Knock the pond down with the proverbial warm lettuce leaf.
Josh, the no ticket, no start man (translation, no ticker, no heart) is at it again.
He's promised more turns around the dance floor than a contestant in They Shoot Horses, Don't They, and he's at it again, and the reptiles - desperate to send the beefy boofhead to the knackery - are all aboard.
Only the most committed pond correspondents will care, and be moved to wade into that sludge with Fergo ...
‘Toxic sludge’: Frydenberg unloads on Holmes a Court
Josh Frydenberg slams Simon Holmes a Court and Monique Ryan over toxic Kooyong campaigning
Josh Frydenberg has accused teal campaigners of hypocrisy, detailing personal abuse, antisemitic sign vandalism by opponents and Simon Holmes a Court’s ‘toxic’ social media.
By John Ferguson
In the usual reptile way, that was just a gloss on Josh's own effort...
War on the home front: how bitter Teals came for the Treasurer
With his first budget under his belt, Josh Frydenberg turned his attention to the election. Then came the most miserable time of his political career in the battle for Kooyong | EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT
By Josh Frydenberg
That use of the third person is a real killer, down there with the pond talking about the pond.
No doubt Josh thinks he's a legend in his own lifetime, a veritable Saint Sebastian suffering from assorted arrows, but he's actually just flogging a tome ...Josh Frydenberg is former treasurer of Australia and deputy leader of the Liberal Party, 2018 to 2022. This is an edited extract from his memoir, A Grateful Son (HarperCollins), which will be published on Tuesday, October 13.
The reptiles are promising even more excerpts ...ON SATURDAY: Loyalty betrayed: Inside the bitter fallout between Frydenberg and Morrison.
Count the pond way out.
The pond has done its duty. It's there at the intermittent archive for anyone who cares. The pond would rather head off for a bout of root canal therapy.
As for the rest, the Australian Daily Zionist News was in full swing with this bizarre headline ..
As delegates walked out on Israel’s PM at the UN, they sat politely for the leader of a regime that had just gunned down its own citizens in the streets.
By Hillel Newman and Reza Arab
The pond had to personally save that one to the intermittent archive so that fellow students could relish the notion that Benji embarking on a war of choice for election purposes - and persuading mad King Donald to join him - was a true friend and ally to Iran's brutalised people ... by standing by and watching as thousands of dissidents were butchered by the mad mullahs, and not lifting a finger to help them.
You can't make up this level of delusion...
Israelis and Iranians are fighting the same war on two fronts: against the tyranny in Tehran and its proxies, and against an information war waged in institutions that have been corrupted. The good news is that Israel cares for the Iranian people, and the Iranian people understand who their real allies are.
...but the pond should have known what would arise from this peculiar alliance ...
Reza Arab is adviser to the Iran Prosperity Project and a lecturer at the University of Queensland.
The reptiles kept the cause ticking over with another bout of fear, panic and alarm, with Brownie on the job ...
Still ‘very volatile’ for Jews’ safety: AFP
AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett has warned the security environment for Jewish Australians remains ‘very volatile’ and the terror threat from Hamas supporters will stay elevated.
By Greg Brown
The pond was disappointed that this meant Pike piking climate change was pushed down the page...
By Elizabeth Pike
Ironically in the original story, Bowen wasn't the lead, but no doubt the reptiles felt the need to juice it up in a way that fed the hive mind ... Turkish COP31 chief says world must ‘stop running away from responsibility’
The pond would rather turn to the infallible Pope for a comment on the headgear matter...
The pond supposes that at some point it should head over to the extreme far right of the digital edition, but what dismal scenes then unfolded ...
Firmus’ apparent IPO stall is still too early to call this the popping of the massive AI bubble, but the overreach represents a blow to Australia’s tech ambitions.
By Eric Johnston
Associate Editor
It’s not unusual for stock listings to go cold, particularly if broader market conditions suddenly turn sour. However, that’s not the case here. It’s rare for one of this size to stall so spectacularly just days out from launch, suggesting a major gap between actual and perceived investor interest.
