MP, a hard-line socialist and throwback to the good old 18th Century days when the tenants returned Squire to Parliament, used it as a stick with which to beat Margaret Thatcher. The sinking of the Belgrano, while regrettable and resulting in loss of Argentine life, was a legitimate act of war. The desire of the left to smear the Royal Navy was indicative of its lack of moral perspective.

In a similar way the Anti-War Left calls for President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld and General Franks to be prosecuted for war crimes. While the Democrat nominees cannot go that far, they still carp about the conduct of the war and its consequences, regardless of the fact that, for example, John Kerry voted for it and Howard Dean endorsed it. The American people recognise this disingenuousness, which is one of the main reasons why the GOP have just won governorships in Kentucky and Mississippi.

The official defence policy of the Labour Party in 1982 was unilateral nuclear disarmament. This policy was endorsed by their candidate for Sedgefield, former CND member Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. Their industrial policy was state ownership of industry. Their economic and foreign policies were centred around withdrawal from the Common Market, when it really was just a Common Market, not a political body like the European Union. These agendas, particularly the defence agenda, made the British people highly suspicious of Labour, giving them the belief that Labour wasn’t fit to govern. In the same way the Democrats seem to be drifting further and further to the left. While the hard left seems to be the natural position of the 90% of college professors who are registered Democrats, it’s not the position of the blue-collar working men and women who want good healthcare, who want good schools, who want to vote Democrat but who’re also patriots concerned about their national security. These people are more sophisticated and morally serious than the Democrat nominees seem to think, and for as long as they continue their leftward drift, they’ll be drifting further away from their own voters. Bush has won the little guys.

Of course the defining moment for the Labour Party during Thatcher’s first term was the breakaway of some of the leadership to form the Social Democrat Party (SDP). The SDP, led by David Owen, Bill Rodgers, Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams, all formerly high officeholders of Labour, came into being as a result of the Labour leaderships’ refusal to consider reform of the party’s voting system. This system operated on a ‘bloc vote’ basis, with the trade unions in Labour’s Electoral College wielding a massive amount of power by casting all their members’ votes. The SDP recognised this to be fundamentally undemocratic, and for a brief period, became a significant force for moderation. They made the mistake of allying themselves to the Liberals, who were then a spent force, and the Liberals, like a parasite in search of a new host, leeched themselves onto the SDP, stealing their clothes and their policies, riding on their backs and eventually taking them over. The last two leaders of the new Liberal Democrat Party have both been old Liberals.

Enter the figure of Senator Zell Miller. When one of your elder statesmen comes out publicly and says that he’s voting for the opposition at the next election, you’re in trouble. It shows that you are at war with yourself. Although Zell Miller’s announcement will not lead to the formation of a breakaway third party, what he has done is give voice to those many thousands of Democrats who will be deeply troubled by the posture of the nominees. When someone as senior as Senator Miller, a guy who wants to vote Democrat, says he can’t bring himself to, it shows that on any level the Democrats’ positions aren’t working. Zell Miller’s announcement is the Democrats’ SDP moment, and they should reflect on how many votes the SDP took from Labour at the 1983 General Election.

In 1979, the British economy was a mess. As an eight-year old the previous winter, I remember rubbish being piled up on the sidewalk outside our house. The garbage men had gone on strike as part of the ‘Winter of Discontent’, a concerted campaign by the trade unions to extort more money from the state and their private employers. Thatcher was elected on a platform of radical economic reform, cutting taxes and, more importantly, cutting public services. This led to a boom in unemployment for the first two years of her Premiership, followed by a period of prosperity that in many ways is still going on. An unfortunate consequence of the Thatcher years has been the decimation of the British manufacturing sector, although this was not all down to her. The first major strike that she had to contend with was the steelworkers in 1980. They were out for twelve weeks, and during that time, not a single pound of steel was rolled in the UK. As a result, British trade unions have as much responsibility as Thatcher for the departure of manufacturing jobs to the Far East. It is now rare to see anything marked ‘Made in Britain’ and as a result our economy is unbalanced towards the service sector. If anyone thinks such an outcome is unlikely in the United States, one need say only one word – offshoring.

However, the cumulative effect of Thatcher was that more money ended up in our pockets, with the consequence that we started to feel good about ourselves. We started to boom. We never achieved anything like 7% in one quarter, but the fact that we felt prosperous made us proud to be Brits again. The raising of the Union Flag over Port Stanley was the icing on the cake.

Of course, in 1983 Labour were wiped out electorally. Although the Labour leadership immediately tried to restore some sanity after that defeat, they weren’t able to do so in time for the 1987 election, which Thatcher again cruised through. One sees no sign of any immediate outbreak of sanity in the Democrat ranks, so it’s possible, just possible, that the critical battle for the Republicans in the next few years will be the White House race of 2008. We’ll see. However, it’s strange to think of George W. Bush as an American Thatcher, but that’s what he’s turning out to be. Just don’t tell the good ol’ boys down at the rodeo.

America's Northern Ireland

2006-03-22T13:21:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
November 14, 2003

The popular myth runs that in 1994, a civil servant in the Northern Ireland Office answered his telephone. The voice at the other end belonged to a high official of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The two men were the channel of communication between the British Government and those bent on ending British rule in Ulster. The IRA man said, ‘The war is over’.

The actions that both Labour and Conservative Governments have taken since that call have brought the government of Northern Ireland to a standstill. They have failed to recognise that, although the IRA recognised it could never defeat the British Army in the field, the mindset of its leadership was such that they could never give up on their ambition. That being the case, the political wing of the IRA, Sinn Fein, has done everything in its power to frustrate Ulster’s public life through political, instead of violent, means.

I mention this as it is now clear that the current coalition effort in Iraq is producing a situation increasingly similar to that endured by the people of Ulster since 1969. While those responsible for civil government believe they are conducting a policing operation, their opponents believe they are at war. It has been one of President Bush’s greatest mistakes thus far to declare major operations over at the stage that he did. For the Ba’athists, blood brothers of Sinn Fein, and the Islamists, this war will never be over until they recognise that they will never defeat the Americans. That means there can be no American exit strategy. That means digging in for decades and the regular drip of losses. Or else it means heating up the war again.

There are some crucial differences between Iraq and Northern Ireland. Obviously, Iraq is very much larger than Northern Ireland. The majority of Ulster’s people wanted to remain British, so they did not seem to have any problem with a British military presence. Harold Wilson only sent The British Army to Ulster because of the harassment and gerrymandering perpetrated on the Catholic minority by successive Unionist Home Rule Governments and disreputable police units like the B Specials, a name guaranteed to raise the hackles of any Ulster Catholic of a certain age. Although the B Specials and their political masters were vile bigots, they never dug mass graves or deployed poison gas shells on Dungannon or Portadown. Ulster has only one land frontier, although at points it’s as porous as Iraq’s. And the British army in Ulster never had to deal with the specific nihilism of suicide terrorism. However, although the Ulster situation produced a regular stream of casualties, it did not have the same incredibly high attrition rate as the Vietnam War. At no stage were 250 bodybags a day being sent back to the mainland.

