First World War anniversary celebrations

The anniversary of the start of the Great War is already being hijacked by the bleeding heart liberals who believe that 'there is nothing to celebrate' and 'that the dead of both sides must be commemorated together' and other such rubbish. 

Well I don't agree.  There is a lot to celebrate.  First and foremost is the superb performance of the British Army in stopping the Germans dead (literally) in their tracks.  By doing so they prevented the defeat of France which would have led to the domination of Europe by Germany.

If you want to find out just how good the British Army of 1914 was then don't read the sort of drivel put about by the likes of Sebastian Faulks but a book by a truly brilliant historian, Lyn Macdonald,  who dedicated most of the last forty years to first hunting down survivors and then, when they were no more, their letters and diaries and weaving the resulting information into a series of superb books on the Great War.  Here, to give you a taster, is an extract from her book 1914 and is the account  of sixteen year old Jimmy Naylor a trumpeter with the Royal Field Artillery who witnessed the British infantry in action.: 

"He was saying , At four hundred.......At five hundred .......at threee fifty.......at three hundred. the rifles blazed, but still the Germans came on.  they were getting nearer and nearer and for the first time I began to feel rather anxious anf frightened. they weren't and indeterminate mass any more - you could actually pick out details, see them as individual men, coming on, coming on.  And the officer, still as cool as anything, was saying , At two fifty ....At two hundred ......And then he said ,ten rounds rapid!  And the chaps opened up - And the Germans just fell down like logs . I've never seen anything like it, the discipline, the fire discipline of those troops, I've never forgotten that, I was so impressed. As a boy of sixteen I was simply astounded. I thought, 'What a marvellous army we are!' The attack was completely repulsed - probably not for long but it was long enough for us to get the guns away. It saved us. "    

If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck and your heart burst with pride at being British then you probavly live in Notting Hill Gate or Chipping Norton (or both).   

Business Leaders

In my own small way I suppose I am 'a member of the business community'  so I am oddly annoyed when I read in the paper that 'business leaders' want the government to do something, especially when virtually everything these self styled unelected 'business leaders want is the diametric opposite of what I want.  Why is this I wonder?  Well it could be because the average time horizon of most of these businessmen is a maximum of say three years while mine is, anyway when I plant an oak tree, two hundred years. You get my point I hope. So when these drips warn Cameron against doing anything which might jeopardise our relationship with Europe they don't have the long term interests of the country at heart but purely the next couple of years P&L account. Similarly of course when they complain about immigration controls they are worrying about the supply of cheap labour drying up not of the long term social costs which uncontrolled immigration brings.

In any event the track record of 'business leaders' is abysmal.  A trawl through the newspapers of the past would reveal the 'business leaders' have very little judgement about what is good for the country or indeed for business. Business leaders for instance were loud in their desire for us to join the euro.  Enough said, but it would be better for their businesses if these self important prats concentrated their efforts on running them rather than telling the Prime Minister how to run the country.



 

London house Prices

My son is renting a small ground floor flat -one bedroom, sitting room, kitchen and a bit of a garden - at the bottom end of the Fulham road for around £280 a week.  It is in a two story Edwardian terrace house so -presumably - the landlord is getting an equally good rent - or perhaps a bit more as it is a two bedroom affair - for the one above.  This would give him a gross rent of some £30,000 a year which equates to an open market value of this poxy house at around £500,000 (rent = 7% of value)
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Given this exorbitant rent charge you will understand that I take a keen interest in the London property market - should I buy or should we continue to rent- it is the big question.  Savills kindly sent me a copy of their Residential Property Focus and in it they forecast that London Prime (though surely arse end of Fulham cannot be 'Prime' - can it ? ) will rise by 23.8% over the next five years.

Well all I can say is that if Savills are right it is good bye to London as a commercial centre because the cost of housing will have driven everyone out of London. Going back to my son's flat. If he was to pay the rent without any help from me (or from a lodger who kips in the sitting room) he would need to be earning £40,000 a year. That is actually quite a good salary but after travel and rent it wouldn't give him much more than £200 a week to live on.

Over the last four years salaries in London have stagnated or fallen, the financial sector has shed buckets of jobs and bankers bonuses are increasingly a thing of the past yet London house prices are up some 20% on 2008 - it is a joke.

At the end of the day London prices will have to reflect the ability of those who live and work in the place to pay for them otherwise work and people will leave the metropolis for more salubrious fields.  Yes I know foreigners are buying and keeping prices up but one day they will find that tenants strike and refuse to pay ridiculous rents.  London property is a bubble and my forecast for the next five years is -in real terms after taking inflation into account - a drop in prices of 25%

So take your pick - Savills or Fulford - it's your choice.     




 

Ash Die Back disease

A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house  

Eighteen months ago, when Rachel Johnston and her acolytes where campaigning to 'Save our Forests' I wrote a blog saying that 'if they where really serious about 'Saving our Forests' they ought to campaign, not to stop the sale of the Public Forestry Estate to the private sector but to stop the importation of plants from abroad, as the biggest threat to our woodland was not a change of ownership of some woods but the bugs and diseases which where coming into this country via the plant trade.

