Mrs May and Marshal Petain - a comparison

Listening to Teresa May trying to justify her Brexit deal to the House of Commons I had a thought. Marshal Petain, the Hero of Verdun in the First War and the man who France called to in its hour of need in the Second could have made an identical speech justifying his deal with the Germans in 1940.

Yes it is all there. The need to be realistic - this is the only deal on the table - the need to protect jobs/business/ the way of life etc.- Petain would have said it all and the same people who are urging either acceptance of May's 'deal' or a second 'peoples' referendum - you know what - they would all have been collaborators in 1940 France and enthusiastic supporters of the Vichy regime.

It is I think worth a thought. You see there are no statues to Marshall Petain in France but there are many 'Place de Resistance' scattered among the towns and villages of France.  The Frenchman who emerged as the hero of the last War was -of course - de Gaulle - the villain -who died in prison -Marshal Petain.  No statue will ever be erected to Mrs  May but one day Nigel Farage will take his rightful place on top of a plinth in Parliament Square.

End of The Great War

My father was born in 1898 and went out to France as a nineteen year old second Lieutenant in September 1917  He was on his way back from England to rejoin his battalion when the Armistice was declared. This is his letter home:

Dear Daddy

Yesterday was a wild day. We got the news of the signing of the armistice at 9.15 and great was the jubilation. A draft of Australians going off to the line threw their tin hats and respirators on the ground saying they wouldn't be needing them now and left them there.

I went into Havre in pm. It was amazing the civilians were marching about with Belgian, French, USA,English,Australians arm in arm singing the Marseilles and waving flags. All work stopped including the trams. Hundreds of bands marched about playing , followed by huge crowds cheering and singing and dancing. The number of soldiers drunk by tea time was amazing, by evening they were lying all over the streets, the civilians were as bad . We had tea & dinner & came back at about 9.30.

At Tortonis, which is the biggest rest camp by dinner time everyone was tight, pouring champagne stuff all over everyone 7 the floor, hurling bottles and glasses about.

All the ships blew their hooters continuously for hours, some of them were illuminated. We are still waiting here for our orders which I trust will come soon.   

I think therefor I am

The French philosopher Rene Descartes coined this phrase in his book Discourse of Method published in 1637. That shows how advanced in thinking this Rene was because now what he propounded as a mere philosophical thought has become  law! So, according to modern lunacies, if I think I am a woman I am a woman and I have to be treated as a woman even if I have all the genitals etc. of a man.

This patent absurdity was highlighted over the weekend when a white theatre producer got funding from the Arts Council England to go on a full years residential course which was restricted to applicants of 'colour.'  He thinks he is black so he is black -apparently.

Well HURRAY for that I say. I am a member of one of the only two groups of people who you are aloud to mock and be rude about. Yes you've got it. I am white, male and privately educated oh, and to top it all I voted for Brexit. If you are wondering who the other group is it is also white, working class,patriotic, male and voted Brexit.  But hope is now at at hand for us persecuted minorities. We can all think. Just now I am pondering what I think  I might be.  I am quite tempted by being a female Muslim human rights campaigner from Somalia. That seems to tick a lot of boxes and should be worth a fortune in government grants. After all there can't be many female Muslim human rights campaigners from Somalia who happen to own a socking great house in the country in need of repairs.

Nigel Farage - wherefore art thou in our hour of need?

Nigel Farage is that rarity among politician - a man who retired form the stage at the pinnacle of his career.  Watching the events unfolding as Mrs May tries her best to emasculate Brexit turning the UK, into in Boris Johnstone's  choice turn of phrase, a 'colony of Europe' one wonders where he is and why he is not bestriding the airwaves denouncing Mrs May as a modern day Quisling.

Nigel though I suspect knows his history. He is waiting in the wings. he knows timing is everything in revolutions and a pure Brexit would indeed be a revolution. Like Lenin he will await his time in a self imposed political exile and, when he judges the time is ripe, he will reemerge - we all hope - to lead us into freedom. 

The Francis Hotel Bath -The World we Live in

We spent a weekend in Bath recently, staying at the Francis Hotel, which is an MGallery Hotel. The blurb says that: "MGallery by Sofitel is a collection of boutique hotels dedicated to lovers of life, literature and culture." Well that's as maybe but it also seems to be dedicated to total stupidity in it's staff.

