For King & Country, stylised as for KING & COUNTRY and formerly known as Joel & Luke as well as Austoville, is a Christian pop duo composed of Australian brothers Joel and Luke Smallbone. The brothers were born in Australia and, with their family, emigrated to the United States as children, settling in the Nashville area.
Starmer is turning into a doubleplusgood duckspeaker. Ask him an awkward question, get a torrent of whataboutery quacking.
Mr Speaker set him up with an easy starter: Dr Luke Evans (Con) facing Sir Keir with familiar Budget teases about the Winter Fuel Allowance, IHT on farmers and the employers’ NIC hit on GPs, care homes and hospices. Answer: the £22 billion ‘black hole,’ money thrown into the NHS and two million extra medical appointments.
It’s like Pelmanism, but where you don’t have to pair the cards.
The PM’s feelings were soothed - not that they had been much ruffled - by a Savlon query from Labour’s Alex McIntyre: would he agree that the Government was ‘delivering opportunity for the next generation’ with breakfast clubs and a bit of childcare funding? Blow us down, he would!
The Leader of the Opposition opened with Ukraine, an issue where (as previously with Brexit) the two sides of the House have an unfortunate tendency to agree, as indeed does the so-called right-wing Press (Peter Hitchens being an honourable exception.)
There was talk of sovereignty and (the time-expired) Zelensky’s right to be at the negotiating table. Later in this session, Dr Neil Hudson (Con) likened Zel to Churchill in that both had suspended elections in wartime. [Perhaps Angela ‘Winnie’ Rayner can light up a Romeo y Julieta to celebrate scrubbing those local council polls? It’s all part of our becoming a People’s Democratic Republic.]
Steve Race (Labour) wanted us to ‘redouble our efforts… to help secure Ukraine’s future as a free, democratic and sovereign European nation.’ Did that last adjective imply NATO membership? Funny how in 1949 it was truly vitally necessary to defend against Communist expansionism but now we need to restrain the growth of a Eurocommunist bloc that, as Mr Vance told it, no longer shares America’s liberal Western values.
Starmer gave muddy replies on spending but Badenoch failed to pierce the murk. She congratulated him on accepting her advice to cut foreign aid but he said he had not even seen her proposal. More embarrassing for him was Diane Abbott’s point that using aid and development money for armaments and tanks increased desperation and poverty and made people less safe; Sir Keir gave the usual kind of response - difficult decision, will do more when we can.
Kemi tried again: how did the PM reconcile his figure of a £13.4 billion increase in defence expenditure with the Defence Secretary’s £6 billion stated that morning? Sir Keir said it was the difference between this fiscal year (2024/25) and (2027/28) - reminiscent of Gordon Brown, somehow. Kemi repeated the query and received a patronising repetition.
She went on to probe whether money for the Chagos deal was coming out of the expanded pot, something the Defence Secretary had failed to say. Starmer’s turbid reply was that the extra spend was ‘for our capability on defence and security in Europe’ - an ambiguous response given he then asserted it was ‘for our capability.’
He continued, ‘The Chagos deal is extremely important for our security and for US security, and the US is rightly looking at it.’ Important, yes; but helpful, that is another matter. Senator John Kennedy has given a crystal-clear exposition of the Chagos business in advance of Starmer’s visit to Washington, remarking that if the latter wants to assuage his post-colonial guilt he should buy himself an emotional support pony. Giving away Diego Garcia with its military base to Mauritius helps China’s power in the Indian Ocean; so much for our security.
Dr Kieran Mullan (Con) eventually got the chance to pose the question again: ‘will he rule out funding any Chagos deal from the defence budget—yes or no?’ He too got an opaque answer: ‘the money yesterday was allocated to aid our capability and is the single biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the cold war.’
Jeremy Hunt (Con) weighed in with ‘our biggest single foreign policy priority is the preservation of NATO with America at its heart’ plus the need to ‘spend 3% of GDP on defence within a specified timescale.’ Sir Keir agreed, saying ‘Putin thought he could weaken NATO. He has only made it stronger and larger.’
So important to have an enemy. And to forget a lot of inconvenient history.
There is a word for someone who acts against the interests of his country. Let’s say he hasn't specifically intended to harm us. Mabe he’s just stupid, what we call a ‘tool.’ In concrete terms he might be compared to a miswielded hammer or sickle, though if the harm he does is on a major scale you’ll need to compare him to a mechanised implement like, oh, an incompetently driven tractor?
