Normal people reckon it all comes down to immigration. Will we have more Syrians if we stay in the EU than if we leave? And no one knows the answer to that one either. Or whether it’s a good thing ultimately. Or whether it’s just a phase the world’s going through and it’ll all be over when Putin stops bombing Homs.
What we think we know is that if Britain chooses to leave, the Scottish will say, ‘Och aye the noo,’ and refuse to come with us. Which would mean immigrants could catch a boat to Edinburgh and then simply walk into England. Which would mean we’d have to rebuild Hadrian’s Wall. Or would we? Again, I’m not sure.
I suppose that now is as good a time as any to declare my hand. I’m with the man whose wife we fancy. I’m in.
When Mr Cameron was touring Europe recently, seeking a better deal for Britain by sucking up to prime ministers from such places as Romania and Hungary, I watched on YouTube an MEP called Daniel Hannan make an anti-EU speech to a group of, I think, students. It was brilliant. One of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. And I’ll admit it made me question my beliefs. But despite his clever, reasoned and passionate plea for us to leave Europe, I’m still in. He talked sense, but a lot of this debate is about how we feel.
Back in 1973, my parents held a Common Market party. They’d lived through the war and, for them, it seemed like a good idea to form closer ties with our endlessly troublesome neighbours. For me, however, it was a chance to make flags out of coloured felt and eat exotic foods like sausage and pasta. I felt very European that night, and I still do.
Whether I’m sitting on a railway concourse in Brussels or pottering down the canals of south-western France or hurtling along a motorway in Croatia, I feel way more at home than I do when I’m trying to get something to eat in Dallas or Sacramento. I love Europe and, to me, that’s important.
But I’m the first to acknowledge that, so far, the EU hasn’t really worked. We still don’t have standardized plug sockets and every member state is still out for itself, not the common good. And this is the sort of thing that causes many people to think, ‘Well let’s just leave and look after ourselves in future.’
I get that. I really do. And after I’d watched Hannan’s speech, it’s briefly how I felt too. But actually, isn’t it better to stay in and try to make the damn thing work properly? To create a United States of Europe that functions as well as the United States of America. With one army and one currency and one unifying set of values.
Britain, on its own, has very little influence on the world stage. I think we are all agreed on that. But Europe, if it were well run and had cohesive, well-thought-out policies, would be a tremendous force for good. I think we are all agreed on that as well. So how do we turn Europe from the shambles it is now into the beacon of civilization that it could be in the future?
Well, the answer, I think, lies with the press. Today, in Britain, an MP cannot even put a cup of coffee on expenses without being torn to pieces by the media. A duck house will get him the sack. He can’t look at a pretty girl or pick his nose, and woe betide any of them who say something which is slightly at odds with what they’ve said before. Or what the leader is thinking.
British MPs work and play in the glare of powerful follow spots. They are monitored constantly by the newspapers … the same newspapers who tell us that these people are powerless because these days all the major decisions are made in Brussels.
Right. So let’s switch our attention then. Let’s leave the ‘parish councillors’ alone and concentrate our big guns on the real decision-makers in Brussels. Let’s have hacks outside their houses all day long, waiting for one of them to do or say something wrong. Let’s make them accountable. Let’s turn them from ‘faceless bureaucrats’ into household names.
That is the biggest problem with the EU right now. Nobody is really concentrating on its leaders. Nobody is saying, ‘Hang on a minute …’ And this means they are running amok.
It’s why we need to stay in. So our famously attentive media can try to stop them. To make them pause before they move. To make the continent work the way the continent should, as a liberal, kind, balanced fulcrum in a mad world that could soon have Trump on one side and Putin on the other.
13 March 2016
Sober Syrians we should let in; boozy Brits are too shaming to be let out
If you listen to the bleeding-heart liberals with their Baftas and their Islington postcodes, then every single one of the Syrian people currently stuck at the Macedonian border or holed up at that camp in Calais is a decent, hard-working soul who wants to come to England to start a nail salon.
Whereas if you listen to the UKIP types with their red trousers and their usual spot at the bar, then they’re all terrorists and ne’er-do-wells who want to come to Britain so they can pick our pockets and burgle our houses while gorging on our healthcare system.
The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. Some of the people queuing up to come to England want to explode in a shopping centre as soon as possible and some want to steal your wallet. But some are living under a tarpaulin sheet, in a field of mud, in the cold, because they grew weary of waking up every morning wondering whether they’d be blown to smithereens by a Russian bomb that day or be beheaded by a lunatic. To these people, even Rotherham looks like heaven on earth.
Not that long ago I was actually in Raqqa and Homs, the hellhole cities that vie for coverage every day with Kim Kardashian’s bottom. I had a nice time there. I met lots of people who were kind and funny. They gave me tea in their shops and asked if Captain Slow – James May – was as hopeless in real life as he appeared to be on television.
It troubles me that many of these people will now be dead. And it troubles me even more that some of them are in that French dump, with their children, trying to get into Britain.
