1551 days ago
Okay, this is only one store in a medium sized Welsh village. The one I live in. Perhaps, unbeknown to me, absolutely all of my fellow villagers spend their nights re-reading the works of Ayn Rand, brushing up on Austrian economics or on the greatest 100 quotes of Ronald Reagan and we are somehow atypical. My instincts are that this is not an unusually enlightened place. And thus in light of my article earlier in the week on #BoycottBenandJerrys and the woke hypocrisy of Unilever (ULVR) I bring you a photo from the village store.
2556 days ago
The Taxpayers Alliance has produced a fascinating 51 page report explaining why so many of us are "just about managing" to quote our useless Prime Minister. In short it's hard evidence that Ronald Reagan was right when he said that the scariest words in the English language are "I'm from the Government and I'm here to help." We feel poor not because of wicked Tory austerity (fauxsterity), but because of how a bloated state has distorted the economy.
2804 days ago
In today's podcast I look at Peak Club - the mad debt binge at Soho House and what it tells us about asset bubbles and more. Then I cover Theresa May's misguided proposals on executive pay before finally covering the latest boardroom antics at Bowleven (BLVN) , putting it up for sale.
2948 days ago
I am not saying that Donald Trump is a patch on the great Ronald Reagan. But the way the British liberal press demonises him is similar to the way the demonised Reagan back in the 1980s. The facts are that the world would be safer with Trump in the White House than with crooked Hillary Clinton as POTUS as I explain in this podcast
2955 days ago
Bruce is in London plugging his autobiography and so is being interviewed by every TV station radio station and newspaper in town. The book talks about his battle with depression and sounds a bit depressing so the liberal media would rather have a Trump hatefest as they yack away with the Boss. Let's put this into context....
2980 days ago
Surely after Brexit, when almost every celebrity in Britain told the great unwashed to vote to stay, a call that was completely ignored, even the Guardian realises that celeb endorsements count for nothing. Keira Knightley can lecture me from her multi million pound mansion about why I really want to pay more taxes, have more EU diktat's ruining my life and why I should wet my pants over global warming but I just don't care. I have bills to pay and rather resent someone with no such concerns telling me how to live my life.
But the Guardian has not twigged that. After all its senior staffers in the media elite go to the same parties as Alan Bennett and the same charity bashes as Becks, Keira and Gary Lineker so they think the views of the celebs actually matter. The Guardian backed laws to stop the press exposing the hypocrisy of such celebs by exposing double standards in their private lives. It is part of an utterly out of touch liberal establishment
And thus the Guardian splashes with the news that the singer Bruce Springsteen is backing Hillary Clinton and thinks that Donald Trump is a "moron". Well there is a shock.
3026 days ago
I came back from Greece on July 2nd and then spent barely five days away from Shipston in that month. My step mother died on the 14th and was buried nine days later. My father, in his old world way, did not "emote" as all around him wept. He said almost nothing. I have no idea what he was thinking or is thinking. One big question was how, when he was finally left alone, would he cope? I worried.
3106 days ago
From the comfort of his £17.5 million North London home, actor Tom Conti has complained that the word luvvie, as used to describe him and certain, but not all, other actors, is as offensive as the word nigger, used by either certain black folk or white racists to describe all black people. Conti is talking out of his arse.
If one is a white racist or a black person attempting to reclaim the word in the way that certain gay folk have attempted to "reclaim" queer, then all black folks are niggers. It is an offensive term and should not be used, it is a term from the era of slavery, a term that suggests that those with a different coloured skin are inferior to we white folk.
On the other hand not all actors would be described as luvvies. Can anyone remember the word being used in association with John Wayne? Or Ronald Reagan? Or closer to home would anyone describe wife beating
3757 days ago
President Obama has now ordered his warplanes to bomb some ISIS Islamofascist loons off to a place where they get to meet 72 virgins. He is now off on a 2 week golfing holiday. If you think that this will save the Kurd oil plays in London - Genel (GENL) and Gulf Keystone (GKP) here is why you are wrong.
You need to think back to the last but one totally useless disaster of a Democrat to sit in the white house, the lamentable Jimmy Carter. He and his party were haunted by one event for many years – the capture of US hostages in Tehran. Carter tried a military option to get them out and it failed. The hostages only came back home when Jimmy had been replaced by the greatest President the US has ever known, Ronald Reagan.
