Very good and sound logic

David Davis

From David Farrer at Freedom and Whisky (.com)

And Freedom and Whisky finds more justification for leaving the State out of your arrangements.

State child-stealing

David Davis

Never thought I’d see stuff like this.

If there _is_ a war on terrorism, then we should conduct one. If not, then not.

David Davis

Charles Moore in his inimitable style discusses why we don’t stop little old  white Caucasian ladies at airports.

We as libertarians all know that “the war on terror” is a machinery-device by the GramscoFabiaNazis. It is designed for “security-theatre” purposes.

The “Moslems” are merely an identifiable fall-guy-group, who can be blamed publicly. Of course, none (much) can be charged with anything, mostly because nearly all of them are not guilty of doing anything to hurt us, so it “does not stand” as a case. They ought not to allow themselves to submit to this sort of public vilification: mostly this can be done by allying themselves wholeheartedly with “Western Values”, _/In Public/_ , which is very easy and which requires no religious alliegance to anything whatever except an honest and checkable commitment to secular liberalism.

The “War on Terror”  is here only and exclusively to control and enslave the populations of The West whose aspirations, lifestyle and values the GFNs hate, and want dead so they can inherit such power and wealth as is left undecomposed.

The GFNs are thus the ultimate harbingers of evil, wickedness and oblivion, although they themselves either don’t know it – or – more likely – they  _/do/_   know it, but have no care whatsoever for the rest of Humanity which may not be party to their desires and impulses of death and solo-deliverance.

At least Labour are honestly-statist scumbags

…llike Hugh Gaitskell who genuinely hated Anglosphere culture out of moral conviction (so Tony Benn loved him) and whom Margaret Thatcher most feared, out of all of them…(Wilson was just a Yezhov-policeman-imitation-character.)

…whereas David Cameron wants power so so so much that he can’t summon up the moral courage, the guardian-Angel-conscience, if you like, to cut and cut and cut again, and WIN the Party back to power!

David Davis

What “baby-George” George Osborne can do first of all, at about 02:00 am on the morning of a general-election win – IF they get one at all which is by no means assured as the Labour-scumbags will try to rig the results -  is this:-

(1) Lock-down and shut all “government buildings” containing such things as…

…”departments” of… education/skills/culture/women/communities/environment/farming/rural-affairs/more women/children-schools-and-families/media/sport/ diversity/health-protection-agency/UK-trade and investment/E-government-unit/Direct-gov(very very very sinister thing, this one!/The Greater London Authority/Info4local (whatever that might be?)/Better regulation Executive (even more sinister!)/UK resilience(er what?)/Department for work and pensions/Home Office Interior Ministry/Ministry of Justice (a tautology that one!)/Department for transport/ Department for regulatory reform (what’s the “better regulation executive” for then?)/Department for communities and local government/Department for children schools and families (this GramscoFabiaNazi government hates families and wants them dead, because they challenge its authority)/Department for comunities and local government (why is there another one?)

(2) Put all the “staff” on the street. Give them a bin-liner and 15 minutes to clear their desks and their lavatories of personal property.

(3) Burn ALL the records (and I include all hard disks, pen-drives, CD roms and servers) of all these departments. It must specifically include the pension records of all the people who have worked there. Otherwise there will become no stigma or even temporaray disadvantage attached to having worked for such places.

The Queen cares more about being “Head of a Church” than…

…looking after her Subjects’ sovereignty.

David Davis

This actually upset me as well as making me realise that the Queen must have deliberately given assent to things like ROME, the SEA, Maastricht, Nice and Lisbon.

If a “Senior Adviser” to the Queen has asked for a meeting with the Asse-Hatte “Rowan” Williams”, then it must mean that the Queen asked for it to take place.

The Pope is perfectly entitled to try and “poach” “Anglicans” from England into the Universal Church, if he can. He’s a classic aggressive campaigning battling Christian Pope of the Old School, and good luck to him: he’s also fun to watch, and smiles often, which makes you want to like him as a person.You can imagine him on a destrier, in full armour, wielding his flanged mace (so as not to shed blood while killing) in the middle of the Battle of Hastings.

Equally, by sovereign constitutional precedent and settlement, the Queen as the Anglican Boss is entitled to try and hold on to her “farm animals”. She might also care to think about defending our liberties sometimes. But what she’s clearly doing right now is a harmless game that has no bearing on how we real individuals live our lives, which are our own: this is one of the few real comforts available to us in a darkening and less free world.