I don’t have a Bafta and I don’t live in Islington, so I’m not daft. I’m not going to sit here now and say, with a tear in one eye and a bit of a sniffle, that we should open the Channel Tunnel immediately because I know that’s impractical. Britain is a small island and while only 2 per cent of the land mass here is actually built up – that’s a fact, by the way – we simply don’t have the houses for a million newcomers or the money to keep them fed, watered and healthy.
Which brings me neatly to the poolside bar of the hotel in Morocco where I was staying last week. It was horrible. The hotel itself was a giant concrete maze painted brown to make it look like an ancient fort. The pool was ringed with palm trees to make it feel like an oasis. And the people around it were the sort who were completely taken in.
They’d come away, in March, to spend a few days getting diarrhoea simply so they could go home with a red nose that would cause people at the lodge to say, ‘Have you seen Brian’s tan? His laundrette must be doing pretty well.’
At night I was cornered in the bar by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic and Dr Scholl’s sandals and last Tuesday’s Daily Express who droned on and on about how Nigel Farage should be running the country and how many languages Enoch Powell could speak … and then he wandered off to get some more Watneys Red Barrel and another packet of cheese-and-onion crisps and I was left thinking, ‘Monty Python was way ahead of the game on this.’
But instead of a party of Germans forming pyramids and frightening the children there was a group from – and I’m saying this because it’s true – Liverpool. They had shaved heads, gym-toned bodies and voices that could crack glass on the International Space Station.
They called the waiters Mustapha and drank a seemingly endless amount of cognac and Coke. This is a drink with which I’m unfamiliar. And I hope it stays that way because it seems the more you ingest, the stupider you become. After four, one of the party said that the Gestapo were like Heinrich Himmler’s Special Forces. He knew this, apparently, because he’d watched a television programme.
Their views on the employment laws of Britain were interesting too, since they seemed to think they were slaves. And that upo
n their return to Liverpool they would definitely be sacked.
Then they all jumped in the pool and made a lot of noise, which caused all the Brians and the Freemasons to peer over their Harold Robbins books and look displeased. And the waiters to scurry away for fear that they’d be used as a volleyball in the very near future.
And all of this got me thinking. These people are English. They have British passports. And it is their way of life that we are trying to preserve when we say no to the Syrian refugees.
But answer me this: who would you rather have living next door? This lot? Or a teetotal family from Homs who have fled from Vladimir Putin’s jets and Jihadi John’s knife so they can have a quiet life in the shires?
We keep talking about the citizenship test, to make sure that newcomers know the name of the national anthem and how to hold a knife and fork properly before they are given a British passport. And yet we hand them out without so much as a by-your-leave to morons who have less intelligence than the average dishwasher. Simply because they were squeezed from between their mothers’ phlebitis-ridden thighs in Britain.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that we introduce a one-in-one-out policy that would mean ejecting one undesirable for every Syrian who’s allowed in (although, deep down …), but I do think we could adopt some kind of halfway house that prevents Britain’s most unpleasant souls from travelling abroad.
The fact is: we need to be careful of our image. And I’d far rather be represented on the world stage, and around its swimming pools, by someone who had the gumption to up sticks and walk across Europe with his children to find a better life than a yobbo in a football shirt who mixes cognac with Coca-Cola and thinks he’s a slave just because he has a job.
20 March 2016
Shave off the beards, hipsters. Or prepare for a long wait at Gatwick
When the IRA used to run about the place, sportingly giving a brief warning before detonating a bomb, we never dignified its activities by calling the Troubles a war: the group’s members were always referred to as common criminals. And we never used to let it interfere with our lives either. The IRA would blow something up and the next day we’d go to work as usual.
Today the Blitz spirit seems to have gone. We talk about the ‘war on terror’, which means we think of the ISIS fanatics as warriors rather than tragic, drug-addled losers who treat the world as one big Call of Duty game. And while we all say, after every atrocity, that we will not allow these people to interfere with our everyday lives, we then proceed to do the exact opposite.
After the Brussels attacks last week, security was immediately stepped up at airports and train stations all over the world. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said travellers must expect extra delays as they head off for their Easter holidays, and in Argentina Barrack Obama was criticized for dancing the tango rather than speeding back to the White House.
Then came the ‘experts’ with all sorts of idiotic ideas about how we can prevent people from exploding in future. They’ve already decided that we can no longer fly with toothpaste or a tennis racket, or any kind of cream, in case we suddenly decide to moisturize the pilot to death. And they are introducing legislation that means the constabulary can have a look at the websites we have visited whenever the mood takes them. So what’s next? No gloves? No electrical equipment of any kind?
It has been suggested that, in future, because two jobless halfwits blew themselves up in Belgium, people must be screened before they are allowed into an airport building. What’s the point of that? You’d still have thousands of people all huddled together in one place. It’s just that they’d be outside in the rain, rather than inside, where it’s dry and warm.
If you’re on an Easter break now and it took you hours to get through the airport, then the criminals have won. It’s as simple as that.