Firmus’ stumbles shouldn’t be regarded as the popping of the massive AI bubble. The investment into AI infrastructure globally is still surging and tech players are driving Wall Street to record highs.
Killer Creighton was also on the loose on the extreme far right, and in his inimitable style, went straight to the cliché of Louis XV:
Louis was just an excuse to pile in on the perfidious French, a handy distraction from mad King Donald's contribution to destabilising the world economy, though Killer would eventually get there ...
France’s borrowing costs easily exceed those of the so-called PIGS southern European nations of Portugal, Italy, Spain and even Greece, once the poster child for fiscal incompetence.
With anaemic growth amid mass rioting, spending that absorbs more than 55 per cent of the country’s GDP, budget deficits of 5 per cent of GDP pencilled in for coming years (well over double Canberra’s), and a presidential election due in April, it’s hard to see things getting better before they get worse.
The next global financial crisis is clearly on the horizon. The financial collapse of 2008 came largely as a surprise, but the cause of the next – and likely far worse – conflagration should be obvious to all: governments’ excessive debts, and the ridiculously self-serving financial regulations that have sustained them.
Reckless fiscal policy implemented by many of the world’s richest and most powerful nations is almost certain to trigger a crisis in financial markets, with devastating impacts on ordinary people.
The reptiles compounded the sense of crisis with riots in the streets ...Protesters clash with French police in riot gear in Paris. Picture: AFP
The pond tends to regard this sort of carry on with some equanimity. The pond came of age in 1968 when rioting students in the street promised a revolution, but eventually went back to their books, while the likes of Godard went full Mao ...
Killer was determined to panic, as he often does:
As happened in late 2007, panic will spread, pushing up interest rates in bloated public debt markets, prompting massively overextended governments to put up taxes and slash spending in ways that will only inflame already furious voters.
Killer eventually tired of the perfidious French, and flung in a billy goat butt in the form of a "though":
In Japan, with debts at more than 200 per cent of GDP, the 30-year bond yield has more than doubled to above 4.2 per cent, the highest in its history.
America’s debt burst through the $US40 trillion ($57.5 trillion) for the first time in August, even before President Donald Trump promised to rack up another $US1.3 trillion on the national credit card to give $US5000 to every American adult citizen, should his party do well in the midterm elections next month.
US 10-year bond yields have jumped from 4 per cent in February to 5.3 per cent, the highest since 2002, when US government debts were the equivalent of less than 60 per cent of GDP – around half their current level.
Amid all the globalist claptrap, it’s still a dog-eat-dog world: Washington suddenly sold billions of euros and bought Japanese yen in July, fearful the panicking Japanese would start selling off their massive US bond holdings to shore up the yen’s value. So much for NATO economic solidarity!
Bond holders, being pension funds, financial institutions and private investors, are understandably baulking at the prospect of systematically higher inflation, and are even beginning to question the creditworthiness of prominent G20 governments.
They’ve been fooled once by the unusually low inflation of the pre-Covid era, enduring huge real losses as governments sprayed money everywhere, triggering investable inflation. They won’t be so readily tricked again. Now they know that governments can and will use their central banks to prop them up in crises. Quantitative easing on steroids, including in Australia, is now standard operating procedure. So-called independent central banks know who their masters really are.
That’s why the money-creation pump won’t be so useful this time. Investors have learned.
True to his word, Terray defaulted on France’s debts in 1770, slashing interest rates and stretching loan terms without permission from creditors.
All fine, but it was time to save the world from mad King Donald and his minions by returning to the perfidious French with another "but" ...
A public debt crisis will be worse than the banking crisis of 2008. Then, governments could rescue the banks, but who will rescue the governments?
Governments are naturally a fiction by which everyone tries to live at everyone else’s expense. Government bonds are the bedrock of the global financial system. Taxes are already far higher than they should be. Expect the costs of adjustment to fall ultimately on the least politically well-connected.