This is the critical similarity between Ulster then and Iraq now. The historian Daniel Pipes deserves due credit for spending years forwarding the view that the Islamists considered themselves to be at war with the West, and that the West’s failure to take this posture seriously only emboldened them further. When a terrorist attack occurred, such as the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, it was called a crime. Men who considered themselves warriors were treated like felons, prosecuted in the civil courts and sent to civilian prisons. The British adopted the same posture towards the IRA and the even more bloodthirsty Irish National Liberation Army, which produced Northern Ireland’s most psychotic Republicans, Dominic ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey and Desmond O’Hare, ‘The Border Fox’. The IRA was run by a body called the Army Council. It referred to its internees as ‘Prisoners of War’, its members as ‘volunteers’. It was no accident that the quietest period in Ulster’s recent history, in terms of terror, was during the era of internment in the early 1970’s. The IRA view this as a romantic period, when the older Republicans made it their business to corrupt the impressionable youths they encountered in Long Kesh Prison, turning it into a University of Terror. As a result, when Edward Heath lost the political will to continue the experiment, he turned a generation of killers onto the streets. An opportunity to inform and improve the minds of the interned was totally wasted.

Kevin Myers, Ireland’s leading, if not only, conservative commentator, wrote recently in 'The Sunday Telegraph' that the reason that the IRA effectively won was the lack of resolve of the British Government to crush them militarily. Although an extreme view, it has a ring of truth. I’ve written before, in an article for 'The Washington Dispatch' called 'Running The Bad Guys out of Dodge', that the formative attitudes and experiences of Islamists are very similar to those of groups in the Old West like the James Gang, and that the social challenges and attitudes to authority in southwest Saudi Arabia are similar to those in post-Civil War Missouri. As a result, I believed then that the civil situation in Baghdad, Tombstone on the Tigris, could be improved by appointing a Marshal, really to run the Islamists out of town. That opportunity has been lost, and as time has gone on the situation has really deteriorated to the extent that Baghdad is now Belfast circa 1981, and the only reason the Americans and the coalition will fail is if they have the same policy to their opponents as the British had then. This may mean taking a very difficult and unpopular step.

This may mean declaring the war back on. This may mean suspension of civilian authority and the declaration of martial law. This may mean suspension of the right of free association. This may mean accusations of fascism. None of the above measures were ever applied in Belfast, whose hot war went on for decades and whose cold war has been run by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, twin Godfathers of Hate whose goal was and is to turn Ireland into the Emerald Cuba, from their offices in the Stormont Assembly, and all on the taxpayers’ time.

The analogy to the affairs of Northern Ireland are so obvious that it is disturbing that so many of those opposed to the coalition effort in Iraq continue to refer to it becoming another Vietnam. That was a hideously divisive experience for your country, one that mine has been fortunate enough to avoid. Maybe it’s because every citizen in England could have been one of their victims, like six-year old Jonathan Ball who went out shopping with his father near Manchester in early 1993, that it’s still socially unacceptable to express sympathy for the methods of the IRA, a restraint missing from the actions of left-wing bloggers who call for more American deaths, and groups like International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). However, on November 7th Denis Boyles of the National Review Online reported on how some journalists are now admitting the truth about the military campaign in Vietnam. He quotes Robert Bartley in the 'Wall Street Journal', who said ‘The truth about the Tet offensive is that we won’. One of the great historians of recent years, Victor Davis Hanson, makes the same case for the Tet offensive in his seminal case study of the supremacy of the western way of war, 'Carnage and Culture', published in the UK as 'Why The West Has Won'. Such is the clarity of Hanson’s arguments, and the conviction with which he expresses them in his columns for NRO, that 'Chronicles' magazine has labelled him ‘an apologist for war crimes’, a rather nasty way of saying you disagree with someone.

However, in the same article Boyles reported that Walter Cronkite is still standing by a report he made on the Tet offensive. I’ll let the more articulate Mr. Boyles finish my sentence – “ (it was) a piece of work that gave credence to all the crisis-jive reported before him by other, even worse journos, and set a precedent that hasn’t served CBS or the media well since”. Huzzah, sir!

You’d expect liberalism from the American broadcast media, for at least as long as the advertisers are willing to pay. However, some of the most disturbing commentary I’ve read about the coalition effort has come from the right, and, sadly, from the British right. Two of the most prominent British critics of the war and the occupation are Peter Hitchens and Sir Max Hastings. Hitchens, the younger brother of Christopher Hitchens and a columnist for The Mail on Sunday, is a kind of British David Horowitz, if such a thing could exist, a former Communist who has become a very conservative defender of what ought to be called the ‘High Tory’ way of life. Hitchens’ ideal Britain is one of tea on the lawn, hanging criminals, young ragamuffins tugging their forelocks to the bobby on the beat and everyone knowing their place, and probably not one where mouthy wee Glaswegians get to express challenging views to the United States of America.

However, the emanations of Sir Max Hastings have been scandalous. Sir Max, a former editor of 'The Daily Telegraph' and the London 'Evening Standard', wrote an article called ‘Britain is furious with America’ for the November 7th issue of the London Spectator. He kicked off the article with a plea for equivalence in the face of danger, asking us not to call those responsible for murder in Iraq ‘terrorists’, but ‘guerrillas’, ‘unless’ he said ‘ we wish to describe those running SOE’s (Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive) agents in Europe in the second world war in the same terms’. A former editor of 'The Daily Telegraph', a guy with a reputation as a historian, equates those who detonate suicide car bombs in front of the Red Cross with those who faced certain torture and death at the hands of the Gestapo in their brave and, in many cases, wholly forgotten efforts to shorten a war which was killing Britons at an incredible rate. And you thought it was only some of the left who were sick. Sir Max was opposed to the war from the start. I suppose I should applaud him for having the honesty to oppose the peace.

The President has shown an admirable will to continue, not to back down, not to flinch when things are not going according to plan. It will remain to be seen whether he has the guts to face down the nay-sayers like Walter Cronkite and Sir Max Hastings, the guys who report and interpret history. That may require the most difficult decision of a career that for two years has been fraught with difficult decisions. The quagmire-lovers are waiting for him to slip up. Slip up he can’t, there’s too much at stake. He could try to do what John Major and Tony Blair did in Ulster and try to accommodate those who consider themselves at war with you, or else he could fight a war he advocated to its proper conclusion and spare the Iraqi people the political situation now endured by the people of Ulster. He should not want American youth to grow up thinking about Iraq the way I did thinking about Northern Ireland. Fallujah, Tikrit and Mosul don’t need to have the same resonance for you guys as the names of Newry, Strabane and Derry have for me. There’s no reason why the Sunni Triangle should become like the Bandit Country of South Armagh.

If you think Iraq’s a quagmire, it’s got nothing on Northern Ireland. Yet.

MTV Trashes the Church

2006-03-22T13:18:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
November 13, 2003

On the evening of October 6th, the MTV Europe Music Awards were held in Edinburgh. The good burghers of the windy city allowed one of the most egregious acts of disrespect for the Catholic Church in recent times, which if repeated on the streets would earn the MTV board prosecution under Scotland’s unfortunately necessary, anti-sectarianism laws.

