How Britain Disgraced Herself When Princess Diana Died

Mexico is six hours behind the UK and pretty much exactly twenty years ago to this very minute I was sitting at a table outside a Veracruz coffee shop drinking cafe con leche and preparing to drive the 300 miles home to Mexico City. My wife bought a copy of el Dictamen, the local newspaper from one of the urchins who hawk in on the street, and the only child I had at the time was three years old and tucking into a plate of chips which he had liberally sprinkled with sugar. I suspect the wife bought the paper to avoid having to watch him munch sugared chips. 

I remember that I had just lit a cigarette when the wife told me that Princess Diana was dead. I grabbed the paper and there was the news agency report, from AP if memory serves me right, reprinted seemingly verbatim in the paper on one of the inside pages. It was an important story, but not so important that el Dictamen felt the need to rejig the front page. Much easier, you can almost hear the editor thinking, to drop something from the foreign news section and then slot the Diana story in to save everyone a lot of trouble.

We drove home and the following day I switched on the TV and tuned into what is today called BBC World, but which back then was the far better sounding BBC World Service Television. Why did I not drive like a bat out of Hell to get home quickly to get the latest updates? For the simple reason that I did not regard it as a very important story. Diana was the ex-wife of the Prince of Wales and had no constitutional role to play in British affairs. Her death was sad for her family, but no concern of the people at large, at least that was my view.

How wrong I was! Over the next few days, I was stunned to see on my TV screen the way in which the people of Britain seemed to be turning the death of that not very bright youngish woman into a Mexican-style soap opera, complete with emoting and lots of wailing.

It must have been worse for the people in London as a friend who lives in Putney reported that the heavy, pungent odour of millions of flowers hung over the city as people seemed to be competing with one another to show how much they cared about a woman that they had never met and never would have done even had she lived.

In those days the British embassy had a club for British and Commonwealth people and the next time I was in there the conversation was dominated by the way in which British people were letting the side down by behaving like a bunch of hysterical natives. 

I do not recall many people from the British diaspora in Mexico going along to the embassy to sign the book of condolences that someone decided had better be put out eventually. Three years later when HM Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother died we all dutifully trooped along to put our signatures down in the book and then went to a bar to raise a loyal toast to her memory, but Diana? I am sorry, but who cared, really?

It is hard to say why the nation decided to go in for such an embarrassing display of national breast-beating, but it did and as someone remarked to me that is what mob-hysteria looks like and it isn't a pretty sight.

Let us hope that we never see it again.

EU Free Movement for the British Is a Federast Fantasy

The EU referendum was well over a year ago and still the defeated Federasts trot out the same pathetic whines as they did the day after their defeat. Time for the gloating Brexiteers to give the same answers as we always have, so let's start with one of the biggest and most entertaining whines, which is the one that says that by voting to leave the EU the Brexiteers have somehow deprived the poor ickle snowflakes of their chance to work abroad.

Speaking as someone who is now over sixty and who has managed to spend more than a third of those sixty-odd years abroad, I can say quite clearly that the EU does not help British people to move in any way shape or form. Quite the reverse, in fact, since most of the countries that make it up are either very poor or have a rentier system that prevents British people from taking advantage of the mythical freedom of movement.

It is unlikely that any British person would want to chance his arm in Poland, as the economy can't provide jobs for its own people, hence the numbers of Poles who have blessed Great Britain with their presence over the past couple of decades. Besides, the rentier nature of the economy means that what jobs there are available are handed out on the basis of knowing someone with the political or economic clout needed to slot a candidate into a cushy number.

Even in Germany, a country that cannot be called rentier, regulations ensure that the tasty jobs go to German nationals. For instance, a friend of mine is married to a Chinese woman who practised traditional medicine in China, having graduated in that from a Chinese university.  When that couple lived in Germany, the wife was not allowed to practice her craft because German laws have it that she had to obtain a degree in it from a German university. Here in Britain, by way of contrast, all she had to do was rent a shop and then open it for business.

This is why British people tend to avoid the EU countries, apart from Spain where the elderly go to die and look to the rest of the world, 'cos that's where the tasty numbers are to be found.

A good drinking mate of mine was deputy director of maintenance at Veracruz port. He had left school at the age of 15 to join the Royal Navy back in the 1950s. The skills he acquired stood him in good stead when he left the navy as he ended up working in West Africa and the Arabian Gulf, before fetching up in Mexico.