The story. My wife booked the room, I paid for it with my credit card. When we checked out I asked for a receipt, a perfectly normal request you would think, for some reason though this was clearly a problem but the girl behind the desk offered to email me one to which I agreed. Two days went past and no receipt. I emailed them. No response. Two days later, by now getting pissed off I emailed them again now -Wow -they deigned to reply. We will they said send you a receipt if you give us the last four digits of your credit card and tell us who booked the room. I did this and got back a reply thanking me for my email and telling me they would now happily send me a receipt providing I got my wife to email them. Then I exploded

What sort of pathetic little mindset is it that inhabits people who can find reasons not to send a receipt to someone who has paid a bill with his own credit card. Who writes these rules and who is so incredibly stupid that they then obey them. Has everyone forgotten that the excuse: " I was/am only following orders/obeying rules" was totally discredited at the  Nuremberg Trials after the last war.

Rules, as we used to say in the army, are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men. Sadly the modern generation seems to consist totally of fools. And the real joke is that most of the idiots slavishly following ridiculous rules and guidelines (they are so stupid they don't even know that a rule and a guideline are different) went to university where you are supposed to learn to think for yourself.     

Mrs Justice Lang - moronic judgement on homeless East Europeans

If I was homeless and sleeping rough in a foreign country and one night someone touched me on the shoulder and said  -I've got good news for you - we will pay for you to go back home to the bosom of your family -well I would be bloody grateful. Not apparently though if you hail from Eastern Europe.  They complained that us paying for them to go home to a nice warm bed  breached- 'you've guessed it - both their human rights and their rights under 'free movement of people' within the EU.

Something called the 'Public Interest Law Unit (PILU) of the Lambeth Law Centre - which says on it's web site that  "it is particularly interested in using law as part of the process to effect social change through test cases" and is - yes -you've guessed it again -funded by us - the poor bloody tax payer - through Legal Aid -decided to take up their case  and went to court.

Luckily for them they found themselves in front of a particularly moronic judge -of which there are -alas - all too many - called Mrs Justice Lang who decided -yes the poor rough sleepers had had their human rights and their rights of free movement abused and  yes - they should all receive large dollops of Tax payers money - for their supposed pain and suffering -£10,000 for one Lithuanian so far!

You can't make it up. But Mrs Justice Lang said in her judgement that "rough sleeping even accompanied by low level offending such as begging and drinking in a public space should not be grounds for removal." Sadly I don't have her address to give out nor that of Paul Heron a socialist and founder of the PILU.  Because wouldn't it be fun to recruit a gang of homeless and bribe them to set up camp on the doorsteps of both these people and let them really enjoy the results of their stupidity.

 

the House of Lords and Brexit- A solution

The House of Lord's attempt to wreck Brexit through a series of amendments is causing Mrs May all sorts of grief. There is though an easy solution at hand which has a blue ribbon Constitutional pedigree - just create more peers to vote through the Brexit Bill.

Back in 1911 Asquith - the then Prime Minister - went to the King - George V - and requested him to do just that if the House of Lords rejected his Parliament Bill - which was designed to curtail their powers. The King reluctantly agreed and- when the peers where informed of it - they backed down and passed the Bill.

So what was good for a Liberal government (without co -incidentally, like Mrs May, a working majority. It ruled in coalition with the Labour Party and the Irish Nationalists; plus ca change, plus c'est meme chose ) must surely be good for today's Conservative Government.

So come on Mrs May -get your act together - inform the Lords that either they pass the necessary Brexit legislation without amendment or you will create enough Lords to do it anyway.  As an added bonus may I put my hat in the ring and offer to be one of the new Lords.  Many people assume - because I live in a big house surrounded by acres of land and because we have lived here for some 800 years - that I am a Lord anyway and are very disappointed when I tell them that I am not.  So making me a peer would cheer a lot of people up  as well as helping you to achieve the aim of passing all the necessary legislation through the Lords hassle free. 