As Shakespeare said, there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Similarly, there is in the mind of a Catholic a tide that, if exposed to for sufficiently long periods, makes even the most tepid of the brethren say, No More. Intolerant as it may seem, I now zone out pop singers and actors saying how repressive they found Catholic school, or how the nuns beat them with rulers. Like G.K. Chesterton’s Flambeau, I have been stuffed with liberalism like a Strasbourg goose full of grain, and I have had my fill. Bleating about Catholic guilt is always good for a cheap shot and a few bucks. None of them ever talk about Catholic pride, in my society a complete social taboo. In Scotland, you’re better off admitting to glue sniffing or necrophilia than saying you’re proud to be a Catholic.

Not that a properly trained, properly informed, properly devout, Catholic should ever want to. One of our prayers runs

“But Christ was humbler yet, even to accepting death,

Death on a cross”

If God himself, in the form of his son Our Lord, can express humility, then it follows that the rest of us should really follow suit.Which brings me to the scandal perpetrated on October 6th in the city of John Knox and Jenny Geddes. The MTV Europe music awards opened with what appeared to be a church choir, robed in white, proceeding from backstage. A trapdoor opened and from below stage there appeared Christina Aguilera, dressed as a nun. Wearing an expression of piety, her hands clasped in apparent prayer, Miss Aguilera then cast off her habit to reveal that she wasn’t wearing very much underneath. She then proceeded with the standard pelvic thrusts.

I should explain that I saw this on a clip on the early morning GMTV News Hour. As one gets older, there are things that one can’t take that early in the morning without a second cup of coffee, and Christina Aguilera prancing about like a nun with no bra is one of them. I was quite relieved that the clip was as short as it was, as otherwise the remote would have gone through the screen.

Miss Aguilera is a cultural phenomenon that has completely passed me by. I can’t name one of her songs, I don’t even know what her voice sounds like. She is a completely closed book, and one that I would prefer did not sully a nun’s habit for the purpose of making an entrance. She may devote her spare time to the performance of good works and small acts of corporal mercy – I am not the keeper of her conscience. However, the boys (and it will be boys) at MTV, the alpha predators at the top of the jungle of the music business, know that if it’s sensational, it will sell. And like greedy trial lawyers, for them it’s all about the money.

It would be interesting to know whether any MTV executives observe any kind of religious practice, be it Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Muslim. In the very short clip of Miss Aguilera in her underwear, there seemed to be a sort of studied, indifferent sterility to her actions. The move had been thoroughly planned, of course, to produce the maximum impact, but its impact was that of much modern art – crucifixes in dung and that sort of stuff. Even Catholics aren’t shocked at having their symbolism desecrated any more, such is its prevalence. The practice of abusing Christian symbols has nothing to do with rejection of patriarchy or clerical abuse. It’s everything to do with a lack of boundaries, and the desire of people like the top boys at MTV to make as much money as possible. Those guys should watch one of the better movies about the Society of Jesus, The Mission. The central character, Mendoza (Robert De Niro) is a slave trader and mercenary who reforms and becomes a priest. There is still time for them to reform, and as we say ‘repent, and believe the Good News’. Miss Aguilera’s moral interests might be better served by finding some new homies. The Sisters are always recruiting.

A Nasty Brush with the Anti-War Left

2006-03-22T13:15:00.000Z

(June 2 2006 - I received an e-mail this morning from David Torrance, advising me that the gentleman in question was his twin brother. I am more than happy to correct the error, and my apologies to ther Torrances for any offence or confusion caused).

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
November 12, 2003

I’m not a tall person, only 5’7”, and a slim 12 stone. However, what I lack in height I make up in width across the shoulders, and I’m as solid as a tank. For all that I can take care of myself I loathe confrontation, and will run a mile to avoid it. Accordingly, I can’t stand other people putting me in a position where I have to confront them. On October 6th, two very strident members of the anti-war left did just that. If the attitude of those two ladies is anything to go by, the cultural and ideological war that’s engulfing the West over the Iraqi war is going to run and run, and conservatives need to win it as a matter of urgency, to preserve our great history and way of life.

That evening, I was part of the audience for Question Time, an ask-the-panel political discussion show that’s been a mainstay of the BBC’s Current Affairs programming for decades. In the foyer, you could see the usual suspects gathering. There was Mohammed Asif, the City of Glasgow’s Asylum-Seeker-in-Chief, waiting for a chance to shout ‘Racism!’ at the country which gave him shelter from his previous home, Afghanistan. There was baby-faced David Torrance, host of Grampian Television’s The Week in Politics, hoping to be recognised. There was the usual doubt over the political independence of the BBC, with a campaign poster for the communications trade union BECTU on the staff notice board. And there were two ladies sporting ‘Stop Bush’ badges.

The most divisive political movement in the UK is the British National Party (BNP). A sub-Klan collection of rednecks dedicated to race baiting and immigration control, they are the blue rags to the bull of the Anti-War Left. They use as their symbol the Union Jack, debasing the national flag in a way that would be unthinkable in the United States. The Stop Bush Sisters, their fascism antennae at full power, must have spotted the young man of mixed race with the Union Jack tie from one thousand yards, and they decided to have a go at him.

BBC Scotland’s headquarters has a very elegant smoking lounge, a kidney-shaped facility with a glass façade. Being a smoker, I was in there having a quick draw when the Stop Bush Sisters burst in and started shouting at the man with the Union Jack tie sitting no more than three yards across from me. Although the guy denied membership of the BNP (I wonder..), he was doing nothing to anyone other than smoking a cigarette. One of them threatened to assault him. Now when a Scotsman can’t be left alone to smoke a cigarette in peace, that’s just wrong, and when he’s threatened with assault for his choice of tie, that’s evil. Your humble author, the world’s biggest physical coward, got mad.

I jumped up and shouted at the more dominant of the two, a wild-eyed blond Englishwoman of indeterminate age, that she should leave the guy alone. She shouted back at me that she wouldn’t. I shouted back that if she didn’t stop, I’d get security. She said, go get them. I played my killer card – ‘I was a lawyer for seven years – does that sober you up?’ The Englishwoman’s eyes glazed over for a fraction of a second. However, in a second she had cast her die and started shouting at the man again. I called security. The Stop Bush Sisters were escorted from the smoking lounge.

The personal highlight of the show was telling Rosie Kane, a Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Trotskyist Scottish Socialist Party, that being an MSP was the best job she was ever going to get. However, my milquetoast stomach was in knots throughout the show, and left in a hurry at its end.

Although the BNP’s policies are repugnant, its members are human beings, and entitled to the same respect and courtesy as every other member of the human race, including those they would disenfranchise and expel. The Stop Bush Sisters, campaigners for peace, would beat up a man for his choice of tie, having made an assumption that, in a fraction of a second, became for them a solid fact. Although it’s questionable judgment to wear a symbol viewed as fascist in the likely presence of the anti-war left, that young man has a right of freedom of speech – doesn’t he?

Liberalism's War on Women

2006-03-22T12:38:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
November 10, 2003

As a first year law student, the first class I took was contract. The first thing you learn in contract class is that for every right there is a corresponding obligation. The ‘O’ word is a big and scary one, one that could be a good tool to use against the stokers of the abortion mills. If a woman has a right to choose, what is her corresponding obligation? The answer is to face the consequences of her actions.

