British pseudo-universities plumb new depths

Five British techs universities have announced that they are "pulling out" of programmes financed by the Libyan government, in a classic example of the British penchant for making a dishonest virtue of necessity. 

Manchester Metropolitan, Teesside, Liverpool John Moore, Glamorgan and Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh announced they had ditched the deal with Libya to train 300 health workers each year in the wake of bloody clashes in the North African nation. Liverpool John Moore University also said that it had severed a deal to advise Libya's National Economic Development Board on improving business education in the country, apart from pulling out of a proposed pact to train health workers.

They weren't going to be getting the money anyway, and the courses they are "pulling out of" served useful humanitarian and developmental purposes. Even though they are only following in the slimy footsteps of the Boy Wonder and The Hagueon, it still sets a new benchmark for opportunistic cowardice disguised as moral principle.

Sayeeda Warsi: watch your back

If, as I do, you consider courage the foremost human virtue, then the young Muslim peer deserves to be cut some slack for her youth, inexperience and the ineptitude of her staff.

She is the product of aspirant and successful Pakistani immigrants, and as such - despite her electoral failures - her elevation to the House of Lords is a rare argument in favour of having an appointed upper chamber. 

Cranmer's post today is a balanced and helpful compendium of Warsi's public career - one that I am glad to have in the wake of the shellacking she got for arguing that the term "Muslim extremists" should be reduced to "extremists" to avoid the word association.

That was so stupid that it could only have been made at the urging of Team Cameron, obsessed as always with not being the "nasty party" that tells the truth. She owes Cameron big time, so maybe she deserves a pass on that one.

Other than that she has told it like it is about the disgusting customs brought into Britain by the more primitive Muslim immigrants, as enabled by the grotesque ideology of the multiculturalism. Which, of course, makes her a hate figure to the Bitchy Boys Club: a heterosexual woman (ugh); the daughter of a successful capitalist (boo); an integrationist (hiss) and an attractive Tory (vapours). 

But the multiculties dare not attack her too openly, so they will invite her to join discussion groups where they hope to discredit her and will subvert her with innuendo. It's what they do and - here as elsewhere - they will continue to create a climate where some stupid Islamist shit will try to follow through on the death threats against her.

She asks, "Why go into politics if you are not going to be brave?" We await a reply from her patron.

Mervyn King - the sage of Threadneedle Street

Sage, as in the sage and onion stuffing in the greasy turkey of the British economy. Thus his interview in the Telegraph:

The more I’ve thought about how labour markets work, the more I’ve realised that there are hardly any jobs whose tasks you can describe exactly. Nowadays, most jobs have the property that employees can choose to do them well or badly, so employers need to think about the long-term welfare of the staff not just pay today.

Dear God. He had to have a deep think to come up with that? "British management" has been an oxymoron during my lifetime, and that King should only just have achieved this blinding glimpse of the obvious, a mere 20 years after being hired as the chief economist of the Bank of England, is profoundly dispiriting.

It seems the Queen asked him, "If these things were so big, why did no one see them coming?" King says he replied:

Everyone did see it coming but no one knew when. It’s like an earthquake zone. You should be trying to build buildings in ways which are more robust. . . . I wish I’d spoken out more forcefully about the build-up of leverage.

Do I need to underline how pathetic that reply is from the Governor of the Bank of England? So he saw it coming but didn't have the guts to make public what "everyone" knew and which it was his duty to denounce. "I wish" is a chicken-shit expression of regret for having failed absolutely to do what he could to avert the calamity.

Boy Wonder posturing on Libya

Sigh. Cameron claims to have taken the lead in imposing a "no-fly zone" over Libya. Which is to say persuading the Americans, who have the capability, to impose it while the Euro-weenies sit back and carp as usual. 

Like all his circle, he lacks the personality and experience to impose himself on officials, so he is simply toeing the Foreign Office line; which is to seem to do something while the EU is "considering holding a special summit on Libya". Oooh! That must have Muammar trembling in his slippers!