But the Queen – rather than get exercised about playing harmless games – ought to have spent most of the last 50 years resisting far far more dangerous and important threats, both to our status and hers: such as the encroachment of the fascist EU upon especially and in particular British Sovereignty – no?

Amazon.co.uk: Customer Reviews: The Terror of Constantinople

 

Constantinople in 610 AD, three hundred years after Constantine the Great took the small fishing village of Byzantium and made it the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire; the city where Europe meets Asia; the City of Man’s Desire, where anything can be bought for the right price. But is the City of Gold a city of dreams or nightmares?
"Terror of Constantinople" marks the second outing for Aelric, a young Saxon nobleman transplanted to early seventh century Rome from England. Initially sent on a mission with his mentor, the priest Maximin, to collect books for the Roman Church in Britain, clever, cynical Aelric has proven a useful tool for the venal, power-hungry clerics of the Church in Rome, and is not planning on returning to his bleak, benighted homeland anytime soon.
His previous assignment as investigator and hatchet man for the Dispensator of the Church of Rome successfully completed, Aelric looks forward to settling into his nice new home in one of the few remaining suburbs of Rome still in working order. He’s coining it on the trading market, collecting books by the dozen for his library, and about to marry his pretty, ditzy mistress and become a father. Life looks good.
However the Dispensator hasn’t finished with Aelric yet, and blackmails him into accepting a new assignment, this time in Constantinople. Aelric soon finds that beneath its sophisticated veneer the city is suffocating in fear, controlled by a terrifying secret service which scoops up people at random on charges of treachery, sending them to torture and death in the cells beneath the sinister Ministry. Agents provocateur infiltrate all levels of society and citizens are encouraged to denounce each other at will. Wives tired of their husbands, sons wanting their inheritances in a hurry, business rivals, and envious neighbours all find a ready ear in the Ministry’s Black Agents. Divide and rule is the policy of Emperor Phocas, a paranoid megalomanic under threat of losing his position and his head to the next claimant to the throne. Danger lurks at every turn. Despite his overweening confidence in his own golden good looks, charm and intelligence, Aelric has to admit that even he might have stepped over his head into a cesspit this time. Will quick wits, a sexy smile and a sword be enough to save him?
Conspiracies of Rome was one of my historical fiction finds of 2008, and "Terror of Constantinople" is another winner. Blake’s erudition and political savvy create a convincing framework for an irreverent, bawdy historical thriller, written with élan and full of non-stop action, intrigue and suspense. The period is unusual and fascinating, as Blake himself says, "just at the transition between late antiquity and the mediaeval period," and Aelric makes a compelling protagonist. He’s conceited, ruthless, amoral and hedonistic. He also has a contagious zest for life, a passion for knowledge, and a distaste for narrow-minded religious dogmatism. He’s generous and protective of his motley mix of retainers as befits a Saxon lord, and has the Saxon warrior’s boundless capacity for alcohol, love of a good, brutal fight and zeal for blood-feud if he or his are injured in any way; a complex and contradictory character who always leaves the reader guessing.
Bring on "The Blood of Alexandria"!

Amazon.co.uk: Customer Reviews: The Terror of Constantinople

The Controlled Entertainment Media: A Case Study

Andy Thompson writes:

Sean,
 
Hope you are keeping OK.
 
I refer to the abovementioned section of your excellent publication, “Cultural Revolution, Culture War”.
 
In this chapter you write,
 
“….millions watch the entertainment programmes; and these have been recruited as part of the hegemonic apparatus”.
 
and

“It is possible to fill up page after page with similar examples of the use of popular entertainment as a reinforce of the hegemonic ideology—the careful balance of races and sexes in positions of authority, the vilification of white middle class men, the undermining of traditional morals and institutions, the general attack on all that is targeted for destruction.

Any one example given may seem trifling or even paranoid. But, taken together, the function of much of the entertainment media is to subvert the old order”.
 
May I draw your attention to the attached video clip of an advert currently doing the rounds on commercial television.  Unsurprisingly, it is a Government advert espousing the virtues of loft insulation in order to reduce our collective ‘carbon footprints’. 
 
This advert is a classic example of what you rightly describe as “….the careful balance of races and sexes in positions of authority, the vilification of white middle class men….”
 
Three parts of this advert are noteworthy:
 
1. The use of a ‘mixed race’ young male as the boyfriend of the young, white girl.  Not only a mixed race young man but a helpful one who offers to help out the mother without apparent fear of insulting the father. 
 