As an admittedly biased observer, the death of the concept of consequences is all around. If you smoke cigarettes and die of cancer, it’s the tobacco companies’ fault. If you stuff yourself like a pig on high cholesterol food, get fat and suffer a heart attack, it’s the fault of the fast food companies. If you buy a car that’s too powerful for you and crash, it’s the fault of the manufacturer. If you don’t pay your local taxes then get drunk one night and trip up on the sidewalk, it’s the city’s fault. Every mistake you’ve made in your life is the fault of your parents because (sniff) ‘You were never there, Dad’. A President of the United States was responsible for the mass degradation of history’s most successful Army out of his desire to feel the pain of others. As a result of his actions, 2,700 of his citizens also felt pain.

However, from the philosophical point of view, abortion is often deemed consequence-less for the perpetrator. Indeed, it’s about the only form of killing so far actively encouraged by the standards of modern society. The explosion of Western affluence in the last twenty years has certainly encouraged us to define ourselves not as who or what we are, but as what and how we consume. Scotland’s most viciously ultraliberal newspaper, The Sunday Herald, carries a portfolio of absolutely exquisite properties every week. The political attitudes prevalent on the opinion pages sit wholly at odds with the wooden floors and en-suite bathrooms two sections behind them.

However, for many, many middle-class women, the social pressure that’s been placed on them since the 1960’s is impossible to resist. The amount of newsprint that editors dedicate every day to diet supplements, beauty supplements, hairdos and increasingly, holistic and alternative medicines, would cover a small forest. However, the most insidious form of societal pressure on the western female is the unbending lie that ‘they can have it all’.

Nobody seems to ask young women whether they want it all. Who set the boundaries of ‘all?’ How is ‘all’ defined? Unless my opinion is radically simplistic, then there must be a substantial proportion of females more interested in maternity, husbands and babies, the kind of important stuff, than in closing a twelve million dollar deal before jetting to Rio for the weekend. It’s a fact of life. More simply, it’s biology.

However, that’s now viewed as being an unacceptable truth. To say so would bring accusations of trying to place parameters on women. Far from it. If a woman elects not to pursue a professional or business career but to stay at home and raise a family, she is exercising her real right to choose. She is exercising an option on her future that many people who claim to speak for her would prefer that she did not have.

The political aims of liberalism require workers to pay taxes. The more women stay at home, the fewer taxpayers there are to fund social programs. For liberals, this is massively undesirable. As a result, every aspect of an economy’s resources, principally its labour, must be deployed. This means sending women out to work. It’s a contradiction of choices that the liberals will promote the perceived consequence-less abortion right over the right to stay home and raise your kids, but when viewed through their economic prism it makes perfect sense. Working mothers are good. They pay taxes. They can’t afford to stay at home, so they need childcare. Childcare programs give one a warm glow and also help to reduce the unemployment statistics. If you open a publicly funded childcare project, you can claim that you’ve created jobs, however these jobs can only be sustained by more taxation income so Mom needs to get a second job to earn a living wage. A working mother’s own earnings will fuel consumer spending. Their consumer spending will help keep other workers in a job.

It’s sad to see young women still repeating the slogans and tropes of the 1960’s, when the world has moved so far on since then. Our affluence has moved on. The collective dangers we face have moved on. Liberalism’s disproven politics have stayed stuck in amber. They keep forgetting their own slogan, ‘Yesterday’s Gone’. Their apologists will forgive them many things, although it’s inexcusable that they’re maintaining their war on half of the human race.

The Conservative Dilemma

2006-03-22T12:35:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
November 6, 2003

Post-Clinton, there has emerged a disturbing dichotomy in conservative thought which is producing a philosophy that’s really a contradiction in terms. It’s the idea that it’s possible to be an economic conservative and a social liberal. This is impossible for the simplest of reasons. A liberal’s view of economics is based on his politics. A conservative’s views on politics should be grounded on their understanding of economics.

Since the monetarist successes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s, there are some economic practices that clearly work. Cutting taxes puts money back into the hands of producers and consumers and stimulates growth, after an initial period of pain. The release of growth figures of an incredible 7% for the last quarter shows once again the truth of Margaret’s Law. Also, unbending regulation increases costs that can only be recouped from the consumer at the end of the supply chain, therefore unreasonable regulation, for example, the European Union regulating the correct curvature of bananas, is bad, while positive regulation, for example the outlawing of child labour, is good.

A liberal believes principally in the redistribution of wealth, and if not wealth, then income. One of the 20th Century’s great capitalists, John Paul Getty, once acidly pointed out that if all wealth were redistributed at noon, by 12.15 someone would have blown his share on the horses. It doesn’t work, but because of the emotional power of liberal utopianism, appealing as it does to a human being’s innate sense of fairness, liberalism’s adherents are likely to hold onto their beliefs long after the errors in their theories have been made clear to them. As the people, in the form of the state, are responsible for the welfare of all, the state’s principal duty is the provision of services for all, which can only be funded by either borrowing or taxes, and taxes, of course, take money out of the system.

Increasing taxes also, as Reagan eloquently pointed out, leads to inflation and acts as an accelerant to the tendency of government to grow of its own accord. A good case in point is Britain’s Inland Revenue, our IRS. The Inland Revenue now employs 60,000 people. This means that one person in one thousand of the whole population, including minors and the retired, is now employed by the taxpayer to collect taxes, and that is just way too many people in a country where the national average wage is about $37,000.

However, liberal social policy also strongly affects economics. Easing the requirements of obtaining a divorce has one consequence; it pushes up the divorce rate. A higher divorce rate requires more judges to sit in the courts, and more legal system professionals to do the administration. It requires more social workers and counsellors to provide services for those caught in divorce’s bitter aftermath, usually traumatised children.

Liberalising abortion policy means you need to train nurses and doctors to perform terminations. My understanding is that, unless a healthcare professional is a committed abortion ideologue, then terminations are an area of medical practice that one can sicken of quite quickly. This means that maybe more money is required to train new personnel in this area of healthcare than in, say, renal or cardiac medicine, as it needs a relatively steady stream of new recruits.

While the desire for an adequate level of social security provision is a good idea when the alternative is the almshouse, when it is possible to consistently receive from the system without contributing, a behaviour pattern that’s all too common in the UK and USA, the system itself is fundamentally flawed. However, the liberals would fight tooth and nail against any tightening of social security provision, as it would remove one of their core constituencies and also require welfare’s more hardened recipients to exercise thrift and ingenuity.

The accepted view expressed by radical feminists is that every woman has a right to a child. For them, this is not viewed as a moral but political issue. The hideous spectacle of a former couple litigating each other to destroy embryos conceived by IVF before the breakdown of their relationship has recently been played out in London’s High Court. The rationale for the father’s bringing the action was that if the mother used any of the embryos, no waiver she could sign would absolve him of his legal responsibility to aliment any children born as a result of the implantation. While you may have thought that Frankenstein was a creature born of an over-indulgence in opium, liberal laws on the creation of life have their roots in the concept of rights, concepts, unlike those of small government and low taxation, that just didn’t exist sixty years ago. Conservatives, no, the human race, is kind of better off without them.