Senator John Kennedy explains here very clearly why the British Prime Minister’s proposal to gift the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is disastrous:
Mauritius has zero entitlement to the Chagos Islands and never did have. It’s just that Britain took over both from France in 1810 and administered them from Mauritius. The PM feels obliged to follow a non-binding 2019 ruling by the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands that was backed by its vice-President Xue Hanqin, a former Chinese Communist official.
There is a US military base on the Chagos island of Diego Garcia, which lies strategically situated in the Indian Ocean controlling sea lanes in which the expansionist Chinese Government is keenly interested.
The former President of Mauritius wanted £9 billion over a period of years as compensation for permitting the US and UK to continue to use the base; his replacement wants double that. Ever since coming into office Starmer has been referring to a £22 billion ‘black hole’ in the finances left him by the Tories; yet it does not seem to have caused him any trouble in entering this commitment.
Three weeks ago the Conservatives reportedly accused the PM of “traitorous levels of national sabotage.” If that is so, put him on trial; he loves the law. Failing that, I will restrict myself to call him “tractorous.” Sir Keir, John Deere.
Senator Kennedy suggests that Sir Keir is suffering from post-colonial guilt and should instead buy himself an emotional support pony.
I would go further. I’d say Starmer should saddle it up and ride off into the sunset.
We were down on the Lizard peninsula and went for a walk to Church Cove.
The church is St Wynwallow, founded by a Breton saint in around 600 AD. It is ‘a place of peace and quiet away from the business of life.’ There is a concession to religion once a month when Evensong is held.
There he hangs, the man who summed up the whole library of Jewish religious teaching in two sentences: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’”
A little further down the hill towards the roaring water was a house made open for a Ukrainian display. Compare the iconography:
Other than Peter Hitchens, few in the mainstream British media make plain what has gone on in Ukraine and why.
So it is not surprising that there is a house in a hip Devon town whose owner put the old yellow-and-blue in the window to show they were on the right side of History (that fictitious god of the Marxists.)
Later they replaced it with a Palestinian flag.
Only the middle class can be that stupid. They take on an idea given them by the official governmental propaganda machine and will then defend it against all comers, including facts and logic.
If we must deplore democracy it is not because of the less educated but on account of gullible, bloodthirsty, bourgeois English ninnies. (Photos: author.)
I can’t be the only one who suspects that Sir Keir may be an example of high-functioning autism. Some would say ‘suffers from’ but it is we who bear the consequences when someone in high authority is not ‘neurotypical.’
There are worse flaws: think of narcissistic psychopaths or messianic dreamers - have we not had such governing us before? Then again, what normal person wants to have - or could attain - the top job?
Children who are ‘on the spectrum’ of autism have difficulties in social communication - not just with words but in their facial expressions and body language. They may not understand others’ minds or grasp underlying meanings in what is said to them. They are instinctively sensed as different by their fellows, who with the cruelty of the conformist young will tend to shun or bully them.
They do have emotions - often they get on well with animals, who are not so tricky. But for them human social intercourse can be like a tourist trying to speak Greek and their rhythm of responses is halting. As a result they can be misunderstood as impassive, unfeeling. Dan Hodges in the MoS reports a senior government official as saying Starmer is ‘a very strange man. There's no empathy there. You try to talk him through the implications of what he's proposing and he goes blank.’
Asperger’s types can be very intelligent but faced with a largely social world that is unpredictable and sometimes frightening or painful they may turn to a model that they can understand and control; not just computer games but - if they have sufficient power - grand schemes with niches for everyone else. In reality the model is bound to be inadequate and the Aspie will be intolerant of ‘square pegs,’ as Adam Smith noted in 1759:
‘The man of system… is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.’
The rigid thinker fears that dissent threatens his perfect structure, which may break down and explode like the organisations of would-be world masters in Bond films. If challenged he will double down on his carefully planned mission, which would work without a hitch if only everybody did exactly as they were told.
Does this explain Starmer’s insistence that despite strong criticisms of his hapless Foreign Secretary and Chancellor they would stay in post until the next General Election? Or his refusal to budge on the obviously calamitous inheritance tax changes for farmers?
Sir Keir’s project is enormous radical change and is a continuation of the Blairite programme for a constitutional structure that will permanently exclude the ‘forces of conservatism’ - represented by great numbers of people, perhaps the majority if the Brexit referendum is an indication. Great and lasting conflict is therefore built into this machine.
