Blessed Are The Poor

Lock up your daughters, wives, sisters, mothers and bi-curious male relatives too, because Sir MAX HASTINGS is here! Charterhouse School's most famous exponent of both sex and specs is here to lecture us into bed with his unique brand of arousing nostalgia.

Max Hastings is a man that not only took 17 gully catches for the Oxford Second XI in one season, but so far the only man on earth to have talked a woman into bed by quoting from a tediously morose book (his own) on the fall of Berlin. I reckon it's in that silky voice of his, and for any doubters out there, check this out:

Ooooh, spit on me Max!

This week Sir Hastings has elected to put the honeys on the back burner and tackle one of the great questions of our age. “If we are richer and healthier than ever, why are we so miserable?”

It's a good question, and Max decides to start off his column with a pop culture reference to bring the kids along on this socio-philosophical ramble. “'Whaddaya want if yer don't want money?' as Adam Faith famously sang” Right... Adam who? Clearly Max's music taste is suffering serious arrested development. But that's a cheap shot.

Pandering to the kids aside, he gets straight in at the deep end and hits us with the big stick of middle class hubris and the bludgeoning mace of middle class morality. “You may kid yourself that becoming Roman Abramovich would brighten up your day but in reality... by the time you have finished paying for bodyguards... (and) coping with bolshie Chelsea fans, you are no worse off living in a nice semi and worrying about whether or not the car will pass its MOT.”

That must be nice to know for everyone struggling to make ends meet. I'm sure everyone losing sleep over whether they'll be able to get to work next week if their car fails the MOT really appreciate this little pointer. And let's not forget those who can't even afford cars, who can't afford holidays or even basic school supplies for their children. I bet they feel really silly now they know that having Abramovich's billions wouldn't help them after all.

This is just the tip of the iceberg though. Max now asserts that this never-ending quest for money is to blame for... you guessed it: The terminal decline in the moral values of our society. Max rues the fact that “the nation is abandoning DIY, and prefers to pay Poles to wallpaper the lounge rather than make the job a bonding experience at weekends.” Now I'm not condoning the exploitation of eastern European workers to fulfil our own interior design fantasies, but such an idealised view of DIY can only come from a man who's never done any. After 45 hours a week of soul crushing admin. in an office where the blinds are always closed, who can blame you if you don't want to spend your weekend at the top of a step ladder being suffocated by sticky paper.

But Max isn't alone in his despair at the flashy spending of working people trying to enjoy their lives a bit more, no no! He is backed by righteous leigons of Daily Mail letter writers. Apparently this lot treat Max as some kind of guru, constantly asking him: "What can we do?", “how can any one family do things differently?”, “how do you, as a couple, stand out against the rest of the herd?”.

It's pretty simple isn't it? If you've got such a problem with the society you live in, do something about it. Stop blaming your problems on immigrants, young people, poor people, The BBC, American TV shows, “The liberal establishment”, The government, The EU, MRSA, Al-Qaida, the Archbishop of Canterbury, speed cameras or emo music, get off your arse and do something for yourself. Stop waiting for a moral crusader on a white horse to change things for you, no matter how well he wears his specs.

Read Max's Article Here

Also this week....

...Richard Littlejohn pretends to be an American TV reporter. He should know how that lot sound, he lives in Florida most of the year...

...Melanie Phillips lays into our overpaid MPs. Hold your breath, you might actually agree with her...

...Andrew Alexander claims we might need to legalise drugs at some point. You might agree with him too...

A Tale of Two Gits

Robert Mugabe (left) is a complex character. Once an intensely popular rebel leader and president, the man who's ruled Zimbabwe for over twenty years now looks doomed. What's caused this spectacular fall from grace is difficult to say. Is the man yet another victim of masculine hubris? Is he deluded into thinking he's on some kind of divine mission? Or is he just a desperate politician who's been making his last desperate stand for the past five years.

If you're looking for someone/thing to blame for the ongoing tragedy that is Zimbabwe, then look no further, as STEPHEN GLOVER and his jackbooted colleagues have the answer.

It's the “British Left” Stupid!

Steve gets straight to work this week claiming “Mr Mugabe had his fans on the Left of British politics even when his gallant 'freedom fighters' were raping nuns and killing civilians in the 'liberation war' of the 1970s.” It seems strange to me that when 280,000 white people subjugate six million black people there really isn't any need to put the phrase liberation in inverted comas, but then again you just can't tell those sub-editors at The Mail. And let's not forget the old raping nuns cliché. A timeless classic used to fire up the righteous indignation of the religious, gullible and slightly xenophobic since the dawn of time. Napoleon's regiments supposedly raped Spanish nuns during the Peninsular wars of 1804. The Zulus apparently raped nuns during British attempts to wipe them out in 1879. And obviously the vile Hun raped nuns in France and Belgium during the First World War.

There's never been any need to provide a shred of evidence for the charge of Nun rape, and naturally Steve doesn't. All you do need to do is conjure up an image of a slightly ruffled habit and then relax and watch the army recruitment offices fill.

Throughout Steve's article he portrays Rhodesia as a magical-happy land where the rains never failed and the rivers ran with lemonade. He even calls it “Africa's breadbasket”, just like every other lazy hack who can't be arsed to think up a nickname for themselves. He shows white settlers as a lovely bunch, always helping their black brothers and sisters and quite partial to breaking into songs from hit musicals.

In actual fact, when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, the government of Ian Smith (right) - butcher's son and uber-racist – refused bi-lateral independence from Britain because it meant they'd have to give all black citizens the vote. Steve also manages to gloss over the laws that set aside 50 per cent of cultivatable land for the whites, who never made up more than six per cent of the population. During the Liberation War during almost every male in white Rhodesia had done a tour of duty within the previous two yeas and anti-communist, anti-equality mercenaries poured in from the USA, South Africa and Portugal to name a few places. Anyone thought to be supporting the rebels was brutally repressed, with villages being burned to teach co-operators a lesson (that one worked a treat in Vietnam) and police firing into massed demonstrations.

You can argue that the liberation fighters, some under Mugabe's command and some not, committed atrocities of their own. It's pretty much indisputable but it's not the point. The left support liberation struggles, especially those on grounds of race, not because they're of unimpeachable integrity but because they're inevitable. Ian Smith's government could have killed three times as many people as it did, ten times even, but it would never have won. The black people of Zimbabwe wanted land, freedom and equality, and the intensity of a struggle for something this virtuous can never be matched by the desire to prop-up the ancient and crumbling edifice of privilege. And that makes it more of a shame to see Mugabe's Zanu-PF party become what it fought so hard to destroy - a powerful elite prepared to use any measures possible, including violence, to cling to its last shred of power . But it also shows Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) will eventually triumph and the people of Zimbabwe will have the kind of country they want, because they're prepared to risk their lives to get it.

It is Mugabe's insatiable love of power and pathological fear of losing that's brought Zimbabwe to the terrible juncture it now faces, not a bunch of white, middle-class lefties in Britain supporting a people's right to freedom and self-determination.

Bloody Steve...

Read Steve's Article Here

Also This Week...

...Amanda Platell socks it to Ken Livingstone for daring to try and repopulate the planet outside the strict laws laid down by our Australia God...

...Quentin Letts uses words like "glug" to try and hide the fact he's fresh out of ideas...

... Keith Waterhouse gets his medication mixed up and starts going on about the Blue Peter time capsule...