Indeed, France’s fiscal woes, amid rising populism, could wreck the whole eurozone. Marine Le Pen, the likely winner of next year’s presidential race, has long disliked the European Union, a project France encouraged after World War II only to weaken and tie Germany down – something Berlin’s insane energy policies appear to have been doing all by themselves anyway.
Insane energy policies? That's code for Killer reptile speak, an insane desire to pretend that climate science is a nothing burger.
Is there a heroine, a veritable Jeanne d'Arc, waiting to save Killer? Rassemblement National presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has long disliked the European Union. Picture: AFP
Better yet, go Milei for the "nth" time, where "n" stands for exhausting ...
Responsible Australian governments would start making cuts to spending now so they can better ride out the coming storm. Too bad we don’t have any.
President Javier Milei in Argentina has shown that even massive cuts in spending and regulation can supercharge economic growth, if the rest of the world remains stable.
But as the streets of France already illustrate, stability can’t be guaranteed.
As Killer mentioned it, how goes the Argentine economy?
Economy is on track to enter a technical recession after a lukewarm recovery in August, data shows.
Construction activity grew 0.4 percent in August on a monthly basis, barely enough to cover the 4.4 percent fall in July. Manufacturing posted a 1.9 percent monthly bump after a 5.1 percent fall in July, according to government figures published Wednesday.
The two sectors employ the largest share of formal workers in Argentina, making them key indicators for the real economy.
Argentina is expected to have fallen into a technical recession in the third quarter, according to the central bank’s market survey published Tuesday. Analysts estimated that gross domestic product fell one percent from July through September compared to the previous three months, which would be the second straight quarterly decline. Official data for third quarter GDP will be published in December.
Memo to Josh. On your return, immediately appoint Killer as your economics advisor. What could go wrong?
And so at last, and inevitably, to Our Homeric Henry, alas and alack, back in his role as a singular contributor to the Australian Daily Zionist News ...
October 7 marks ALP’s descent into disgrace
8 min
The caption for the snap: Abandoned and torched vehicles at the site of the October 7 attack on the Supernova music festival in southern Israel. Picture: Jack Guez / AFP
Give all to the mighty G: Make us preferred on Google
The hole in bucket man went all in, with a splendid reference to "kairos" to set the correct portentous, pompous tone ...
In much the same way, three years after the horrors that then unfolded, “October 7” marks a moment when the world changed. The atrocities Hamas committed were not merely intended to kill; they were intended to brutalise, humiliate and defile.
The Nazis hid their crimes; Hamas’s terrorists filmed theirs, vaunting and flaunting the absolute power they wielded over the terrified hostages they snatched away, the women they raped, the men they butchered, the children they burnt to death.
The crimes were unspeakable; still more was the sadistic lust with which they were committed.
Events such as these give a terrible significance to the ancient Greek idea of kairos, the critical moment: the rupture that breaks, and ultimately reshapes, the flow of chronological time. Those moments overwhelm our understanding, leaving words struggling to suture the tear in the fabric of human comprehension.
Could Our Homeric Henry top that reference to "kairos"? Of course he could. Rather than simply talk of "a date", he trotted out "hemeronym":
The reduction of an event to a hemeronym – that is, a date – is part of that process, compressing into a phrase an entire constellation of facts, images, memories and emotions.
The pond could have produced a dissertation on that ...
... At different stages of use, hemeronyms may have the following semantic meanings: nominating stage - hemeronyms are expressed as ideonyms; legislative and legal stage - hemeronyms are used as ergonyms and pragmatonyms; market-competitive stage - hemeronyms function in the role of ergonyms, pragmatonyms, socionyms, pseudonyms, biblionyms; historical stage - hemeronyms function as documentonyms and chrematonyms. At the last stage, it is possible to revive hemeronyms as the name of a new media product with a historical allusion to a well-known publication of past years. (Abstract here).
But forget the low academic comedy, this is serious stuff ...