The devolution plan was designed for him by another notorious micro-manager, Gordon Brown, whose own limited tolerance for dissent was illustrated by the ‘bigoted woman’ episode, though at least he didn’t jail her.
It will fail.
One reason is the hubris of imposing a mission statement on us all: ‘The purpose of the New Britain should be grounded in the shared values and aspirations that unite the people across our country.’ There is no such unity and the attempt to impose it will be disastrous. If our political class knew any history they would see how the nation was repeatedly torn apart by attempts to foist on it various forms and structures of the Christian religion, or of kingly governance. Since then we have witnessed the results of Marxism and vengeful ethno-nationalism elsewhere.
Our flexible and evolving liberal democracy is not an ideology but a method. If it works properly it allows everyone a voice and ideas to compete without bloodshed.
Because it does not work properly - because the voting system is so skewed; because the planned scheme of regional governments threatens a proliferation of petty fiefdoms as already exemplified in Scotland and London; because as Mr Vance told Europe ‘you’re running in fear of your own voters’; because the country continues to import potential dangers and further drains on our resources while protestors are squashed - a future civil war in Britain is not unthinkable.
According to David Betz, a professor of war studies at King’s College London, it is already inevitable and could occur within the next five years. He thinks we should now concentrate on mitigating the effects - protecting cultural artefacts, developing regional seats of government (but see above comment on devolution), reviewing the security of energy support systems, nuclear weapons etc against internal threat.
In the Hogmanay posts there has usually been a song or two from Eddi Reader. She deserves a post of her own.
Eddi Reader grew up in Glasgow and Irvine, Scotland and it was in those towns that she learned to use music as a vehicle for communicating with others through busking and performing at the local folk clubs. In the early 1980s, Eddi travelled around Europe with circus and performance artists before moving to London where she quickly became a sought after session vocalist. She famously harmonized with Annie Lennox touring with the Eurythmics, after her time with successful punk outfit Gang of Four. It was the short-lived but warmly remembered Fairground Attraction that really brought her into the limelight and to the attention of a much wider audience.
JD is experiencing technical problems, so today we repost an event from 2013: the dragon that attacked Chelyabinsk, Russia on St Valentine's Day 2013. See, they do exist!
"A.D. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament."
In mythology, there are dragons or wyrms, but also two-legged or legless, poisonous or fiery wyverns, or lindworms. I have seen long ago but cannot now find on the Internet an engraving, possibly sixteenth century, of one of the latter, destroying whole villages with its fiery breath. I wondered then how someone could dare invent something on that scale, so disprovable.
And then on St Valentine's Day 2013 (or 15th February, depending on the time zone you were in at the time), one visited Chelyabinsk.
This time the evidence was direct and undeniable, not merely reconstructed with an artist's imagination. According to James Higham, Russians commonly drive with dashcams because of the risk of fake, compensation-seeking "accidents" like this. And so at last we got the proof, for the world to see.
Down it flew, a long, fiery shape with a snake-like body and no legs, its deafening roar sufficient to blow in windows and doors and knock down walls, the flames of its breath bright enough to cast shadows. Had it not landed in an ice-covered lake, but hit solid ground, the destruction would have been enormous, as it had been a century ago in Tunguska.
Here be dragons.
Images taken from this video compilation, and this.
The Opposition struggles to wrench itself free of the Conservative Party’s lamentable record over the past years and remains vulnerable to Labour’s easy counterattacks.
If they are to succeed in holding the Government to account, their questioning will have to be more focused and they will need to have strength in depth when dealing with woolly and evasive replies.
The PM himself said the decision was ‘wrong’ and he didn’t agree with it. Would he therefore appeal it, asked Badenoch?
Starmer havered, saying the decision was made under the last government; well, “according to their legal framework”; Parliament should make the rules. The Home Secretary’s team was “working on closing this loophole”.
Noting that the PM had avoided the question, Kemi asked whether he would amend the borders Bill now going through Parliament or put forward new legislation? Without choosing either option, Starmer repeated the ‘working on it’ line and resorted to the usual counterpunch on the Conservatives’ former “open borders experiment”.
Then he muddied the waters further by saying that the Tories had voted on Monday “against increased powers to deal with those who are running the vile trade of people-smuggling” and added some Blair-like sloganism: “Same old Tories: open borders, empty promises.”