As a rule of thumb for social health, next year check what your candidate has to say on social policy. If he says he’s an economic conservative and a social liberal, you can tell which box to put him in. It’s the one marked ‘Charlatan’.

The Undisciplined Losers of the British Conservative Party

2006-03-22T12:31:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
October 29, 2003

For over a year, the sad collection of otherwise unemployable misfits who comprise the Parliamentary Conservative Party have been engaged in one of their bouts of serial plotting against their leadership. Mostly men, these men are men of neither calibre nor character, who by their self-centredness and egocentricity will probably bring to an end one of the greatest political movements in the English-speaking world, all through vengefulness and pique. It is the culmination of thirteen years of bitterness, and the object of their plotting, Iain Duncan Smith, was himself a chief plotter against John Major. His chickens have come home to roost.

The story starts in 1990. With British forces massing in the Gulf to commence Operation Desert Storm, the Conservatives threw out Margaret Thatcher after eleven years in Downing Street. The prime mover was a disreputable former Cabinet Minister called Michael Heseltine, a man who would have crawled naked over broken glass for the Premiership. It is fitting that he never made it. In Thatcher’s place came John Major, a man I used to respect, whose record in office included:

-Taking the pound into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, costing the taxpayer billions when George Soros decided to bet against it on September 16th 1992

-Introducing the Child Support Act, creating the Child Support Agency, the most hated instrument of public policy in the UK and responsible for more than thirty suicides

-Introducing a review of the Armed Services called ‘Options for Change’, radically cutting back on defence spending

-Beginning the rapprochement with the IRA which has reduced the government of Northern Ireland to a sick farce

-Ratifying the Maastricht Treaty, removing all inter-EU border controls, starting the ball rolling on the effective abandonment of any form of immigration policy, producing hundreds of thousands of economic migrants and asylum seekers.

-Turning virtually every polytechnic into a university, debasing the value of every degree awarded in the country
-Failing to rein in and effectively lead the Conservative Parliamentary Party. That, after all, was his job.

Between 1992 and 1997 public life in the UK was dominated by the doings of a very small band of Conservative MP’s, including Iain Duncan Smith, who made it their business to make life as difficult as possible for Major. They constantly rebelled against him, plotted against him, spun against him in the newspapers, so that in 1995, Major felt it necessary to take an unprecedented step and resign the Leadership of the Conservative Party, to take on all comers. He won. It speaks volumes for the way the Conservatives conduct themselves that they should have so little regard for how they are perceived by those who matter most, the voters.

That’s the root of the problem. Most Tory MP’s do not possess what could classically be called first-rate minds. With a few honourable exceptions, such as Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin and Shadow Work & Pensions Secretary David Willetts, they are a thoroughly middlebrow bunch. Where this becomes dangerous is when class and standing are factored in.

If a man of limited ability is humble enough to acknowledge his limitations, he is a man worthy of respect. When a man of limited ability, and even more limited experience, does not acknowledge his limitations, he shouldn’t be in a position of responsibility. If a man of limited ability and experience who does not acknowledge his limitations has a high opinion of himself because of how he speaks, who he’s related to, what school he went to and where he comes from, you have a pen picture of a sizable number of Conservative MP’s.

Duncan Smith was elected in 2001, after the second straight General Election defeat. A rather stiff man, Duncan Smith immediately had to overcome the resentful memory of his own behaviour towards Major. Although he has introduced a number of anodyne, New Labour friendly policies, his limitations as a leader are blindingly obvious. He doesn’t make any effort to get along with people. He isn’t even prepared to try. The Conservative Party has paid in excess of £500,000 in redundancy and severance payments to staff that Duncan Smith has hired and fired. That’s in just two years. For a former Army Officer, his personal skills are atrocious.

He’s not helped by the bunch of unemployables that sit behind him in the House of Commons. These people are paid £56,000 a year by the taxpayer to represents the interests of their constituents. They spend too much time spent hiding in corners, plotting Duncan Smith’s downfall. The present bout was started in March, by a non-entity called Crispin Blunt (General’s son, middling business career, etc). Just as the Conservative Party Conference was beginning in early October, the BBC announced that they would not be broadcasting a programme concerning Duncan Smith’s employment of his wife in the role of his diary secretary for a year after his election to the leadership. This has resulted in an investigation being launched by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Although it seems likely that Duncan Smith will be exonerated of any form of corruption, the fact that he should let himself be exposed to the possibility of this kind of investigation shows a lack of judgment unbecoming a Prime Minister.

The Sunday newspapers were full of the Conservative Leadership crisis on 26th October. It seems likely that if a serious challenge is mounted, Duncan Smith will go quietly, rather than face a contest. It will be sweet revenge for John Major, and will make the process of actually leading the rabble that is the Parliamentary Conservative Party even more difficult for his successor.

The Parliamentary Conservative Party is not fit to form a government. They don’t have the slightest realisation that their behaviour appals the British public, who are at their most politically disengaged since the Second World War. Their lack of experience of what laughingly used to be called the ‘real world’ is painfully obvious. If I go into my job and try to have my boss removed, I get fired. These guys don’t think those kind of rules apply to them, even after two heavy defeats. If they break up the Conservatives, they leave the country with a choice between two leftist parties, Labour and the disgusting, immoral Liberal Democrats. They would help to possibly hand the government of the country to a man, Charles Kennedy of the Liberals, who has never held a proper job other than be an MP, who agitated against the Iraqi War and then, with sickening sanctimony, declared that he supported the troops. A government led by that man is a possibility unless the Parliamentary Conservative Party start behaving with ten percent of the self discipline required by every worker in every factory, shop and office in the UK. They act like losers, and when a loser, a little guy like me, calls you a loser, you’re in deep trouble.

The BBC's War on the Pope

2006-03-22T12:25:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
October 21, 2003

The greatest gift of the humorist is to be able to think up funny names, and Englishmen are some of the best at it. Michael Wharton, still writing the Daily Telegraph’s ‘Peter Simple’ column in his nineties, has created characters like freelance scientist Paul Ohm and Dr. Spacely-Trellis, the ‘go-ahead Bishop of Nerdley’, whose catchphrase is ‘We Are All Guilty!’ Douglas Adams, author of ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ novels, created people like Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, an accidental immortal on a quest to insult the Universe in alphabetical order, and Prak, the most dangerous man alive, capable of telling only the truth. However, the doyen of English humorists of the twentieth century was J.B. Morton.

For over thirty years, Morton wrote the ‘Beachcomber’ column for the Daily Express, and his range of characters was legendary. He created a stuffy English judge, named Mr. Justice Cocklecarrot. He created a mad scientist, Dr. Strabismus of Utrecht (Whom God Preserve). However, one of his greatest characters was his pastiche of a big-game hunter, Big White Carstairs.

On 12th October, Big White Carstairs was re-born for the 21st Century in the form of Steve Bradshaw, a reporter for the BBC’s flagship current affairs show, Panorama. There was nowhere in the world that Big White Bradshaw would not go to hunt down victims of the Catholic Church’s teachings on contraception, finding his prey as far afield as Nicaragua, the Philippines and Kenya.