So it was with 9/11, as voices on the left sought to recast the massacre as “blowback”: the return to America of the violence it had visited upon others. As attention shifted from what the terrorists had done to what America had done to provoke them, prominent intellectuals lined up to present mass murder as justice delivered.
Thus, the very next day, while New Yorkers were still digging out the dead and desperately searching for the wounded, Noam Chomsky proclaimed that “for the first time, the guns have been directed the other way”. “The United States,” said Mary Beard, an eminent classicist, just two weeks later, “had it coming.” Meanwhile, jubilant public celebrations erupted throughout the Muslim world. A tragedy for some, 9/11 came to symbolise a triumph for many others.
Yet those efforts paled beside the speed and ferocity with which October 7 was redefined. The ensuing torrent of statements shifted the blame to the victims, turning the horrors into an indictment of those on whom they had been inflicted. Almost before the first shock had subsided, the work of reversing guilt and innocence was under way.
In some cases, the assertions were so plainly mendacious that they served only to expose their proponents’ bad faith. A case in point was UN secretary-general António Guterres’s claim that the scale of Israel’s killing and destruction in Gaza was “unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as secretary-general” – a period that encompassed wars in Syria, Sudan and Ukraine whose death toll exceeded Gaza’s many times over.
There was a snap of the villain ...UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres at the 81st General Assembly in New York. Picture: Angela Weiss / AFP
And at this point, correspondents will know what's coming. A little attempt at balance, an attempt to take Our Henry's thumb off the scale...
First up the Graudian ...
People tell of lives changed beyond recognition after the 7 October attacks by Hamas three years ago and the subsequent Israeli offensive
In recent days, Israeli attacks have intensified, killing at least two Palestinians in Gaza on Tuesday, according to health officials. The Israeli military said the strikes targeted militants.
On Wednesday, Gaza medics said at least two Palestinians were killed and others wounded in airstrikes in Beit Lahiya and Khan Younis.
“It is what we feared … a ceasefire that just isn’t a ceasefire,” said one international aid worker now based in Amman, Jordan, who worked in Gaza throughout much of the conflict. “Daily life is horrible. People aren’t hungry any more but they are still malnourished. Our local staff are telling us that this is just the next stage of the conflict.”
Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, told the UN security council last month that despite the increase in supplies entering Gaza, the health situation remained critical, with “infectious diseases … widespread amid overcrowded displacement sites and inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene conditions”.
Inadequate funding for relief efforts exacerbated the “shortages of medical supplies, fuel and the overall humanitarian response”, Alakbarov said, while “restrictions on the entry of critical humanitarian items imposed by Israel” were slowing preparations for cold weather.
Marvel at the callous disregard of Our Henry ...
The government’s immediate response was unambiguous, with both formal statements and ministerial interviews stressing the enormity of Hamas’s crimes. But by January – a mere three months after the attack – references to those crimes were dwindling, eventually surviving only in formulaic anniversary statements. Across 220 press releases and media appearances, the atrocity was first relegated to incidental mention and then progressively effaced.
But the changes went far beyond erasing the collective memory of Hamas’s crimes. References to Hamas hardened into ritual: the same pious catchphrases about releasing the hostages were endlessly recited until devoid of content. Instead, more than 90 per cent of the variation in text and meaning concerned Israel, freeing Hamas of any active role and placing all agency in Israel’s hands.
Moreover, while Hamas was invariably referred to as an entity, references to Israel became increasingly personalised, casting Benjamin Netanyahu and his close associates as the sole authors of the events flashing constantly on our screens. There were six mentions of Yahya Sinwar, all associated with his death; in contrast, Netanyahu was mentioned 88 times.
At this point the pond regrets reverting to Haaretz, having done it many times, but must do so again ...
For 14 years, Netanyahu's policy was to keep Hamas in power; the pogrom of October 7, 2023, helps the Israeli prime minister preserve his own rule (*intermittent archive link)
Adam Raz
And so on, and having interrupted at such length, the pond allowed Our Henry to rant on ...