Here was Badenoch’s opportunity to nail Starmer’s misleading statement on Monday’s vote. During that debate, Chris Philp (Con) had offered a ‘reasoned amendment’, making it clear that the Opposition did indeed support tougher measures to tackle “serious and organised crime”, but “we do not support a path to citizenship for people who arrive illegally, and we do not support cancelling the Government’s obligation to remove them”. The Tories wanted no amnesty for ‘undocumented’ migrants this time, unlike the huge backlog-clearing of 2011.
She missed the chance to expose in PMQs that serious weakness in the Bill and in Labour’s underlying intentions, saying for Philp’s amendment that:
“… the Bill abolishes laws passed under the previous Government to ensure removals, and abolishes laws passed under the previous Government to ensure a deterrent by restoring illegal migrants’ ability to claim indefinite leave to remain and British citizenship; and because the Bill contains no proposals to limit legal migration, nor limit the eligibility criteria for settlement and citizenship, which means that the Bill will lead to increased illegal and legal immigration.”
Philp also noted that the Border Security Commander “cannot actually command anything. There are no powers at all in the Bill, merely functions … he has no clear powers, merely an ability to publish documents and reports.”
These points had been made in the Commons, but not in the limelight of PMQs, where the public is much more likely to hear them. This was a lost opportunity for a headline-grabbing forensic attack.
Then the PM repeatedly slithered out of the question whether he would appeal the Palestinian case: “She asked me if we are going to change the law and close the loophole in question one – I said yes. She asked me again in question two – and I said yes. She asked me again in question three – it is still yes.”
Three times only! Remember Jeremy Paxman’s twelve, to Michael Howard? In that case, one hardly knew which man to admire more, given Howard’s lightning twists as he evaded the question differently each time. Starmer has not that speed of mind – but he doesn’t need it, since his myrmidon army of MPs can simply bulldoze resistance, as they did to the ‘reasoned amendment’.
Badenoch turned to another vulnerable target, the new Attorney General Baron Hermer, “the Prime Minister’s personal friend and donor”, whom Labour’s Lord Glasman has called “the absolute archetype of an arrogant, progressive fool”.
The Government lawyers appear to have tacitly accepted the tribunal judge’s statement that the family were facing a humanitarian crisis “as a consequence of the Israeli Government’s indiscriminate attempts to eliminate Hamas”. How could that adjective ‘indiscriminate’ have been allowed to pass unchallenged? Did this imply a change of our official position on Israel?
A good pin on which to make the PM squirm, but Badenoch pulled it back out smartly and turned to the new chief inspector of borders, who lives in Finland and wants to work from home. Starmer was happy to deal with the latter: the individual had worked from Finland under the Tories but would now be UK-based. Returning to the AG, he noted that a previous Conservative AG had been “sacked for breaching national security”. So there!
When will Kemi break the habit of asking two questions in one?
Space does not permit discussion here of all the other matters in this session, but let us glance at three:
Sir Ed Davey (Lib Dem leader) recalled our time as brothers in arms with the Americans, deplored President Trump’s tariffs and suggested revenge imposts on US electric cars; Starmer shamelessly referred to the ‘special relationship’ and said “British steel is an essential part of our heartlands” – skating over issues of Chinese ownership, the EU’s impact over decades, as well as the dire costs of electricity thanks to the Net Zero push.
Similarly, he told Harriet Cross (Con) that “farming is top of the agenda”, though on Monday, he had fled to Cornwall by jet while hundreds of tractors jammed London’s streets. No changes to inheritance tax yet, then. The National Farmers Union welcomed his ‘road map’ apparently; not that bit though, surely.
‘Angel of Death’ Kim Leadbeater, fresh from modifying her Assisted Dying Bill so that cases would not be overseen by a High Court judge after all, but by a committee (selected how?), wanted Starmer’s confirmation that her 2023 ‘Healthy Britain’ report was resulting in moves to make the UK “healthier, happier and more productive” – right up to the point of the medical ‘kill shot’, one supposes.
What is it about the Left that loves death? David Steel’s 1967 Private Members Bill legalised abortion with a Labour Government’s support (10 million terminations so far); now, we are opening the door to routine officially-helped suicides. And as for war – today, Sir Ed Davey was yet again gung-ho for Ukraine and Zelensky.
‘Affairs are now soul-size,’ wrote the poet Christopher Fry in 1951. Now, Britain is indeed in a battle for its soul.