So what’s to be done? Well, we’re told that there are possibly up to six hundred people in Europe right now who are happy to explode, and I’m not sure there’s a damn thing we can do to stop that happening. We can’t even put our hands up and say, ‘OK, OK. We give in.’ Because we don’t really know what it is they want. Apart from us all to die.
The fact is that they are going to carry on blowing up until the recruits realize that they don’t end up in heaven with a load of virgins. That they just end up dead, like all their victims. And that’s not going to happen any time soon.
So we have to accept that there will be atrocities in various European cities from time to time. And then we have to work out how life for most people can carry on as normal in spite of this.
I’ve listened all week to politicians saying that we need more EU integration and that we need less EU integration. I’ve heard bleeding-heart liberals say that if the Muslim youths in various run-down suburbs were given a better education and a proper job afterwards, they would be less inclined to blow themselves up. And I’ve heard frothing Nazis say that they should all be escorted back to wherever they came from in cattle wagons.
But because we live in sensitive times when we are not allowed to cause offence, I haven’t heard one person suggest the one solution that everyone knows will work.
Cara Delevingne. Your first primary-school teacher. My children. Andrew Lloyd Webber. And everyone in the Salvation Army. At an airport, all of them have to put their liquids in a see-through bag and take off their shoes and their belts and their watches. And they all have to queue up for hours.
All of them are treated no differently from a sweating alarm-clock salesman from Homs. And why? Because we know, and the security services know, that they are not suicide bombers.
All the people who exploded this month in Belgium and Turkey were Muslims. So were those who blew up in Paris and London, and those who planted bombs in Madrid. So were those who flew the jet liners into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
And I’m sorry, but if you are looking for a criminal who’s described as male and bearded, with a dark complexion, why the bloody hell do you stop and search a nine-year-old blonde girl with blue eyes and a My Little Pony rucksack? That’s just idiocy.
But of course, we all know the problem. If Britain has two queues at its airports – one for white people and one for those who aren’t – then we are going to find ourselves on the naughty step at the United Nations. Because that’s racism.
Which means that we are fighting what we stupidly call the war on terror with our hands tied behind our backs by political correctness.
In the Second World War the security services didn’t harass everybody. They went after those who wore lederhosen and couldn’t say ‘squirrel’ properly. And those who were suspiciously good at cooking pasta. Nobody said that was racist. It was just common sense.
Whereas today things are so bonkers that officials in South Yorkshire didn’t dare investigate a child-grooming operation because it was a Pakistani thing and they didn’t want the headlines. And Dame Judi Dench is searched every time she goes abroad because it would be racist to not search her.
It’s potty. And it’s got to stop.
So I’ll say it. If we really want to carry on with our lives – as we say we do – we need two queues at the airport. One for people who don’t have beards. And one for those who do.
27 March 2016
Picking a holiday is hard when Johnny ISIS beats you to all the brochures
Last week we were shown some photographs of the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. And it looked like Chernobyl. The swimming pools were empty and the lobbies of the vast, gaudy hotels were deserted. And while the market carpet shops were still open, the ‘For you, my friend, special price’ vendors were just hanging around in doorways because they had no customers.
Local tourism officials are trying to put a brave face on it, saying visitor numbers to the country have only halved in recent years, but the truth of the matter is that no one in Britain is sitting at home this morning saying, ‘Mavis. How do you fancy Egypt for a summer break this year?’
Ye
s, the brochures still talk about balmy evenings and camel rides and sipping umbrella-shaded cocktails by the pool, but we all sort of know that we’d also get light gunfire, muffled explosions and some beheadings. These are not what we want while on holiday because it’s hard to get your head straight if you’re on a sun lounger and it’s in a ditch two hundred yards away.
And it’s not just Egypt that’s no longer on the list of possible holiday destinations. With the notable exception of Morocco, pretty much the whole of northern and central Africa is now a no-go area for Johnny Brit.
Tunisia. Algeria. Libya. Chad. Sudan. The Democratic Republic of Congo. Kenya. Somalia. Terrorism and lunacy have put the kibosh on the lot. And there’s no point moving west for some respite, because there you’ll probably get bitten by a bat and catch Ebola.
Don’t you find that staggering? Even when the world was cut in half by the Iron Curtain, you could still go to Prague or Zagreb or Moscow and be fairly certain that you’d come home with a head. But today, in half a continent, you can’t.
And that brings us back to the holiday brochure. Because it’s not just Africa that’s a problem. Yemen. Iraq. Syria. Turkey and that whole swathe of consonant-tastic countries that stretches right the way over to India are now no longer available to the drunken greengrocer from Luton with his Kodak Instamatic and Dr Scholl’s sandals.
I remember, not that long ago, seeing a map in the Daily Mail that explained what ISIS wanted: a huge Islamic superstate that stretched all the way from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the Himalayas and then down through Southeast Asia to the tip of Australia.
If You'd Just Let Me Finish Page 13