Well there was - surprise surprise- a deafening silence on this matter from Rachel and her chums and sadly what I predicted then has come true far quicker than even I anticipated with the arrival of Chalara Fraxinea, or Ash die back as it is now popularly known, in East Anglia and Kent.

I wrote a letter to The Times on the topic the other day which they kindly printed. It went as follows: 

Dear Sir

The outbreak of Chalara Fraxinea fungus in ash trees was entirely predictable and thus entirely avoidable.  It has happened because DEFRA has totally failed in it's primary function of protecting the biodiversity of these islands. I and others have been warning of the inevitability of this tragedy for some time but successive governments have refused to ban the imports of trees and plants from foreign nurseries which are the source of not only Chalara Fraxinea in ash but of the Processionary Moth in oak trees and of P.Ramorum in Larch. the excuse successive governments ministers have given for their failure to implement a ban on the importation of all foreign plant materials is that would be contrary to our obligations under the EU Single market. furthermore when I recently questioned DEFRA officials as to why, when they knew Oak Processionary Moth had arrived in this country from Holland they were still allowing imports of oak trees from that source I received the amazing reply, that, as now the Oak Processionary Moth was in the UK we could no longer ban the importation of trees which might carry further infestation.

It is only by the banning of all plant imports into this country that we can protect our unique biodiversity and it is high time this was recognised by the government. 

Allan Mitchell -Plebs or Plods?

Well Allan Mitchell has gone and I don't much care as anyone who believes, as he professed to do, that spending more money on overseas aid whilst ruthlessly cutting the defence budget was a good thing is a very strange sort of Tory in my book.

But did he really call a policeman a 'fucking pleb.'  Well I don't believe he did what I think he actually called him was a 'fucking Plod.'  Now either the said policeman misheard or someone decided that it would in infinitely more damaging to the Chief Whip if the word 'plod' was changed to 'pleb.

Why is it more likely that Mitchell called the policeman a 'plod' simply because that is the generic name for uniformed policemen in the services and among plain clothes policeman. In fact if he had held his hand up and admitted calling the copper a 'fucking plod' the Police Federation would not have dared open their mouth as to condemn him as to do would have been to condemn the hole of CID.

Eric Hobsbawn

Now most of us, say 99.9% of us at a guess where, until he died at the ripe old age of 95 unaware of the existence of this evil rabid old Marxist historian. I was anyway and was amazed that the BBC devoted some five minutes of the Ten o'clock news to lamenting his demise. In the following days the newspapers where full of obituaries and Ed Milliband himself could not but mention that our Eric was ......'a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of my family.'

Well, yes, Eric Hobsbawn was 'passionate about his politics, so passionate in fact that he cheerfully admitted when asked in a TV interview    '.........in 1934 millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that , would it have made any difference to you at the time? to your commitment ? to being a communist?'

Hobsbawn replied; 'probably not'

Now that is really someone being 'passionate' about politics- so passionate that you are cheerfully willing to condemn millions to their death on the oft chance that a social experiment will work. Actually Hobsbrawn's 'passion' rather reminds me of the 'passion' of the Nazis who indulged in genocide.  This putrid man is lauded as a great historian and thinker and yet he could and did somehow manage to write a history of the 20th century called 'the Age of Extremes 1914 -91' without mentioning the purges, the gulags or the famines which his Soviet heroes inflicted on their subjects. How can such a man receive such eulogies from so many when the central plank of his thinking was not just flawed but spawned such evil and suffering?  How can Ed Milliband get away with lauding the memory of a man who condoned mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing on such a massive scale? I don't know I wish someone would enlighten me.
 

     

The affair of Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative Chief Whip neatly illustrates a lot of what is wrong with modern Britain.  Just to recap on the facts. Andrew Mitchell works at No.9 Downing Street, to get to his office he has to pass through a set of gates at the entrance to Downing Street. These gates where erected some time back, at great expense, to protect Downing Street from terrorist attack. He reportedly asked the policeman on duty to open the gates to allow him through and the policeman refused on the grounds that because he was on a bicycle and not in a car he would have to use another gate.   Understandably Mr. Mitchell called the policeman a F****** idiot/moron or pleb or whatever. 

So what does this incident show about the state of modern Britain?

1) The proliferation of footling little rules devised by mentally retarded officials
2) That the police and officialdom generally are overpopulated with people who consider that rules - however stupid - are sacrosanct and must be obeyed at all times to the letter
3) The desire of little men -like the policeman and his superiors -to 'sneak' and attempt to destroy a man's career  - a man who - actually - had very good reason to swear at them
4) The media love of enjoying a feeding frenzy over any minister who they think they can destroy.

What the media ought of course to be outraged about is that a Policeman should deliberately have impeded a very senior Minister going about the business of HM's government. further that his superiors, rather than reprimanding him for his arrant stupidity, should have publicised the whole affair to the press with the aim of getting the said Minister into serious trouble. In the old days everything would have been handled so much better, a quiet word, perhaps a bottle of whisky changing hands and that would have been that. Now though I suspect the Policeman is taking time off and attending trauma counselling from the shock of being called a F****** moron.