Take a Knee
Did you see that Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner “took a knee” during the one minute silence in the House of Commons to honour the memory of the black thug, George Floyd? I don’t suppose he was the only one. So the abasement of the House of Commons – which once defied the tyranny of Charles the First, which witnessed the oratory of Pitt, of Gladstone, of Disraeli, of Churchill – is complete. In his…
A Burning Issue
George Floyd was a six foot six, powerfully built nightclub bouncer and ex-con who had served time for armed robbery. That he died in the manner in which he did was dreadful, but had he been a white man with exactly the same attributes, who died in exactly the same way, we would never have heard of him. But in fact he was a big scary black man (now ludicrously sentimentalised by some as a…
COVID-19 – From a Drama into a Crisis!
We have as a nation endured for nine weeks now, an unprecedented period of social and political disruption which has had and still threatens, the most far reaching and serious consequences for the future well-being of our people. As we all know a viral pandemic has swept the world in the way that viral pandemics have since humans and our pre-human ancestors first walked this earth. Unlike most previous pandemics however, this pandemic — the…
Seventy-Five Years On
When I started work, most of my male colleagues, if they were beyond their mid-thirties, had been in the forces during the Second World War, and I fondly remember one old boy who had fought in the First! More than one of them had decorations for bravery, and there were a few empty sleeves and artificial legs. At one time I worked for a most generous and pleasant man who had lost one lung and…
Hope Springs Eternal
This glorious April, the finest in my memory, is drawing to a close. I am, as will be obvious, no expert on 19th and 20th century English poetry but somewhere in the remotest dusty recesses of my memory banks are snippets of verse about the beauties of England in the spring. Were they by Rupert Brooke? Or perhaps by homesick, and long forgotten, colonial civil servants or army officers stuck in the sweatier parts of…
Is Coronavirus Racist?
Is Covid-19 racist? A daft question you might think, but think again because there’s nothing so daft that a bunch of left-wing ethnic minority race whingers won’t ask it. This particular clique is called “Charity So White” and its particular gripe is that the charity sector is dominated by white people, their concerns and preoccupations. The organisation introduces itself online with these words: “Charities may have good intentions but some uphold White supremacy and racism”.…
Of Coronavirus, Lions & Sheep!
It is now roughly three weeks since my first article on this subject the whole world it seems is still in the grip of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. In the first countries to be infected, China and Italy there now appears to be some reduction in the rates of infection and in the numbers of deaths, but for the rest of the world the numbers are still rising steeply. Here in the UK the Prime…
Corona – goes viral!
The world is in the grip of a viral pandemic of the proportions normally only seen in horror movies, and we all begin to realise that in a ‘global village’; in which intercontinental travel has been promoted as the height of sophistication; and in which multiculturalism and multiracialism is regarded as de rigour, ‘conventional wisdom’ has been turned on its head.
New Victorians?
It’s well known that Boris Johnson has a taste for big projects; you’ll remember the “Garden Bridge” and “Boris Island” from his time as Mayor of London, both attractive projects (or so I thought), both fantastically expensive, neither realised – yet. Now Prime Minister with a big majority he can indulge that taste for grandiose projects to his heart’s content with no-one to say “no”, not even his neutered Treasury. So we are to have…
A Greater Europe
As our membership of the European Union begins to recede into the past, it’s time for a little reflection and a look into the future. Our 47 years as members first of the European Economic Community (the Common Market), and then of its successor the European Union, may have dominated the adult lives of most of us, but they will come to be seen as a mere historical blip in the eleven centuries since the…