Obviously, the port's director was a Mexican and equally obviously he was a political appointee who knew little about the work and cared even less, but  my mate was on hand to ensure that the port ran smoothly in return for a whacking great reward that included two first class flights back to the UK every year.

If you are like me and find changing the oil in your car's engine difficult enough then a decent degree from a decent, Russell Group university should see you right. Often you will find that wealthy third worlders quite like having British people on their staff, not to do very much work - perish the thought - but so that they can boast to their cronies that they have an Oxford man or Edinburgh woman at their beck and call. Not that there is much becking or calling since you are there for prestige reasons, but I am sure that you get my drift.

Now then, given that none of this is exactly new information, why are the Federasts using Britain's withdrawal from the EU as an excuse to whinge about how it will mean that they cannot get an easy life abroad?

The answer could very well turn out to be that your average whining Federast is really nothing more than some bovine loser with a pathetic little poly degree and a puerile desire for status who really believes that one day he will leave his local-government non-job behind and wangle himself a top of the range number in the EU. As if even a third world place like Romania would take such people seriously...

In other words, they are like the bloke who plays for a Sunday League team and who tells everyone that one day he is going to turn out for Manchester United. Just as people smile at the Sunday player in the pub, so we should smile at the Federast who believes that any other country anywhere in the world is going to treat him with anything other than derision.

Why The Brexiteers Should Love Gina Miller

I have a confession to make - I quite like Gina Miller! I know that she is the South-American trophy wife of a multi-millionaire, but she has done more for the Brexit cause than most and when the histories of these times are finally written, Gina, Bob, Eddie and the Guardian's bedwetting finest below the line commentators will all receive their due rewards as the facilitators of Brexit.

In the case of the still just about beddable Gina, I like to think that soon after we finally leave the European Union, Nigel Farage will call a press conference in the garden of his favourite pub. There he will sit, with a pint at his elbow, a tab in his right hand, and Gina Miller sat on his left knee. He will hold her steady with his arm around her waist as he bounces her up and down to make her go all giggly, and then she will confess that actually she was working for us all along.

Think about it, her supposed aim was to subvert the democratic referendum result via tame judges and a subservient Parliament.  However, do you really think that the British people would have sat idly by and allowed that to happen? On the surface, Gina Miller is everything that the average Brexieer hates, so she just had to be a double agent, put forward to subvert the Federast cause.

The sheer anger that this woman created in British hearts ensured that Parliament did not do as she supposedly wished, which is why we are now heading for the exit at full throttle. Just consider what might have happened had a more credible, user-friendly Federast come forward to fight that case, instead of Gina Miller. The coup might very well have succeeded.

Before the vote we were helped immeasurably by Eddie Izzard and Bob Geldof, to name but two. Izzard likes to present himself as the metrosexual voice of the new generation, but to most British people he is just a weird bloke who wears women's clothes. As for Geldof, he is the millionaire scruff who could afford to hire a floating gin palace to mock hard-working British fishermen who want the waters around our country back under national control.

Surely those two had to be working for Brexit all along? I mean, who could believe that ordinary people would not be anything other than revolted by their personalities and their antics?

Finally, we have the hysteria that only the Guardian's diminishing gang of below the line commentators can produce. Let me give you just one example from October 2016 when the Guardian's finest decided to launch a hatefest against the City of Sunderland. The gist of it was that Mackems are thick, wickedly waycist and deserve to be unemployed forever.

 

In the unlikely event that the Federasts did manage to wangle another referendum, do they really think that we will not turn it into a vote about them, by reporting all their comments over the months since June 2016? They give the impression that they don't realise just how much contempt we have for them and how great is our determination to ensure that we will see Brexit through. We will not allow the Metropolitan wankerati to win the final victory, no matter what the cost.

So, are all those people secret agents for Brexit? It is incredible to think that thousands of Guardian commentators could be mobilised to pretend that they are all bovine members of the polyocracy who are afraid that once we get rid of the Brussels' bureaucracy their local government non-jobs may be next to come under our baleful gaze.

The problem is that if Gina, Bob, Eddie and the Guardianistas really are genuine, card-carrying Federasts then they are so utterly thick that they honestly do not realise just how much their antics help the cause that they want to destroy.