It is not hostages that Obama fears. For ISIS makes the mad mullahs of Iran seem like cappuccino sipping, Guardian reading liberal pussies. What Obama dreads
3905 days ago
The veteran Labour politician Tony Benn has this morning died aged 88. As is the case, even for Bob Crow, his family have my sympathies. So what to make of Wedgie? This may rather surprise you.
Anthony Wedgwood Benn was an aristocrat who renounced his seat in the Lords to fight for what he believed in from the House of Commons. And he certainly had strong beliefs. During the 70s and 80s as Energy Minister in the appalling Callaghan Government and then in opposition he tried to swerve the Labour party violently to the left and he almost succeeded. He did his part in making Labour utterly unelectable and thus gave the blessed Margaret a good stretch in office. For that he deserves our eternal gratitude.
My grandfather, Sir John Winnifrith, was a Bennite. After retiring from the Civil Service he was for the first time in his live, as head of the National Trust & War Graves Commission, able to speak his mind. And thus in the 1975 EU referendum campaign he found himself now and again speaking on the same platform as his hero. Their reasoning for opposing staying in the Evil Empire was that it was a construct to make rich farmers and industrialists richer at the expense, largely via food prices, of the working classes.
I am not sure that I follow their logic but at least I could agree with my Grandfather and Benn on one thing, the EU was a bad thing.
In his declining years Benn came to be seen as a bit of a National Treasure.
4053 days ago
I could not sleep last night and so turned to the “Good Book” for inspiration. I refer of course to “The Reagan Diaries” the journal kept by America’s greatest President during his two terms in office. And that made me think about Terry “Junk” Bond the chairman of financially challenged AIM Cesspit posterboy Vialogy (VIY) and his little Reagan lie.
4197 days ago
This week’s video postcard comes from Berlin. I was staying an hour outside the City for a wedding and today came into town. I spent a good couple of hours at the City’s Jewish Museum, more on that later. But the first point of call was Checkpoint Charlie.
The picture of what remains of Charlie is below. As you can see it is now a tourist mecca surrounded by all the symbols of Western capitalism at its trashiest.
4245 days ago
There will no doubt be wild celebrations in parts of Islington, Bristol and bastions of the Guardian reading Middle Classes tonight. After a long illness. Margaret Thatcher has died of a stroke today. This death will divide the nation.
I am watching the BBC’s coverage and it ignores her achievements totally. It is spiteful and worthless reporting. The left will blame her for all sorts of matters and will delight in her demise. Already I see tweets saying “the witch is dead.” Expect a torrent of tasteless and unpleasant comments and myth perpetuation over the coming days. Thatcher had that effect – she polarized opinion.
That the left hated her with such a passion was down to the fact that she delivered so much of what the left claims as its own ground. And so the left claims to represent “women” but Thatcher showed that a woman could rise to the top based on ability and without positive discrimination. The left claims to look after the poor. But whereas Milliband, Brown, Blair etc are all solidly working class, it is the Tories who have delivered the leaders from truly humble origins (Heath, Major and above all Thatcher).
The left keeps its client state poor. Thatcher gave opportunity to that client state to get a better life: to earn more based on work and ,merit by breaking Union power and abolishing collective bargaining; to own their own home via council house sales, to save more by cutting taxes. That was revolutionary and Britain needed a revolution because in 1979 after the Winter of Discontent, Margaret Thatcher took control of a country on its knees: bankrupt and with no sense of national pride. Thatcher faced opposition from a left determined to keep the poor poor and from patrician Tories who did not wish to upset the status quo. Bravely she drove through change in society by ensuring that the State did less not more.
She was not always right. In her early career it was she who did away with large numbers of grammar schools. I suspect she regretted that. She did not stand up to Mugabe in his early years when the mad old kook could have been stopped. Again, I sense that she regretted that. But on the big calls Maggie was right and that is why the Left cannot abide her.