Equally, it was constantly said that Hamas had to be disarmed; yet beyond vague, inconsequential references to peacekeeping forces, at no time did our government say how, in practice, that was to be implemented and enforced. The demands were repeated; entirely lacking were any means by which they were to be achieved.
Even worse was the total disregard for the war Hamas was waging against Israel. Six hostages were murdered in cold blood at the end of August 2024; Anthony Albanese promptly condemned the murders – but just once did he mention them again, and then in passing. There was only one reference to Hamas and Hezbollah directing their missile attacks at civilians, in September 2024; then that fact, too, disappeared just as those attacks escalated.
Nowhere, in the entire corpus of 220 statements, was it ever noted that Hamas had, on its own admission, built 500km of tunnels in which to shelter fighters and offensive weapons, but not a single civilian bomb shelter for the war it was preparing to unleash.
The reptiles interrupted with a snap ...An Israeli soldier operating in the Gaza Strip, amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Picture: Israeli Army / AFP
Our Henry continued with his rant ...
It would be wrong to claim that the government’s attitude caused the explosion of antisemitism; that had far deeper roots. But it would be equally wrong to deny that the government helped foster the climate in which it could flourish. The ABC, SBS, Creative Australia and the universities didn’t need to worry: they could do to Jews, without any practical consequences, what they would never have dared do to Muslims, much less Indigenous Australians.
Nor was there any change when the scale of the crisis became apparent. By the time of this year’s ALP Draft National Platform, Hamas, like Hezbollah, had vanished – and their responsibilities with them. The war was Israel’s war; the only provocations were Israel’s; the death, the pain, the suffering were entirely the work of the Jewish state. October 7 had been cancelled; even the Islamist attack at Bondi could not be mentioned. The last pretence was gone. Only the silence remains, forever condemning those who wiped the horrors away.
And yet ... and here the pond must again revert to the horrors that Our Henry wiped away ... per Haaretz ...
Hamas is still the strongest force on the ground and an alternative government is nowhere on the horizon. And although the world is showing greater sympathy toward the Palestinians, the sympathy isn't being translated into real change (*intermittent archive link)
In terms of international diplomacy, even though the world is showing greater sympathy toward the Palestinians, the sympathy isn't being translated into real changes affecting people's daily lives in the enclave.
Three years after the October 7 attack, Israel is already occupied with other issues. Ever since the living hostages were returned, followed by the bodies of the dead hostages last year, Gaza has been pushed to the sidelines of public discourse in Israel. But in the Gaza Strip itself, the pause in hostilities has not marked the beginning of recovery.
The killing continues on an almost daily basis, even if Israel describes it as assassinations of legitimate targets. Limits on the introduction of aid and equipment are still in place, and reconstruction plans are far from being turned into operational systems.
The summer has passed but the evacuees' tents haven't moved. Some of them, already in tatters from the heat and bleached by the sun, are now waiting for the trials of winter: rain, mud and cold, in an area which is almost impossible to leave. For hundreds of thousands of families, tents have stopped being a temporary solution while waiting for their houses to be rebuilt. They have become home. Samir Zakut, a veteran social activist in Gaza, tells Haaretz that many of the tents are suitable for short stays, not for long durations, and that they have been worn down by prolonged use. Ahead of the winter, he adds, there is a shortage of tarps and protective covers against rain.
Numbers can also demonstrate the scope of the destruction: According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 200,000 buildings were damaged since the war began, or 82 percent of the total number of buildings in the Gaza Strip. Over 134,000 were completely destroyed and 329,000 housing units were damaged. Most of Gaza's inhabitants, 2.1 million people, live far from their homes, in an area that has shrunk to less than 40 percent of the enclave's total area.