I referred to Bradshaw’s documentary prior to its being broadcast, in an article called The Catholic Untruth Society. The very title of the show, Sex and the Holy City is meant to be disrespectful; however even in this the BBC missed the point. Sex and the City is a sad and curiously moralistic TV show whose ultimate message seems to be that sexual license does not bring personal fulfilment or lasting happiness. The lifestyles of the show’s characters certainly provide no example to the unfortunate young women whom Bradshaw interviewed.

In Nicaragua’s Mulukuku Women’s Clinic, Bradshaw interviewed four young girls and women who had been either raped by relatives or abandoned by partners. A startling piece of information the programme highlighted is the apparent efficacy of the Nicaraguan authorities in prosecuting instances of sexual abuse. Of the perpetrators, one was in jail and one was on the run. Because some of the girls would have liked to have had abortions but the Church had said it was sinful, Dolores Granada, the Clinic’s American-accented director, stated that ‘it’s all the fault of the hierarchy’.

Bradshaw treated us to an in interview with a person called, I kid you not, ‘The Guerrilla Abortionist’. This lady, apparently a doctor, claimed to be part of a ring that performs up to 60,00 illegal abortions in Nicaragua every year.

After this, Big White Bradshaw stentorianly stated that ‘the Vatican is trying to impose its sexual values across the world’, and that ‘The Pope’s vision is based on his own vision of womanhood, based on his childhood experiences in Poland’. The audience was then treated to a cod analysis of The Pope, wherein his father, after his mother’s death, told him at the Polish festival of the burial of the Madonna at Kalwaria that she was his mother now.

The show switched to the Philippines, where Dr. Junice Melgar of the Likhaan Women’s Group claimed that ‘The Church threatens to unseat politicians in the Philippines who support a family planning law’. Krismel Lagman-Luistro, a young, attractive, well-educated and very articulate congresswoman, stated that she ‘just can’t follow the church’. Bradshaw engaged in some aggressive questioning of Luistro’s former confessor, Monsignor Cris Bernarte, but in an attempt at balance, did show the monument that the Mayor of Manila has had constructed to the unborn, after he declared Manila to be the world’s first Pro-Life City. The Philippine segment ended with Dr. Melgar saying, unchallenged, that ‘the Church’s teaching is causing death from unwanted pregnancies’.

Obviously desirous of finding a more sophisticated watering hole, where Bwana could pull off his boots and sip a gin and tonic, Bradshaw next went to the USA. Before treating us to the views of Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice, Bradshaw declared ‘The Pope is waging war on the permissive society’. Ms. Kissling referred to The Pope’s attendance at the UN, and of her disgust at the Nuncio talking to the Libyan delegate, an unusual juxtaposition of social and foreign policy.

However, then we got to the ‘Dutch Slur’. Big White Bradshaw declared that that during the Eighties ‘the Pope was an ally of (drum roll) – Ronald Reagan!’ and that ‘George W. Bush has affirmed the alliance, cutting off money to the UN Population Fund.’ The Pope must be a bad guy, if he makes nice with Republicans.

However, given the dark heart of this hunter, he at last found his mythical prey on the Dark Continent. Have you ever seen a current affairs report that kicks off by asking Kenyan coffinmakers for their views on condoms? Well, I have. Apparently, Kenyan youngsters don’t like using them.

Bradshaw interviewed the Archbishop of Nairobi, who made a startling claim that flies in the face of widely accepted beliefs concerning the porousness of latex rubber. According to the Archbishop, condoms leak. Indeed, he is not alone in this view. He was backed up a gynaecologist and Catholic, Dr. Stephen Karanja, who also declared his pride in having attended a condom burning in 1996, saying that he felt it was his duty to be there.

Bradshaw then went in country, and found there one of the saintliest women I have ever seen on television, Sister Victorine Akoth of the St. Elizabeth Clinic. Sister Victorine, unlike Michael Jackson or Elizabeth Taylor, is one of the thousands of warriors fighting and losing the war against AIDS in Africa. Always caring, never judgmental, Sister Victorine was subject to Steve Bradshaw’s inverted leftist racism, with his observation that ‘All of the nuns were caring’, but that their views on the dangers of condom use was ‘peddling superstition’, and he showed other Catholic interviewees affirming the Archbishop of Nairobi’s views, including Cardinal Obando y Bravo of Managua and Cardinal Trujillo of the Pontifical Council for the Family. Bradshaw’s counter-assertion was based on the evidence of the WHO, a body that, without illness, would have no rationale.

However, Big White Bradshaw finally got his prey in the opinions of Kenyan AIDS sufferer Eunice Atogo Atieno, who said that the Church’s teaching on condoms was responsible for her catching AIDS.

So, in the views of Steve Bradshaw and the BBC, there are a number of conclusions a viewer can draw from this programme. The police in Nicaragua are very good at catching sex offenders. The Pope is a neo-conservative. And old Polish men are responsible for wee Kenyan lassies catching AIDS because they tell them lies.

Well, that’s not the whole story. The Daily Telegraph of 14th October carried a letter from Dr. Christopher Harrison of the British Guild of Catholic Doctors. Doctor Harrison wrote that the Cochrane Library, apparently a useful source of information on these subjects, carried a report in 2001 by two ladies called Weller and Davis. These ladies concluded that if used consistently and correctly, condoms reduced the transmission of HIV by 80 percent. However, uncertainty regarding the data led them to conclude that the true efficacy of condoms was anywhere between 35 and 94 percent.

So that notorious peddler of superstition the Archbishop of Nairobi, having had the light of western reason thrown on him by Big White Bradshaw, might have been right after all. It says something for the BBC's own profligacy with my money that what should have been a serious analysis of policy and its consequences ended up in a slanging match on the porousness of latex rubber. However, having interviewed Eunice Atogo Atieno, Big White Bradshaw got to ride off into his sunset with his scalp. It’s a pity for him it wasn’t wearing a white hat.

Good and Bad Remembrances

2006-03-22T12:22:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
October 20, 2003

The weekend of 10th to 12th October saw two different remembrances for the victims of war and terror, held thousands of miles apart. One was a model of propriety, giving its victims the honour they deserved, the other a disgraceful example of political correctness, culminating in a request for prayers for the military dead of the Iraqi Ba’ath party. It’s strange to think that it when it comes to organising a fitting memorial, Australian surfers and beach bums can do a far more professional job than the Archbishop of Canterbury.

12th October was the first anniversary of the terrorist slaughter on Bali. The day began with an address by John Howard, followed by a service at the memorial to the bombing’s victims, carved from a local hillside. After that service, the surfers continued by going to where their mates were happiest, the beach.

A group of surfers paddled out onto the Indian Ocean, bearing garlands of remembrance on their boards. At sundown, having cast the garlands out to sea, they formed a circle on the water, holding hands, and the BBC, for once, properly recorded what seemed to be a shout of defiance at sundown. Hopefully, this collection of the most un-conservative looking longhaired and tattooed enjoyed a few beers in their friends’ honour.