2. The portrayal of the father as a weak, pitiful, figure of fun.  Almost pathetic, he is patronised and ridiculed throughout – by his daughter and wife in particular.
 
3. The portrayal of the mother as a strong, independent, modern and intelligent woman. Clearly the ‘leader of the house’, she is the one at the top of the ladder carrying out the DIY whilst the husband is relegated to the landing to look up (in every respect) at his dominant spouse.
 
I am wary of being castigated as paranoid or a conspiracy theorist but this advert astonished me in it’s anti-conservative, anti white, pro-ethnic minority, pro-feminist and pro-liberal left audacity.  No surprise I suppose given the hand of this Marxoid government in it’s production.
 
The worrying thing is, the brain-dead majority of the country watching the advert would see it as normal fair and would not give the issues I have highlighted a second thought.
 
Worrying.  Very worrying.
 
Keep up the good work.
 
Regards
 
Andy Thompson

 

 

The poor Moslems should not let themselves become….

…catspaws and fall-guys for the GramscoFabiaNazis.

David Davis

The living man currently purporting to be one of the audio-voices of Osama bin Laden (who will continue to remain dead) comes out on the side of greens, dollar-dumpers, anti-Americans and other types of droid opposed to liberalism and the maximisation of energy-use to benefit humans.

This is of course no surprise: indeed, I wonder why the fellow purporting to be bin Laden did not actually orate about this matter during Copenhagen, which would have had more effect.

The effect of this voicover-tape on ordinary people who follw Islam may be the main worry. Ultimately, they and Islam cannot be the real or even a very substantial enemy of progress and emancipation for all people, although grievous harm has been done by some of them in the past in the name of destruction of secular Western liberalism and society.

I think in passing of the necessity for the medieval Crusades, for which an apology offered to existing European nations, as well as to obliterated ancient Christian countries, is long overdue – but which probably will never be forthcoming. Just like the deeply heartfelt and trans-global apology which is owed to Britain in general, and the Royal Navy in particular, over the little matter of “slavery”, which we here abolished in 1807. (Some questions to the French Government here might be in order, especially concerning Haiti and the position of slaves there after their rebellion and ejection of French colonial repressive interests…)

I also think of the frequent and partially-successful attempts by both Inperial Wilhelmine Germany and also by the Third Reich, to suborn latent Moslem enmity as an ally against “the West”. Buchan’s “Greenmantle” was partly based on fact. You could even say “it was all about oil”…..

Modern Moslems are far more in tune with Western values and liberalism than a small lunatic fringe of both “Islamists” and Western Multiculti-agitproptists cares to admit. They ought not to be taken in by stuff like “audio broadcasts”.

And so where is the fellow then? Repeated occasions of not appearing in public on live broascast media do tend to support the evidence that he is dead.

If Moslems allow themselves to be used as an anti-civilisation-weapon, then they will find themselves cast off and obliterated, as “useful idiots”, just like Lenin said about others such as Fabians and “socialists”.

The Hayekeo-Keynesian Rap

David Davis

I have to thank Tom Paine over at the Last Ditch who brought this droll little thing to my attention. Owing to strange and wonderful wireless-router-hiccups I have not been ablt to reach typepad blogs recently but it seems to be fixed now:-

Libertarian Alliance Historical Note No-19: The harm done to individualism by one individual

Paul Marks writes about Otto von Bismarck in 1992, but the idea bears revisiting today.

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/histn/histn019.pdf

It’ll be the Churches to go next…

Fred Bloggs.

The Church of England has finally begun to notice that the EU is a large pile of dog excrement, albeit a very clever and malicious pile of dog excrement. The Church attacked them on multiple fronts, both financially and politically, saying that “millions of pounds of public funds risk being wasted on redevelopment projects unless local people and religious groups are also involved to bring about spiritual regeneration” and that “The European institutional public sphere is largely a public discourse for elites, it is a sphere in which citizens remain uninvolved. This has in turn contributed to the EU’s democratic deficit.” 

It’s nice that people are beginning to wake up to this sham of  a “Union”, although I fear that the Churches will be found guilty of made up crime and shut down because they dared to speak out against this bureaucratic dictatorship  “Economic Friendship”

Nice work if you can get it

David Davis

Jeff Randall pulls the trousers off the Quangos and their cost to us.

The most expensive cheese in the world

….at about £100,000 per pound.

