Retailers fail to talk-up Christmas 'must-have'

It was a brave effort by toy retailers last week to persuade the public that what every family needed this Christmas was a Chinese-made robotic hamster. A few newspapers, desperate for the seasonal advertising, obediently did their best to talk-up the market, but the British public hasn't bitten.

Those containers from Chinese ports that should now be crammed full of Christmas goods remain stubbornly empty. The Harpex briefly dipped to a new low last week. The prospects of a March election look more likely than they did a few weeks ago when Brown was claiming his action had ended the recession in the UK.

Hey ho.

In praise of immigration

I wholly support the immigration of skilled, qualified and economically productive persons of prime working age and of whatever ethnic origin into the UK; they increase per capita GDP, they pay for their own housing, and in many cases for their own healthcare, they don't drain resources from the criminal justice system, and one of the great delights of London is the cosmopolitan mix of French, north American, antipodean and other advanced cultures that enrich and enliven our capital. Intelligent, imbued with the virtues of the middle class, fluent in English and respectful of our culture, they are welcome.

What utterly escapes me is the reason Labour has opened the doors of our nation to so many of the other kind; the lazy, the thieves, the sick, the dependent, the criminal, the homeless, the illiterate who depend wholly on out taxes for food, housing, healthcare and education, who compete directly with our own feckless underclass for menial and unskilled work, who decrease per capita GDP, who crowd-out the underclass from social housing, who fill the maternity wards and who to a large extent hate us and our culture.

It's a no-brainer, isn't it?

So I'm against immigration quotas - why damage ourselves? But I'm 100% for shutting the door to any immigrant who can't maintain themselves and their family and make a positive contribution to per capita GDP. And 100% for combing-out all those still clinging to our purses and wallets and bidding them adieu.

So what's the issue, Gordon?

Let's hope this inappropriate letter writing will cease

There should be only two sources of 'official' condolence letter received by the next of kin of those fallen in battle; a short, formal letter signed by the Sovereign and a longer hand-written letter from the man's platoon or company commander or c/o. Neither will ever be held accountable by next of kin for the particular circumstances of the death.

I'm not sure when this fad for politicians writing letters started, but let's hope it stops. All politicians are liars, many are venal and corrupt, many are incompetent. Not a class of person from whom a grieving widow or mother would welcome a communication. Add to that an entire government and opposition front bench without a campaign ribbon between them.

Brown's savaging at the hands of Mrs Janes may strike many as unfair, but it arose from his own hubris and vanity in penning the damn thing in the first place. Let's hope this inappropriate letter writing ceases.

Cameron's 'Big Society' needs local ties

Though Cameron has grasped the germ of the idea that central Statism is an unequivocal evil for this nation and its people, he is resisting any real commitment to Localism. Dave's vision seems to be a sort of State Lite; individual volunteers with vertical ties to a smaller State taking the place of Socialist functionaries. Ministers will still hold budgets for local functions and direct policy, albeit through leaner and meaner mechanisms.

Cameron's National Volunteer Corps, as outlined in a major interview with the Guardian, demonstrates that he still doesn't trust people to manage their own lives and communities. Yes, there is a volunteering gap - in areas in which volunteering is part of the central State's agenda. There is no shortage of volunteers in areas prioritised by people themselves. Individuals will engage easily enough when they feel they have a real measure of control, and this means devolving tax raising and spending decisions to local level.

The radical change that's needed is not another variety of vertical tie, but the freedom for local, horizontal ties to form and bind. For a member of the political class, which is what Dave undoubtedly is, giving away any measure of power whatsoever is like having a tooth wrenched out. They hate it. Cameron has also grown up in a party structure ruthlessly centralised under Thatcher - and has shown recently a tenacious opposition to allowing his local associations any real autonomy.

Within a few weeks, the days will start to lengthen again and one hopes the increased light will start to illuminate the detail of Cameron's manifesto as we crawl closer to May. I haven't given up on him yet - he may still astonish us with an act of real vision and leadership - but he'll need to do a great deal better than this sort of dishwater 'keynote' speech.

Good Oh! Technology for a Fortress Britain

It's not often that the Comrades cheer me up, but this announcement from Leeds Polytechnic Metropolitan University has done so;

The Copenhagen conference is rich in the number of technical issues covered including migration. However, what is less explored is how states will respond if told they could be facing over a billion people being forced to migrate if the world’s temperature rises by more than three degrees.

This workshop will, therefore, examine how the current revolution in military affairs has financed a new generation of weapons and control technologies in the "war against terror," and how these will become rapidly reoriented toward area denial and for border exclusion purposes.

Good Oh!

Global amnesia; let's forget derivatives

In a globally collective mass act of amnesia, we have all decided to ignore the fact that somewhere out there are $1,500 trillion of derivatives, constructed from our global GDP of just $55 trillion. We can't afford to write them off, we can't easily deflate them and our governments refuse to divorce themselves from the casino banks that own them. So what the heck, we say, let's just blow up that bubble a bit more - what's to lose?

So the world's banks suck up the billions that governments are pumping into the system and hold onto them as they repair the slight tears in their balloon balance sheets, fire the gas and gain a little altitude, with bumper bonuses for all.

Except I think it's far from over. That derivatives balloon will burst before it deflates away harmlessly.

And your share of the debt won't be the comfy £4,000 each that the press quote all the time. £4k is a very reassuring figure for most people. "I can take a £4k hit" we say; "it's not that much."

No, your share of the balloon burst will be around 27 times your annual income if those derivatives prove completely worthless; if they are only 20% over valued, your share will be around five and a half times your annual income. A long way from that comfy £4k, anyway.

Ok, so let's all put our fingers in our ears and all together ... "la la la ..."

Labour fatally compromised our national security

The Times carries a lengthy piece this morning on how, as Labour so easily shed the blood of our young men in Afghanistan 'to protect the UK from terrorism', they were bending over backwards to encourage as many Pakistani terrorists as possible to emigrate here. And by abolishing exit controls, deliberately lost all track of all those Jihadists from Bradford and Luton who travelled to the tribal areas to train in bombs and terror.

The 'chain of terror' that Gordon Brown draws between Afghanistan and the streets of Britain links Al Queda directly with the Labour Party. For dross, for sleazy electoral gain, for gerrymandering and political corruption, the Labour Party have fatally compromised our national security. God rot their souls.

At least we're spared the sickening stench of Blair at the Cenotaph

If there was any greater blasphemy of Blair's misrule, it was his nauseous presence at the annual ceremony at the Cenotaph. His patently contrived facial set, as false and dishonest as all else about him, used to rouse a wholly inappropriate ire in me at a moment of national remembrance. His betrayal of our nation and of our army have earned him ignominy and disgrace even in death; if his perfumed corpse is dug from the grave and flung into the common sewer-pit it will be no less than he deserves. Like one of Graves' despoilers

The white hem of a winding sheet
Draws slowly upward from her feet;
Soon it will mount knee-high, then to the thigh.
It crackles like the parchment of the treaties,
Bonds, contracts and conveyances,
With which, beggared and faint and like to die,
You signed away your island sovereignty
To rogues who learned their primer at your knees

Instead, today we will have Brown, as dead as any Zombie, pale and phosphorescent with the corpse-pallor, stiff and mechanical as he clutches a wreath that surely stains his wrist scarlet to the cuff, a stain beyond all great Neptune's ocean's ability to wash.