“There is a basic code from Finland to Portugal. Turkey has a different history. But this is not the largest obstacle. How much would it cost?”

Edward Stoiber, Bavarian Prime Minister and CDU leader, speaking of the 407 to 262 vote by the European Parliament to open EU entry talks with Turkey.

Turkey has won the sympathy vote.  It has won the geopolitical vote.  It has won the moral vote.  But cost conquers all.

Another summit, another   deal.  The Telegraph reports an EU diplomat lauding Mr Blair as the saviour of the summit, with the Dutch who hold the EU presidency.  “Blair played a phenomenal role … drafting the compromise text, saving the Turks from themselves.”

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What do liberals think about the family? I have recently read two commentaries on the changing family by liberal writers. Here is the start of one of these items, an editorial from the Melbourne Age newspaper:

“Until the 1960s, the script for family life was predictable, says David de Vaus, professor of sociology at La Trobe University. “The script was boy meets girl, fall in love, get married, set up house, woman stops work to have babies. Then he retires at 65 and one of them dies.” Since then, slowly but steadily, Australians have been tearing up the template.

“As Professor de Vaus documents in his statistical analysis Diversity and Change in Australian Families, the norms once imposed by one’s family, gender, class or ethnic group have largely fallen away. What remains, for better or worse, are individual choices.”

The editorialist is here taking a negative view of traditional family life, on the basis that it is “predictable”, based on a “template” or on imposed norms, and that it lacks individual choice.

Why take this view? The answer is that liberals believe, as a first principle, that to be fully human we must be self-created by our own will and reason. Therefore, a consistent liberal will think that our freedom as humans depends on choosing our own life patterns.

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I am grateful to John for this link to Charles Bremner’s Times article on the forthcoming hate speech Bill in France.  It ties in, of course, with David Blunkett’s decision to insert a clause protecting Muslim sensibilities into his Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill.  A high-class article in today’s Telegraph by Charles Moore argues against that injustice more eloquently than can I.

We do not lack compelling arguments against a religious hate speech law or, for once, compelling arguers.  To their credit, Liberal Democrat MPs and, it’s said, many Labour ones, too, are also disturbed by this attack on freedom.  I don’t suppose more than one in ten non-Muslims sees it as anything other than another unjust imposition on the real British peoples.  But that one in ten evidently includes our political and juridical elite as well as all the little bees who work so busily in the public and voluntary sectors to neuter us and make Britain safe for minorities.

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Yesterday Lord Leslie Scarman, retired Law Lord and cross-bench member of the House of Lords, died peacefully in his sleep.  He was 93.  No doubt his career was long, rich and varied.  But it is with one event, the Brixton Riots of April 1981, that his name will be forever linked.

In those days Brixton was the racio-political cockpit of Britain, as the Islamified towns of northern England are today.  Along Railton Road and on the Frontline/Mayall Road triangle, black council tenants and marginalised white squatters lived cheek by jowl.  But they cleaved to their own cultures.  The blacks, with their dope, their reggae, their patois impenetrable to white ears, predominated in every visible way.  The streets were always filled with activity.  Empty houses were taken over for drinking and gambling, and as dope dens and all-night party venues pumping out non-stop reggae.

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Possessing, as I do, a modest interest in the history of aviation warfare I frequently find myself checking the obits for another sad passing.  These days almost all of those astonishingly gallant young men who survived their tour of bombing sorties to Germany and occupied Europe are over eighty.  The obituaries, inevitably, are becoming rarer. 

Today, however, the Telegraph carried the obituary of one such man, David Jackson Penman,  OBE, DSO, DFC who died on November 27th at the age of 85.  The article concentrates largely on his part in the low-level, daylight raid on a diesil engine factory in Augsburg on April 17th, 1942.  Twelve aircraft, six Lancasters apiece from 44 and 97 Squadron, were sent to bomb the M.A.N factory, which made diesel engines for submarines.  Five returned, all damaged.  Militarily, nothing was achieved.  Production of the diesels was inconvenienced, no more.

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A spate of shockingly violent, fatal stabbings have brought home to London’s gentle middle-class the insecurity in which they live in the capital.

On 17th September 74 year-old Derek Robinson and his 60 year-old wife, Jean, were attacked by an intruder in the hallway of their home on a private estate in Highgate Hill.  They were found stabbed and with their throats cut.  One Daniel Gonzalez was arrested at Kings Cross and subsequently charged with other recent murders as well.

On 20th October Robert Symons, 45, of Airdale Avenue, Chiswick, was killed with a single stab wound to the heart after a struggle with an intruder in his home.  Yousef Bouhaddaou, 26, has been charged with murder.  Four others have been arrested in connection with the incident.  Mr Symons, a teacher, left a wife and two daughters aged 2 and 5.

Then last Monday 29th November John Monckton and his wife Homeyra were savagely attacked by two youths who had burst through their front door.  Mr Monckton died of stab wounds.  His wife was critically injured and police are still waiting to speak to her in hospital.  Mr Monckton had two daughters, aged 9 and 12.  The younger, Isabel, was in the house at the time of the attack.

One of the attackers was black.  The other is described as “light-skinned”.  His ethnic background is unknown.

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Keith Windschuttle is at it again. Not content to be merely the bad boy of Australian frontier history, this time he is going to earn the ire of Australia’s multiculturalists by defending the legacy of the White Australia Policy (WAP).

Speaking of immigration restrictions, I have found the work of two US libertarian theorists Hans Herman Hoppe (see here and here) and Murray Rothbard (see here) quite illuminating here, even if their libertarian theory seems a bit pie-in-the-sky at the moment. Still it does provide some useful thought experiments.

It seems to me that the rival ideas here reflect essentially two views of human nature and political community. On one side are the ‘universalists’ who acknowledge no legitimate human political entity other than the individual or ‘humanity’ and on the other side are the ‘tribalists’ who see as innate the human desire to club together into distinct (but usually dynamically evolving) intermediate associations. Some tribalists may praise these associations (“tribal idealists”) others merely warn that they are ignored at one’s peril (“tribal realists”).

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The following is a spoof commendation of ... polygamy, what else?  I sent it to the EU Commission house organ, Commission en Direct, for reasons which will become apparent.  It appeared in the 9th November issue.  Amazingly, there are journalists at the FT who also have nothing better to do than leaf through Commission en Direct.  One of them took it upon his or, just possibly, herself to have some harmless fun at the Commission’s expense.  Or maybe polygamy is just bigger than I thought.  The full text of my missive follows.

One of our colleagues has recently proposed setting up a non-official ‘Singles Group’ in the European institutions. Alas, her project is unlikely to be successful.

The reason is as clear as daylight. There are approximately nine single women to every single man employed by the European institutions. In our august working environment, single women are as ‘thick as the autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa’. A singles’ group would therefore largely consist of unmarried and divorced females pushing 40 and 50, with the occasional predatory, sociopathic or gold-digging male just to add variety. For as the old adage goes, a single woman over thirty is more likely to be hit by a terrorist’s bullet and simultaneously struck by lightning than to win the heart of an unmarried male who is non-psychotic, over four foot tall and in full-time employment. Men? The great Charles Thomson, founder of the anti-anti-art movement known as ‘stuckism’, perhaps put it best: “A Single Woman … is never more than six inches away from the nearest Rat’.

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