Two days before Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had conducted the service of remembrance for the dead of the Iraqi war at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. A staunch opponent of the war, Dr. Williams seemed to have concurred with the thinking that a militaristic service of thanksgiving was inappropriate, so there was no march past, no parade of heroes, as there had been after the Falklands and first Gulf wars. In the presence of the Queen, the Prime Minister and the bereaved of the Iraqi war, Dr. Williams requested prayers for the military dead of Iraq, absolutely without any kind of qualification.

It would be hard to imagine any of Dr. Williams’ predecessors calling for prayers for the Kaiser’s High Command or for the General Staff of the Wehrmacht. If Dr. Williams meant that prayers should be offered for the unwilling conscripts of the Iraqi army sent into harm’s way by the recklessness of Saddam Hussein, that would be fine, although the Archbishop should have said so. As it stood, Dr. Williams placed the British war dead on the same moral level as Uday and Qusay Hussein, doing British servicemen and women no honour whatsoever.

Adding insult to injury, the Dean of St. Paul’s, the Very Reverend Dr. John Moses gave what was described as a ‘briefing’ before the service. Reported by Neil Tweedie in the October 11th Daily Telegraph, Dr. Moses said:

“The initiative for the service came from the government and we may question whether the time is right. I do not believe in today’s world we can have a national service and behave like little Brits. We live in an increasingly fragile world, and if one is not sensitive to other traditions, other experience, other faiths, we are sowing the seeds of greater disharmony in the future.”

This display of clerical petulance, allied to a monomaniac pursuit of the multicultural, sits totally at odds with the behaviour of the surfers on Bali. They’re a group of people who have their priorities straight – enjoy the water and end the day with a few beers. Their shout at sundown was a shout of righteous anger at those who attacked them and murdered their friends, Aussie surfers, just about the best friends the island of Bali will ever have.

Compare and contrast with the whinging of John Moses. He is a high officer in a church, the Church of England, whose entire rationale is the supremacy of local opinion. Without England, the Church of England is nothing. The head of his Church, the Queen, was on her way to remember the servicemen killed fighting in her name. Dr. Moses’ answer is an anguished plea for multiculturalism and a sarcastic swipe at ‘little Englishness’. Dr. Moses will be unlikely to be held to account for his disgraceful remarks.

Reflecting on these two services, it seems the Aussies really got it right, while as usual the Brits got it hideously wrong. One couldn’t imagine John Howard, a political leader as staunch in his support of George W. Bush as Tony Blair, calling for prayers for the Islamist murderers of Australians, but that’s what the Archbishop of Canterbury did. The Church of England, so intent on tearing itself to pieces over matters which are nothing to do with Gospel and everything to do with Liberal, cannot bring itself to offer thanks for the safe return of British soldiers without letting their own politics intrude. In this case, I’d rather be on the beach with the surfers. Advance, Australia Fair.

Gaddafi Rides Again

2006-03-22T12:20:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
October 17, 2003

On October 10th, the scholars of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) performed one of their innumerable acts of public service by publishing a translation of a speech given by Muammar Gaddafi on October 4th. The translation, published on their website, is a chilling reminder of this man’s evil, and of how he has not reformed.

The speech was delivered to a group of women in the Libyan city of Sabha. During its course, Gaddafi said,

“We must train the women how to booby-trap the car and blow it up among the enemy, how to blow up the house so that it falls on the enemy soldiers. Traps must be prepared. The women must be taught how to booby-trap their clothes closets, booby-trap their purses, booby-trap their shoes, booby-trap the children’s toys, so they blow up on the enemy soldiers.”

That’s feminism, Gaddafi-style. This person, whose delegate is the Chairman of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, shows that he is still neither a fit nor proper person for any moral nation to be dealing with, no matter how big his chequebook.

These comments have been made a matter of weeks after the lifting of sanctions against him. The Blair Government has entered into a rapprochement with him, producing the ludicrous spectacle of diminutive Foreign Office Minister Mike O’ Brien being given the full tent and camels routine on a Tripoli stopover last year. The sanctions have only been lifted after agreeing to the payment of compensation to the victims of the Lockerbie bombing.

Until December 1988, the most significant thing that other Scots knew about Lockerbie was that it was the site of the last stop of the Glasgow to London train before it crossed into England. It had a long history as a market town. It was a picturesque, unexceptional wee place, until the act of infamy perpetrated against the Clipper Maid of the Seas and her passengers ripped up Lockerbie’s streets, killing her townsfolk in their beds and leaving the Clipper’s nose cone buried on Tundergarth Hill as a monument to the evil of Muammar Gaddafi. For many years afterwards, people went on dying. In recent years Stephen Flanagan, orphaned on the annihilation of Sherwood Crescent, stepped under a train. Muammar Gaddafi wasn’t standing behind Stephen as he took his life, but he might as well have been.

The jailing of Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi shows how dumb some of these guys really were. Before he planted the bomb, Megrahi was Gaddafi’s Chief Spook on Malta, using Valletta Airport as cover. He thought that wrapping the barometric Toshiba radio bomb in clothing would help disguise it. The shop that he bought the clothing from, Mary’s House, sold only very expensive and easily traced children’s clothing, and its owner Tony Gauci identified Megrahi as the person responsible for buying the clothing to the satisfaction of nine Scottish judges. If Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi had bothered to walk another two hundred yards down the street to the local department store, he would probably never have been caught. But that would probably have been too much like hard work. In the meantime, Tony Gauci, a man prepared to stand up to terrorists on his doorstep, gets a very hard time from the left wing press over the reliability of his evidence and his reasons for giving his testimony. Nelson Mandela, one of the first to congratulate Governor Schwarzenegger on his election, has visited Megrahi in his specially designed cell at Glasgow’s Barlinnie Prison and called for him to be allowed to serve his sentence in a Muslim country. Hopefully, one day former President Mandela will get round to visiting the families of the American servicemen killed in the Berlin nightclub bombing that Gaddafi organised.

Neo-conservatism, whatever that word really means, gets a bad press, but if there was ever a Middle Eastern leader who through actions dating back thirty years has proven himself to be a menace to society and whose forcible removal would be justified it is Gaddafi. For any reasonable leader to make any remark encouraging suicide bombing weeks after the lifting of sanctions levied as a result of sponsoring terror is, to put it mildly, nuts. His regime is a classic example of Middle Eastern nut-o-cracy, nuts to the core. He is the Chief Nut, but the sheer lethality of his nuttiness has taken too many lives for him to be regarded as anything other than a nut, a truly dangerous mind. Keep him in his cage.

The Catholic Untruth Society

2006-03-22T12:16:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
October 10, 2003

Archbishop Vincent Nicholls of Birmingham was outraged two weeks ago. The reason for his anger is the consistently negative, disrespectful way that the BBC reports on the business of the Catholic Church, and his comments display a deep-seated anger at the way in which the world’s largest religious institution is continually demeaned and undermined by a publicly funded body.

The archbishop has a point. One of the follies that the BBC has recently spent my money on is a huge expansion of digital services, which most of its licence fee payers can’t access, not having digital television. One of the first new programmes commissioned for digital was Popetown, an animated show for adults (!) casting an irreverent(!) look at life in the Vatican. One of the voices of the cast was Jerry Hall, ex-wife of Mick Jagger, previously not known for public displays of piety.