Our leaders think they can avoid addressing in the national forum systemic issues of public order arising from dangerous ideologies. Better - easier, at any rate - to leave such matters for local police and courts to deal with piecemeal.
Yet history will show that ideas, especially in religion, can result in blood and fire. In the sixteenth century Protestant bishops were burned alive outside Balliol College, and hangmen tore the guts out of Catholic priests at Tyburn.
It should be said clearly that the latter activists are very much a minority among their co-religionists, most of whom are not theologians and are busy with work and family.
Like Catholics, their religious community is transnational and so they will feel an affinity with others of their faith abroad. Some of the Muslim unrest we have seen recently in London streets relates to the Middle East and if peace returns there the furore here may die down.
But that is not the whole story. There is an enduring ideological problem. Radical Islamists may be hotheads but they are not ignorant: they are Puritans who can justify their actions from texts in Islam’s holy book and the hadiths - the witness accounts of their prophet’s companions.
The Koran is a book of two halves. As published its chapters or suras - the record of the prophet’s revelations - are not arranged in temporal order. Islamic scholars group them differently, the earlier ones dating from Mohammed’s mission in Mecca as he began to gather his followers. These emphasise prayer and communal charity - which among others drew in younger sons whose life chances were more precarious in a society that favoured the first born and had no welfare state.
The later suras begin with Mohammed’s time in Medina, to where he was driven by the Meccan polytheists who rejected his belief in only one god. As the new movement grew larger and stronger, the tone of the chapters became more uncompromising and aggressive. Peter Townsend, a non-Muslim Australian researcher into Islam, demonstrates from the Koran and the hadiths that physical violence - including killing - in the furtherance of Islam is condoned.
Islamic scholars generally rule that where there are any contradictions in the text the later suras supersede earlier ones; after that the teachings are not to be interpreted and modified according to historical context but apply forever. If that is so, the struggle against the unbeliever cannot end.
Traditionally non-muslims were held to have rejected what we call God and so were His enemies, to be killed or made slaves or second-class subjects. ‘These perspectives have fallen out of favor in recent times, particularly in the West among diasporic Muslim communities,’ says Wikiislam here.
However there is no formal authoritarian structure in Islam - no Pope or bishops. There are respected teachers - mullahs and so on - but it is always possible for some self-appointed firebrand to set the underbrush alight. So there they are, wagging their forefingers on YouTube and inflaming young men and women who desire a shortcut to respect and power.
What is to be done?
Some on social media are talking of a permanent answer: forced ‘remigration.’ This might just be feasible in the cases of illegal immigrants and foreign-born criminals. Mr Trump is planning it in the US; in the UK, the Reform Party’s Rupert Lowe is advocating it. But how can you repatriate someone born in our country?
Besides, most Muslims here are peaceable and law-abiding, so far. As a minority group in Britain and also from the beleaguered outlook of their religion, they are prone to feelings of persecution. What might be their response if they saw a movement to deport them on a massive scale, the innocent along with the guilty?
We should also reflect on the implications for the rest of us. Stalin was able to deport the entire Chechen nation; is that the kind of State we would wish to have? The solution might be far worse than the problem.
Ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, later a Dutch MP and now a US citizen proposes a different solution - a doctrinal reformation of the religion. History suggests that such a process could be attended by terrible controversy and slaughter - think of the impact of Martin Luther and Jan Hus. They thought they were reaffirming the fundamentals of their faith; but which devout Muslim will be the first to repudiate his own?
In my view the only realistic solution is for us to be watchful and very strong, much stronger than we have been to date. There has to be one secular law for all and it must be rigorously enforced, woke blether ignored. The soft hand and blind eye turned to the utterly disgusting ‘grooming gangs’ have not only harmed countless women and girls but damaged community relations to the point of riots.
Our society is no longer held together as strongly as it used to be by ties of blood, religion, history and culture. We depend on impartial institutions for our cohesion and safety. Should those bonds break perdition will follow.
We need a publicly and frequently stated commitment to civil law and order that disregards any special pleading.
Power is respected. In the early ninth century, a hundred years after Spain had fallen to Muslim conquerors, the Caliph of Baghdad sent precious gifts to Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, to acknowledge the latter’s strength and signify diplomatic peace. It is weakness that invites bloodshed.
Vigilant, unrelenting and even-handed (not two-tier) justice preserves the social order for the benefit of all; even for malcontents, would-be rabble-rousers and self-righteous Puritans.