But let's suppose for a moment there were actually some substance - some willingness to act rather than strike poses - behind the policy advocated by the Boy Wonder. The rebels in Libya have some substantial air assets of their own and Khaddafi's pilots have been defecting rather than bomb their own people. So a no-fly zone might actually benefit the dictator.

British politicians and officials have a sickening record in the matter of interfering in other people's civil wars. From craven non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War to Britain's "Unfinest Hour", the contemptible reprise of the same policy in Bosnia, whatever the Foreign Office proposes in these matters can be guaranteed to show perfide Albion at its worst.

In Memoriam: WPC Yvonne Fletcher

More brown-nosing - Alex Singleton

Order of the KCOC-S to yet another Telegraph journopuke! 

Just as many Tories were becoming fed up with Cameron, our PM has done three things that should put smiles on their faces.

"Our PM" - yeah, right. The Heir of Blair continues to believe that it's all a matter of PR - which is, after all, the only life experience he brought into politics. As commented previously (here and here) the Cameronian washing machine is in full spin cycle.

The problem (please excuse the mixed metaphor) is that he threw out the baby long ago, and after the bath-water is spun away there will be nothing left.

Grandmother Courage

This is 71 year-old Ann Timson, who last week attacked six sledgehammer-equipped young men bent on robbing a jewelry store in Northampton and has become an international heroine.

I am genuinely astonished that she has not been arrested for her unprovoked assault on the thugs - not to mention showing up the police and shaming every man in sight. 

The Express reports that she is flying to New York, first class, to appear on the "Today" show. Why has she not been invited to appear on British TV? Oh dear, we wouldn't want to encourage this sort of thing, would we?

It seems she has form and was the mainstay of a highly successful "take back our neighbourhood" campaign that cleaned up the once-notorious Spring Boroughs estate.

And guess what? As a reward for having worked so hard for her community, the local Labour party rejected her as a council candidate in favour of an outsider.

Bill Clinton sometimes glimpsed the truth

When people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right

William Jefferson Blythe III aka Clinton, following Republican gains in the 2002 Congressional elections

For "strong" read "decisive" and that is an accurate assessment of what electorates want - and are not getting from The One in the States, or The Boy Wonder in Britain.

Cameron and Obsborne have blown it

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3

So also are nations sometimes offered a golden opportunity to change course. There was one such moment in 1979, when the bankruptcy of tax, borrow and spend had become apparent to all except the Labour party's suborned tribal voters. As we know, that opportunity was seized by a principled woman in the teeth of opposition from the Heathite castrati of her party and for a few decades Britain ceased to be the sick man of Europe and an international laughing stock.

Another came last year, but the capons who now run the Conservative party have not merely let the opportunity slip - they have thrown it away quite deliberately. Today's editorial in Critical Reaction states what has been obvious to me since before the last general election: Cameron is the new Heath, and thanks to his moral cowardice and unfitness for high office we will get the Labour pukes back in a few years time to complete the destruction of the nation.

Whatever a screaming 0.5% contraction in the economy might be due to, it hasn’t been as a result of George Osborne’s slash n’ burn - for he hasn’t. He claimed in opposition massively stringent measures would be needed, but the self-styled ‘political’ politician neglected to start making these genuinely hard choices last May, his one true moment to do so.

While it’s characteristic of Tory modernisers to announce what their tactics are as they engage in them, it’s also equally characteristic that these tactics don’t work. If the public are going to believe in cuts – if ever they actually happen – they have above all else to believe that the government believes in them. They are never going to do so for as long as a spin-obsessed Prime Minister and Chancellor think that it is smart politics to run away from ‘little, noisy fights’. Those are precisely the fights where the government needed to stand its ground if ever it was going to convince the electorate of its wider sincerity.

Public sector borrowing is greater than Brown’s at his most expansive, with November’s figures being the worst ever in British history. Ed Balls’ secret weapon in making the case against ‘Tory cuts’ is not the cuts themselves, but the fact that Cameron and Osborne haven’t had the courage to make them. That case is even harder to make now, and we can have even less confidence that this pair will make it.