All those Guardian readers celebrating today were, if my age or older, proudly wearing CND badges and trooping off to Greenham during the cold war. Folks like Tony Blair, Paddy Pantsdown and Baroness Ashton may pretend otherwise but the lefties were wrong about how to win the Cold War while Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Regan were right. Many of those same lefties would have caved into the Argies in 1982. Thatcher stood firm, although some of those around her wobbled. For her it was a matter of principle. Thatcher was right about the ERM and the Euro. She was branded an out of touch nationalist for her views but her views were based on pure economics and she was once again right. She was right. The deluded lefties were wrong. History is on squarely her side.
In parts of the North they say that they cannot forgive her for closing the coal mines and other State subsidised rust belt industries. But the same folk lambast today’s politicians for bailing out the banks. Thatcher understood that there is no such thing as the Government’s cash. There is money paid over by the taxpayer and that cash cannot be wasted. Subsidising an industry which just cannot make a profit, whatever the industry is waste. It is taking money from those who are creating wealth and paying it to others who are not. Whether the recipients are bankers or miners Thatcher understood that such an action was wrong.
Today’s conservatives do not dare cut Government spending or taxes or foreign aid because they are afraid of being confrontational. They have forgotten what principle means. Thatcher never forgot principle and based every decision about it.
Margaret Thatcher was without doubt the bravest politician of the 20th century. She was without doubt the most principled politician of our lifetime. She was a truly amazing woman. And she was right about almost everything.
To celebrate any death shows that you have no heart. We should pity those who celebrate the passing of Margaret Thatcher. This woman shaped the lives of a generation. She saved the UK from the bankruptcy and humiliation of the 1970s. She engineered a renaissance of Britain which all of her successors have done their best to dissipate.
Our greatest leader, Margaret Thatcher 1925-2013 RIP
4397 days ago
Okay I admit it, I tried to watch a bit of the Biased BBC coverage. Three minutes of Newsnight was enough for me. This organisation gets taxpayer’s money to offer balance. And so I sat through a discussion with a stuffed British shirt ( who turned out to be novelist Martin Amiss), a horrible hag from Newsweek in the US who made Amiss look like a neocon and some third rate Republican ex Governor who was occasionally allowed a word or two for “balance”.
The bon mot from Amiss was that Ronald Reagan would be rejected by today’s Republican Party for being far too left wing. Paxman looked bored and did not bother to challenge this obvious lie which was part of the night long deluded leftie luvvy agenda of portraying everyone in the GOP as racist, sexist, homophobes who want to shoot all poor people. And so for some balance he turned to the old hag from Newsweek
4404 days ago
I have to admit that I thought that Michael Heseltine was dead. But much to my surprise I discover that “Tarzan” is very much alive, heading up a task force established by Call Me Dave to work out how to kickstart the economy and getting it as wrong today as he has almost throughout his political career. I suppose that one should not speak ill of the brain dead but for Heseltine I can make an exception.
4407 days ago
Is this the last episode of Downton Abbey series three tonight? Maybe it is the penultimate one. But it is hard to see what shocks we could have left. After all it is 1920 so unless the IRA man takes time off from grieving to join the Irish Civil War or Lady Edith heads off to fight for Greece against Turkey it is hard to see what can go wrong. Bates is on his way out of prison. The ex prostitute is settling in well at the Crawley household. Predatory homosexual Thomas really must get his long awaited come uppance downstairs while simple but honest Mary the under-cook looks set to be handed the keys to a farm by the father of the man she married but did not love just before he died.
Non Downton lovers – in this show someone important has to die at least once a series. The pompous prig Matthew Crawley is trying to make himself more exciting by picking a fight with thicko Aristocrat the Earl of Grantham but he is failing. He and Lady Mary really need to emigrate.
In Dallas, the younger generation of John Ross, Chris, Elena and the mad wife of Chris are growing on me. News that Bobby/Patrick Duffy/The Man from Atlantis
4522 days ago
The reasons Obama deserves not to be re-elected are legion. Sadly he is running against Mitt Romney who offers no real hope for change (change – why does that ring a non liberty bell?) and so America’s worst President since Coolidge will probably get another term. Ongoing illegal wars, continuing suppression of civil liberties via the Patriot Act; a ballooning deficit, crackpot healthcare plans…do I need to go on? But hoisting hopey change by his own petard, we turn to the issue of jobs, or rather the lack of them.
As we all know, Obama has a grandiose 5 year plan to create jobs. So far the only jobs created are for beltway insiders and otherwise unemployable liberal arts graduates.