"As much as we tried guessing, our predictions were wrong; after the release of the hostages, we'd hoped the situation would improve, but nothing happened," Maysam, a mother of two girls, tells Haaretz. "It's hard to live with the uncertainty, with no horizon or solution, as though we were left to look for our personal survival." Zakut, the activist, says that the restrictions on entry of aid and a shortage in replacement parts and oils for engines impair the healthcare system, water infrastructure and other vital services.
The crisis isn't only about putting a roof over people's heads. Around 90 percent of water and sewage networks in Gaza were damaged or destroyed; 82 percent of the population suffer from water scarcity; and according to figures obtained by Haaretz, 70 percent of families receive only six liters of water (1.6 gallons) a day per person. This is less than the minimal amount required for survival in emergency conditions according to the World Health Organization, which has determined a minimum of 15 liters.
Health services haven't started to recover either. According to a new report published on Wednesday by Physicians for Human Rights Israel, a year after the cease-fire was declared, there is not a single hospital in Gaza that is fully functional. In July 2026, there were only 104 beds in intensive care units across the entire Gaza Strip, one more than in October 2025. A full 69 percent of medical supplies that were approved to be brought in between January and May of this year did not arrive, according to Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, as presented in the report.
Behind these figures there are patients waiting for treatment that cannot be given in Gaza, or for evacuation to a location in which they can get the required treatment. According to Gaza's health ministry, at least 1,570 patients have died while waiting for evacuation since the war began, including 505 cancer patients and at least 264 children. The number of medical evacuations since the cease-fire began is still much lower than the numbers before the war, even though the need for treatment outside Gaza has grown.
On the political front, the cease-fire has not led to understandings on the agency that will manage Gaza. Hamas is still the strongest force on the ground, while the committee that is supposed to replace it as part of U.S. President Donald Trump's plan has not managed to enter Gaza. This has led to a power vacuum: Residents are expecting a change, but they have no official to turn to with regard to any extensive reconstruction.
Truly dismal and depressing stuff, but rather than end on that dismal note, the pond thought it should add yet another celebration of "western values" with a further reading...
This came in the LRB (not the band)...
Modest and Misunderstood
Ferdinand Mount (*intermittent archive link)
Follow the links for the books under review, including one by a certain Paul Kléber Monod.
The entire piece is 4,428 words long, so the pond only wanted to feature a few excerpts, most of which relate to the noxious onion muncher and the general rah rah that goes on in the lizard Oz ...
By contrast, Monod reminds us of the benign image the English have cultivated of themselves, achieving a peak of self-love in the early 20th century. Stanley Baldwin’s St George’s Day speech of 1924: ‘I think that the English are at heart and in practice the kindest people in the world.’ Or George Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘The gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic.’ Or J.B. Priestley in English Journey: ‘I wish I had been born early enough to be called a little Englander. It was a term of sneering abuse, but I should be delighted to accept it as a description of myself. That little sounds the right note of affection. It is little England I love.’ And perhaps most remarkable of all because less expected, E.M. Forster’s definition of English culture in England Speaks (1941): ‘The English countryside, the English sense of humour, the English love of fair play, English prudishness and smugness, English freakishness, the mild English idealism and good-humoured reasonableness.’ It’s ‘English, English’ all the way – ‘British’ never quite fits. Monod doesn’t mention Flanders and Swann’s ‘Song of Patriotic Prejudice’ (1964), which encapsulates a millennium of English self-praise and contempt for their dirty, mean, hairy neighbours: ‘The English are moral, the English are good,/And clever and modest and misunderstood.’
It is essential to this image of the English as a mild, unobtrusive race that the British Empire should be thought of as a kind of accident. As John Seeley, in his enormously influential The Expansion of England (1883), put it: ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’ On the contrary, the English displayed from the start a flinty purpose and unflagging energy in ‘expanding’ themselves. The most indelible words in any statute must be those in Henry VIII’s Act in Restraint of Appeals (1532): ‘This realm of England is an Empire.’ The English Crown had already ‘planted’ quite a few of her people in the castle towns of North Wales, where Edward I inflicted a sort of apartheid on the Welsh. Far larger plantations were to follow in Munster under Elizabeth, then in Ulster in the 1600s, where more than a hundred thousand people, many of them Lowland Scots, were settled on land vacated by the flight of the Catholic earls. ‘Settled’ was never more of a euphemism.