On Sunday 12th October, the Corporation’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama will be broadcasting a feature concerning the effect of the Church’s sexual teachings on the flock. The title of the programme will have caused a ripple of laughter throughout the wine bars of London’s media lands, for being so clever. It’s called Sex and the Holy City.

Priest-bashing, a popular British occupation since the 16th Century, is back with a bang, and the root of the problem is not the Church itself, but the liberals. Priest-bashing shows liberals at their worst. It displays their inverted racism. You will never hear a word of criticism from the liberals towards very much more intolerant clerics, the Wahhabists, because they come from a different culture. The fact that their culture promotes murder and death-cultism is, for them, simply an expression of the late Edward Said’s ‘Other’. It is not to be analysed, or criticised, but simply is. They have an attitude towards culture that almost exactly matches the Catholic attitude to God. It is, simply, an article of faith for them that all cultures have equal value, a theory that should be tested by trying to sell the collected works of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan to the women of Saudi Arabia.

It displays their inherent licentiousness. Their philosophy of life seems to be derived from the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who said that it’s good if it makes you feel good, a position that John Stuart Mill had to revise into the ‘Harm Principle’ pretty quickly – it’s good if it makes you feel good, but don’t hurt anyone else in the process. They will never accept anyone placing boundaries on them, which is one of the reasons why liberal influence in parenting is rearing some of the most obnoxious, badly behaved children in history.

But for liberals, there can be no sexual boundaries. One of the great liberal victories of the Blair years is the repeal of Section 28 of Margaret Thatcher’s Local Government Act 1988. Section 28 was a very short clause preventing local authorities promoting homosexuality in grade schools. The critical word is ‘promote’. In the 1980’s, London’s schools became an ideological battlefield, with the popularly described ‘Loony Left’, using the classroom as a means of promoting their own very narrow, limited ideologies into impressionable minds. Baroness Thatcher said ‘No More’. After the Scottish Parliament came into being, one of the Executive’s first acts, one that he they hadn’t listed in the manifesto, was to attempt the repeal of the section in Scotland. This brought a massive outcry, but they went ahead and did it any way.

The Catholic Church will always have its critics. The hierarchy in the UK, up to the new Archbishop of Westminster, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, have been mired of handling accusations of child abuse badly. Movies like the noxious The Magdalene Sisters, directed by Glaswegian Trotskyist Peter Mullan (who, if you ever hear him being interviewed, is one of the most boring people alive) keep the muck flying. Ireland’s Magdalene laundries closed down in the 1960’s. In short, stories of abuse in the Magdalene laundries are not news. They do not add to the sum of human knowledge, but it must make Mr. Mullan feel good to point out the suffering of women in a patriarchy. However, for a movie that isn’t even set in Scotland, my money was used to finance the making of The Magdalene Sisters, due to the availability of grants from the National Lottery and the state production body, Scottish Screen. It gives a whole new meaning to the expression ‘having a share of the gross’.

On October 6th, a movie called Dogma premiered on British terrestrial television. Getting in late from work, I flicked between it and the news, staying more on the news, until I heard Chris Rock say that his character was the 13th Apostle, and that he’d come back to Earth to have the Bible re-written. It was supposedly a comedy, with Mr. Rock being shadowed by two corpulent, pasty-faced, long-haired loser types, Liberal Apostles of Loserdom. Enough, already. For all its faults, the good works of The Catholic Church far outweigh the ill works of a few of its clergy. It deserves more respect than this.

China's Sinister Obsession

2006-03-22T12:14:00.000Z

Exclusive commentary by Martin Kelly
October 9, 2003

There have been reports this week that China is preparing to launch a man into space, becoming the third nation with this capability. In the interests of world peace this has to be stopped, as Red China has consistently shown that it has very few benevolent ambitions, and plenty of sinister ones.

There never was a Communist country that had a benign ambition, never. All of them seek to bring chaos and suffering, and the Red Chinese are no exception. It was said of Stalin that he became leader of Russia in the age of the horse and cart, and left it with the atom bomb. That is a fascist interpretation of his achievements, as the human cost alone of his works was far too high. Similarly, Mao took over China in the age of warlordism, simply by being a better warlord than anyone else. He remained a warlord for the rest of his life. Deng Xiaoping was a warlord, as his actions in the summer of 1989 proved, forever giving the lie to the idea that he was anything other than just a nasty, vicious old man.

Red China constantly harps about others interfering in its affairs, yet consistently interferes in the affairs of another sovereign nation, Taiwan, China’s Cuba. Indeed, it refuses to have diplomatic relations with any nation that recognises Taiwan, what is called in British diplomatic circles the ‘One China’ policy. The apparent rationale for this expedition to the skies is to aid agricultural research, possibly in the same way that Saddam Hussein bought chemicals to aid agricultural research. Taiwan, a modern industrial, democratic, wealthy nation is excluded form international affairs. Oliver Stone should go to Taiwan to make a movie, as the struggle of the Taiwanese to prosper in the shadow of the hostile giant on the mainland is a very much more worthy story than his recent hagiography of Fidel Castro, Comandante.

In the meantime, China’s social fabric is undergoing extreme stress. One of the stories I’ve read about Red China recently certainly falls into the ‘crazy but true’ category. Massively overpopulated, in some parts of China human cloning is viewed as a necessity. This is because in Guangdong province, advances in antenatal care have meant that that the presence of female foetuses is more easily detected, meaning that male births outnumber females by a ration of fifty to one. In short, the Chinese cultural preference for sons is killing off the country’s future mothers, and they’ll soon need to clone females to give birth to more sons.

It’s the very fact that space is so isolated, so powerful, that makes this Chinese expedition so dangerous. They could be doing anything up there. The first major diplomatic crisis of the Bush Administration was the shooting down, by China, of an American spotter plane. China did not cover itself in glory over that incident. If Red China’s ambitions were totally benign, there would be no need for spotter planes. The fact that this level of surveillance is till required in the early days of the 21st-Century shows that they remain as worthy of suspicion now as they were in the 1960’s.

Like all Communists, what drives the Red Chinese is not benevolence but the pursuit of militarism. Having a military is fine, being militaristic is not, and otherwise you end up with the ongoing ridiculous state of affairs on the Korean peninsula. It’s also daft to keep exporting manufacturing jobs to China, providing a hostile government with capital that it can possibly use against you. That suits them down to the ground, being a perfect example of what Lenin called, ‘Capitalists selling you the rope you’re going to hang them with’. Maybe too much time is spent trying to solve the problems of the Middle East to get to grips with the biggest problem, Communism, facing the world’s most populous country. Maybe the sad truth is that, for the time being at least, until the Mullahs are swept away and the Islamic Middle East democratised, a process that really only can begin from within, the Middle East is as good as it’s going to get and that Israel should receive our full support. That region takes too much of out attention, too much time, away from other matters, like freeing the Chinese. As with the Soviets, if the Chinese put a man in space it means that Communism’s gone beyond the atmosphere again, and until it falls to Earth, it needs to be kept in its cage.