David Davis

Even though the cheese slice was the Franchisee’s private property, you’d have thought they could let one go now and again. If today’s British A-level statistics papers are anything to go by, people called “Sameena” pack cheese slices in boxes of mean contents = 500, standard deviation = 3, and P( x < 496) = 0.001, P( x > 504) = 0.01 ….

I presume that Dutch McDonald’s outlets are also independently-operated franchises just like they are here? I do not know. Perhaps someone will enlighten me, If so, I can’t believe that the odd whole burger does not go “missing” fairly frequently.

VDARE.com: 01/27/10 – It’s Happening There: Britain’s Emerging Police State

It’s Happening There: Britain’s Emerging Police State

[Peter Brimelow writes: Nearly forty years ago, I was immensely impressed with The New Totalitarians a brilliant study of Swedish political culture by Roland Huntford, making the point that totalitarianism, in the sense of complete political control of society, can be brought about by bureaucracy as well as brute force. (To my amazement, this book’s influence on my own book on Canada, The Patriot Game, is cited—currently—in its Wikipedia entry.) Sean Gabb reports here that it’s coming soon to another common law country near you—Britain. Indeed, the British government’s current drive to force the anti-immigration British National Party to admit immigrant minorities to membership is the very essence of totalitarianism: no private sphere can be allowed; in Mussolini’s words “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”. This is why the passage of the so called Hate Crimes legislation, lauded by President Obama in his recent State of the Union address, was such a disaster—yet almost unopposed by the Beltway Right. It’s happening there. It can happen here.]

[Edit: The Adam Smith Institute also discusses why Britain is "no longer free".]

By Sean Gabb

At the moment in Britain, the Labor Government’s Equality Bill is completing its progress through Parliament. The purpose of the Bill is to bring all the various “equality” laws and rulings made since 1965—race, sex, sexual preference, age-based, religious, etc—within a single statute, and to enable a single scheme of enforcement, the quasi-judicial Human Rights Commission. It also tightens these laws so that such “discrimination” as has continued to exist will be made illegal.

The exact meaning of any proposed law is hard to judge in advance. We need to see the final Act of Parliament. We need to see the hundreds of pages of regulations that it enables through its delegated legislation sections. We need to see how it will be enforced by the authorities, and how the courts will rule on its interpretation.

But outlines of the law are already reasonably clear. It is, for example, illegal for a Jewish school not to accept gentile children. It is illegal for a Christian hotelier to refuse to let two homosexuals share a bed together. It is illegal for an employer to exclude job candidates who belong to a group of which he might—for whatever reason—disapprove, or to confine recruitment within those groups of which he does approve. The same applies to landlords.

It is also illegal for the British National Party to confine its membership to those it regards as indigenous to the British Isles—an unmistakeably totalitarian violation of the principle of freedom of association.

After a recent rare defeat in the House of Lords, the Government will not be able to force religious schools to employ teachers who are outside of or hostile to their religious values. But this defeat may be reversed when the Bill returns to the Commons in the next few weeks. Or it may be reversed by separate legislation. As said, a law cannot be exactly understood until it is in force.

Even so, the Equalities Bill must be regarded as one of the most important measures in the consolidation of what can only be described as the British police state, which has been emerging since the election of Tony Blair and his “New Labor” allies in 1997. (For more details, see my monograph Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back, downloadable for free here).

The problem with opposing this sort of law is that opponents can be smeared as opposed to equality in general, or even as bigots. This has completely cowed the opposition Conservative Party, which has offered only token resistance. (My own Libertarian Alliance’s opposition statement is here).

Needless to say, this is an illegitimate tactic. As with freedom, everyone nowadays believes in equality. The real question: what is meant by “equality”?

According to the liberal tradition, as it runs through Locke, Hume, Mill and Hayek, everyone has—or should be regarded as having—an equal right to his life, liberty and property.

This means that everyone should be equal before the law. A married woman should not lose the right to own property, unless she agrees in advance. A Roman Catholic should not be prohibited from inheriting under his father’s will. An atheist or Jew should not be denied justice because he will not swear as a witness on the New Testament. Everyone should have the same right of access to the courts. Everyone should have the same rights to freedom of thought and speech and faith, and to freedom of association, and to freedom from arbitrary fine or imprisonment.

And that is it. The liberal tradition does not insist that everyone should have the same right to a job, or residential letting, or service in a restaurant or hotel. No one should have the right to be loved or accepted by others.