At last the pond understood the true meaning of Orwellian - smug, self-satisfied Poms.
The pond recently rewatched Zulu Dawn, an ancient average actioner, about the Battle of Isandlwana and cheered the Zulus all the way as they took down the pukkah mob.
Meanwhile, "settled" and "settlers" continue to do invaluable work, c.f. Gaza and the West Bank.
And this, for which 'Australia' can easily be substituted ...
...In the great immigration panics of today, sympathy is focused on the home team. We are the ones who are being hurt. It is our national and/or racial identity that is being fractured; our self-confidence in ‘who we are’ that is being undermined. What underlies the sense of affront is the assumption that the ‘people of England’ are, as it were, a settled question, that the days of large-scale movements belong to the past, or ought to.
And this at the close ...
The other challenge is much more formidable. Very soon, almost all Western countries will begin to see their populations fall.* Reversing this trend is a mountainous task. For much of the period since the Great War, France has had a pro-natalist policy. President Macron has called for ‘demographic rearmament’, earning the enthusiastic approval of Elon Musk (fourteen children to date), and for a time his efforts did seem to be having some effect. But now France’s birth rate is slipping back to the European average. Viktor Orbán tried hard to generate more Hungarians, devoting 5 per cent of GDP to the effort. Numbers increased a little (though not to replacement rate) before dropping again. The UK has not bestirred itself much. The two-child benefit cap was expressly designed to deter large families. The Tories, who brought in this weird measure in 2017, seem wedded to it. Farage wants to keep it, but only for children born to immigrants – a distinction repellent even by his standards.
On present policies, the population will soon begin to fall. In London, schools are running out of pupils, and councils are facing the painful task of deciding which ones to close (so much for the myth about immigration putting terrible pressure on school places). As for the labour market, it’s not just that the locals don’t fancy back-breaking work in the fields or in Amazon warehouses. It’s that there aren’t enough locals to go around. Future governments are likely to be stuck with a pair of discordant policies: the restriction of immigration, which will be as effective as we want it to be; and the promotion of the birth rate, which won’t.
And while in that issue, the pond came across this droll letter from a certain Benjamin Letzler of Mödling, Austria
Unshriven
Christianity in politics is mostly group affiliation. Think only of the American secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who has been a Catholic, a Mormon, a Southern Baptist and a Catholic again. Catholicism, which encourages a high level of education among its adherents, is also the leading faith of the conservative administrative apparatus in the United States, as evinced by the current composition of the Supreme Court (five of the six justices appointed by Republican presidents are Catholics). In Great Britain, two prime ministers, Tony Blair and Boris Johnson, have contracted Catholicism from their wives (the third wife, in Johnson’s case). Blair went to Catholic mass regularly (‘religiously’ is not the word) for 25 years as a registered Anglican, and took communion until ordered to stop by Cardinal Basil Hume. He converted formally only on his departure from office in 2007. In my own view, both Blair and Johnson violated Section 18 of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 by advising the monarch on appointments to offices in the Church of England while a Catholic. Both should be prosecuted, ‘deemed guilty of a high misdemeanour, and disabled for ever from holding any office, civil or military, under the Crown’ – although an effective barrister could demonstrate in their defence that neither man was ever a Christian at all.
Has there ever been a better slap down of Boris and Tony Bleagh? Letzler is, by the way, a lawyer, as well as being a keen letter writer. See this profile here.
And so to the immortal Rowe of the day ...
Most correspondents will have dropped off at this point, but the pond does continue to wonder what drives the ABC to continually do hit pieces on EVs.
The simple answer is probably too much reading of the lizard Oz, which in turn means it has as much connection to reality as a lizard Oz jihad ...
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