The National Trust - & Mrs McGrady the DG

Two of my least favourite phrases are 'reaching out' and the 'the need to be relevant.'  So it was dispiriting to hear the new Director General of the National Trust trot out both of them in a BBC interview.

Here is Mrs McGrady in full flow:

"I want to reach more people, and more people live in urban areas. The days of walking into one of our beautiful houses and saying that a family lived here, that's not going to do it

We need to think of what's relevant -why would someone in the middle of Birmingham say that's interesting. What is it in Birmingham that they would get more interest from? "

Well actually that's an easy question to answer. Just at the moment the good citizens of Birmingham -or a least a sizeable majority of them -are praying that Aston Villa wins promotion to the Premier League and that their other team, Birmingham City, avoids relegation to League One.  So perhaps, if she is serious about 'reaching out' and being 'relevant to urban people' she ought to -seriously -consider spending some of the National Trust's £600 million annual income on sponsoring a football team -like Birmingham City -who -judging by their performance this year -are urgently in need of a cash injection.

But actually why does she want to 'reach out' and why 'be relevant?'  Surely the whole point about the National Trust is that it's success was built on NOT BEING RELEVANT. So, when big houses were being pulled down and no one thought they had any future in the 'relevant' modern post war world the National Trust stepped in and saved them and their contents for future generations. Equally when the coastline was being raped and pillaged with caravan parks and bungalow developers (for -I am afraid to say -urban people) the National Trust stepped into the breach and bought and saved many miles of coastline.

So-learning from the past -if I was Mrs McGrady I might just ask myself the opposite question to the one she has posed.  What is irrelevant -or thought to be so -in modern society?  Well here is a thought for her -Pride in British History.  In it's ownership are many houses which are intrinsically linked to many of the great names of British history. So let's celebrate their contribution to our and the world's culture and stop making grovelling apologises for their occasional lapses into behaviour which today would be unacceptable.

BBC -Salaries & 'Gender in balance'

I am bored by the whinging females at the BBC going on about 'gender inbalance' in their salary levels compared to their male colleagues. Get a Life or -perhaps more pertinently -Get a Better Agent.

Whenever I have done any TV work the first thing I say when I am contacted is - 'That's very interesting - do you mind talking to my agent?" Why? Because I haven't a clue about what the 'going  rate' is for a job but my agent has. Also - though I have many qualities I also have many weaknesses and one of them is - I am a lousy negotiator for myself.

So I leave the sordid subject of monetary remuneration to my agent and naturally she takes- and fully deserves - her fee. But I always feel that actually she cost me nothing as I am quite convinced that the extra payment she extracts more than covers her cost.

On the same issue though I am also a license fee payers as is everyone else in this country. Frankly that means I want the BBC to pay as little as possible for the 'talent' as us TV performers are called. If they can get away with paying someone less than someone else doing an equivalent job - well good for them.  Personally though I am boggled by what some of the 'Talent' are pulling in. Is that old wind bag John Humphries really worth £600,000 + a year - I think not as for Jonathan Ross -pass the sick bag 

Winter Flu epidemic

"Winter Flu Plunges Hospitals into Chaos" reads the banner headline. But why does "Winter Flu" cause the Health Service to collapse?  If I have flu I go to bed. It is that simple. I make myself a 'hot toddy' - recipe as follows:

Pour a generous measure of whisky (probably equivalent to a quadruple measure) into a glass - add water -then pour mixture into saucepan - then add generous quantity of lemon juice - a spoonful of honey and sprinkle in some cloves. Put on the stove - stir it and -when it boils pour into a big mug and retire to bed.

Drink that and you fall instantly asleep and wake up on the mend. It is that simple.

Instead the modern 'snowflakes' rush up to the doctor's surgery or - even more brain numbingly stupid to  hospital where they will sit shivering - and getting sicker - for some hours - whilst generously spreading their germs amongst a large section of the population -how selfish and stupid can you be?

The resulting headlines will squeal about lack of NHS funding etc. No - I don't think there is any 'lack of NHS funding' what there is unfortunately is a 'snowflake' population which can't even do simple things like put a plaster on a finger or go to bed with a hot drink without clogging up the arteries of the NHS with their pathetic little medical complaints.