If the owner of a business puts a note in his window advertising that he will not deal with Jews or homosexuals, or the disabled, that is his right. As a libertarian, I would regard this kind of announcement with distaste, and I might refuse, because of it, to deal with that business. But that is the limit of proper disapproval. It is not a matter for interference by the authorities.

Now, I have argued so far as if I assumed that the projectors of the Equalities Bill were people of good intentions but limited understanding. But I do not assume this for a moment. The people who rule my country are best described as evil. They have not been led astray by bad ideas. Rather, they are bad people who choose ideologies to justify their behaviour.

There are ideologies of the left —mutualism, for example, or Georgism, or syndicalism—that may often be silly or impracticable, but that are perfectly consistent with the dignity and independence of ordinary people.

These are not ideologies, however, of which those who now rule us in Britain have ever taken the smallest notice.

These people began as state socialists. When this became electorally embarrassing, they switched to Politically Correct multiculturalism. To the extent that this is becoming an embarrassment, they are experimenting with totalitarian environmentalism. But whether in local or in national government, their proclaimed ideologies have never prevented them from working smoothly with multinational big business, or with unaccountable multinational governing bodies.

It is reasonable to assume that, with these people, ideas are nothing more than a series of justifications for building a social and economic and political order within which they and theirs can have great wealth and unchallengeable power. Their object has been to deactivate all the mechanisms that once existed in Britain for holding its rulers accountable to the ruled.

And that is what they have been doing since the Labour Party won the 1997 election. To a degree that foreigners do not often realise, Britain has, during the past 13 years, been through a revolution. This has been brought about by the Labor Government and by its collaborators in the MainStream Media, in the civil service and judiciary, and in big business.

They have swept away the constitutional settlement of the 17^th century. Our Ancient Constitution may have struck outsiders as a gigantic fancy dress ball. But it covered a serious and very important fact. This was an imperfect acceptance of the claim by Colonel Rainsborough, leader of the radical Leveller faction in the English Civil War, that “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he”. It allowed this country to be at once highly conservative in its institutions and, at the same time, free.

All this has gone. Since 1997, we have had a bewildering 4,000 new criminal offences created—many dealing with censorship of speech and publication. They are usually enforced by a summary—and often arbitrary and even corrupt—process.

The traditional courts and their procedure have also been transformed, so that no one whose legal education ended before 1997 has the faintest idea of how to enforce his rights. We have been made formally subject to the European Union. The country has been deliberately flooded with immigrants, as former Blair speechwriter Andrew Neather recently boasted. And the purpose of mass immigration has been to break up the solidarity of the ruled.

I was born in a free country. People could speak as they pleased and live without constant supervision. If a policeman knocked on my parents’ front door, their only worry was that he might have bad news.

I now live in a police state. Recent legal reforms have completely displaced common law protections and all offenses are now arrestable. If I am accused of so much as dropping a sweet [VDARE.COM: U.S. = candy] wrapping on the ground, I can be arrested and taken to a police station. There, I shall have my fingerprints and a DNA sample taken. Even if I am released without charge, these records will be kept indefinitely. They will also be shared with several dozen foreign governments, who will often regard presence on a DNA database as evidence of a criminal record.

The natural response is that sensible men do all that is needed to avoid any police attention. That means prompt obedience to commands that may have no legal basis. And what is that but a police state?

I now live in a country where I have to be aware that private meetings and even private conversations are subject to paid informers and can lead to prosecution and professional ruin.

The Equality Bill is simply another step in the consolidation of this new order of things. It is a bribe to those groups—Muslims, Gays, racial minorities—whose electoral support is needed to keep Labor in power. It is one more excuse for making victims of known dissidents.

Above all, it is another message sent out to all of who is boss.

The only “equality” the rulers of Britain are working towards is equal fear of them—and of what they can do to us.

Dr. Sean Gabb [Email him] is a writer, academic, broadcaster and Director of the Libertarian Alliance in England. His monograph Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back is downloadable here. For his account of the Property and Freedom Society’s 2008 conference in Bodrum, Turkey, click here. For his address to the 2009 PFS conference, “What is the Ruling Class?”, click here; for videos of the other presentations, click here.

VDARE.com: 01/27/10 – It’s Happening There: Britain’s Emerging Police State

An old small thing…

David Davis

…but I found it by accident. Perhaps what it says in my piece below has a grain of realism in it after all.

h/t The Last Ditch, which was here at the Beginning Of Time, but is now always to be found here.

Libertarian Britain

David Davis

Go to conservativehome and take part in the lively discussion thread about whether “Britain is becoming more conservative – or perhaps more libertarian?

Sinister trend

David Davis

It says in The Register that the gramscofabianazi scumbags are going to continue promoting uptake of ID cards by stealth: specifically to the astonishingly uncurious 16-24 generation, which they have deliberately made politically uninvolved in my opinion.

More experts say stuff

Michael Winning

And to continue the Boss’s Day Of Small Things, I know it’s late but It says over at the Daily Express that “salt kills 40,000 people a year.”

Experts say this so it must be true.

Well I suppose we all have to die of something so it might as well taste nice. It puts the term food-fascism in a new light, and so why don’t we just send all these experts to a state-health-farm, in the far north somewhere, with nothing but boiled root vegetables to eat, that’ll fix them.

Personally I recommend tiny little wet-finger-touch-helpings of sodium monohydrogen-glutamate, as a hor-douevre. It actually tastes quite good. You can buy 500g and 1Kg shrink-packs of it at the local Chinese cash and carry in Manchester.

Green Paper

David Davis

This is a day of minor observations about small things. I feel I want to say things about education this afternoon.

This matter which I will relate was commonplace in the early 1960s. Even in “State” schools, whose teachers still thought they were there to pass knowledge on, or at least some of them did.

When I was a young teenager at school, if you did a piece of either homework (it was actually called “prep” then by us, and you did some between 6.15 and 7.30 pm at school, before going home if you were not a boarder, to do the rest before tomorrow am) or classwork that fell below your recognized usually-achievable standards – and you were /told/ what these would be as required-  you would be commanded to redo the work on “Green Paper”, perfectly, for resubmission to the relevant master. Otherwise, you would not be classed in your class ratings for the “Tri-Weeklies”. There were four of these per term. If you missed a “Tri-Weekly” in all subjects fully…..

“Green Paper”, which was of a particular shade and was lined and punched and of Foolscap size – so you could not buy it at Pullinger’s “the stationers” in the town – could only be collected, in individual sheets of the prescribed number for the work, from your Housemaster. He would note how many sheets you were commanded to ask for, which master it was for, and which subject, and by when (usually tomorrow) and would note your marks from the failed-piece. You had to sign for these sheets.

If you “got” three Green Papers (over all subjects) in one tri-weekly, you would then go on “Satis”. You might be beaten as well by the Housemaster or the House Tutor, at his or his discretion, especially if you were thought to be “intelligent and lazy”. (Boris Johnson types please note.) Potential officers in the Prussian Army would have jumped over the wall by this time and buggered off to their favourite peasant-girls, in disgust, at their views of this attempted humiliation. “

“Satis” meant that you had a brown _Blauschein_ thingy handed to you, with all the lessons you had to go to marked on it in a grid, for the next three weeks (tri-weekly) and each master (all of them, for all subjects) had to sign it to the effect that you had performed “satis”factorily in his lesson. Each time,  it made you late as you had to queue up to see him at the end-bell of each lesson, before moving on to another building: (The boys moved and the masters stayed put then.) It identified you to the other boys as a person who needed watching. Some would withdraw the hem of their garment from you, especially the clubbable popular convivial not-very-bright-but-politically-able-boys, whom everyone wanted as their friends.These boys, who are now in their 60s all very rich and relaxed in their old age, did not want to be associated visibly with other people’s failures: that is only right and natural. It was a lesson in life.

It bloody made you perform.

If your “Satis” card was in order at the end, and you had not acquired any more Green papers, then the record of the previous Green Papers you had obtained was expunged.

I am not suggesting that a libertarian education system – if that is not indeed a tautologial notion – would invoke such a thing as this system for making people remember things learned. But if there was a Free Market in Schooling, then some places might go for this method, as in a “That’ll Teach-’Em!” strategy. I fully expcet that the children of people like Tony Blair, the Milibands, Peter Mandelson (he has children, but he is just dissembling for the camerae) and Harriet Harman would go here.

The problem today of course is that there is no failure and no success. Everyone has to be equally “advantaged”, and as well the “curriculum” contains no content of actual factual use or relevance. So I suppose they don’t need Green papers then.

Top Gear in ties

David Davis

I don’t think so, thank you.

Newsreaders? Yes: Jeremy, James and the Hamster? No.

That lot are pretending to be slobs with terrible dress-sense, and they do it very well and it’s part of their brand, so they should look like slobs.