𝑵𝒐 𝒏𝒂𝒗𝒚. 𝑫𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑴𝑷𝒔. 𝑨𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒆𝒔 𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒖𝒔 '𝒘𝒆𝒂𝒌'. 𝑾𝒉𝒚 𝑰'𝒗𝒆 𝑵𝑬𝑽𝑬𝑹 𝒃𝒆𝒆𝒏 𝒔𝒐 𝒂𝒔𝒉𝒂𝒎𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝒃𝒆 𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒔𝒉

Grim moaning, all. I greet you well.

Comment from me is superfluous. Millions of us share Littlejohn's shame.

And that shame is a cause of great joy for our particular species of liberal. Oh, how they're enjoying rubbing our noses in it.

The backlash is building, though. A huge pro-Iranian regime demonstration is planned to take place in London on March the 15th. Naturally our government will not ban it. But I know some people who have other ideas. A few thousand of them.

This paywalled piece from today's Daily Mail:

===========================================

𝐎𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐬 𝐚𝐠𝐨, 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐟𝐟 𝐚𝐭 𝐇𝐢𝐬 𝐌𝐚𝐣𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐲’𝐬 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐮𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐚 𝐬𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐫 𝐝𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬 𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐝: ‘𝐆𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐁𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐡.’

by Richard Littlejohn

For as long as I can remember, I’ve used Makes You Proud To Be British as the punchline to stories about ocean-going stupidity, institutional incompetence and perverse behaviour by our political class.

Most of the time it’s been half in jest, highlighting some ridiculous piece of jobsworthery, abuse of power or complete lack of common sense.

For instance, in The Times this week a former British consul revealed that on the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, thousands of Foreign Office employees around the globe were celebrating ‘Afro Hair Day’.

While our troops and embassy staff were beating a hasty and hazardous retreat from Afghanistan, Carlton-Browne of the FO was swanning around in a Jimi Hendrix wig.

That’s another of those stories I don’t know whether to file under Makes You Proud To Be British or You Couldn’t Make It Up. But today, it’s gone way beyond a joke.

Only a couple of months ago, staff at His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs were invited to attend a seminar during office hours entitled: ‘Guilt of being British.’

Incredibly, civil servants employed by HMRC to raise taxes to pay for public services were being encouraged to be ashamed of their own country – at taxpayers’ expense!

Sadly, these days there’s plenty to be ashamed about. It’s difficult to know where to start. The Labour government's staggeringly inept, cowardly, legalistic response to the war in Iran has shone a merciless spotlight on our dysfunctional, clapped-out state apparatus.

It’s as if ministers work out what would be the best course of action in the national interest – and then do the polar opposite. Starmer trashing the special relationship by refusing to allow the US to use British bases being a case in point.

Having initially caved in to pressure from Labour appeasers including the catastrophic circus act Ed Miliband and Surkeir’s fellow North London Left-wing yuman rites hack ‘Lord’ Hermer, he was forced into a 180-degree reverse-ferret 48 hours later. He couldn’t even get that right. It was more of a 120-degree handbrake turn, agreeing only to the sites being used for ‘defensive’ purposes, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

Still, it was par for the course. Here comes his 19th nervous U-turn.

Not so long ago, Britain – supposedly Nato’s second military power – would have been riding shotgun to America as it sought to rid the world of a genocidal, terrorist regime hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons.

Today, we’re not even capable of riding pop-gun. Our Armed Forces are diminished and under-equipped. Once boasting the world’s greatest Navy, we’re not even able to send a single ship to the Med until next week at the earliest. HMS Drag Queen still has scaffolding on its deck in Portsmouth harbour.

We’re relying on France and Greece to defend our RAF station and citizens on Cyprus. Talk about humiliating.

Britain under Starmer is an international embarrassment, a laughing stock, pitied even by minnows like Bahrain and Cyprus, who are appalled at our ‘weakness’.

Earlier this week, I wondered what would have happened had Starmer been PM during WWII. He’d probably have ordered Battle of Britain squadrons to remain on the ground until the Luftwaffe had dropped their bombs on London.

Donald Trump agrees, dismissing Surkeir with a contemptuous: ‘This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with.’

From the other side of the pond, the UK appears to be a Third World basket case. As I wrote on Tuesday - a sentiment echoed by Andrew Neil in today's Mail - my American friends constantly ask: What the hell is going on in your country?

They look across the Atlantic and see pro-Hamas mobs given a police escort on the streets of London, and mosques and universities holding vigils mourning the death of the Iranian butcher Khamenei and calling for an immediate ceasefire against Iran, a rogue nation murdering tens of thousands of its own citizens and fomenting terror around the globe.

Away from the war, Britain appears at home and abroad to be a nation in terminal decline, which no longer has any confidence about its place in the world.

The nose-bleeding pace of decline has been exponential, accelerated by the disastrous, overlong Covid lockdown, and the WFH experiment and expansion of the benefits culture, which far from being temporary have both become institutionalised. Paying people to sit at home doing nothing is accepted as an absolute entitlement by the government.

Nine million people of working age are now ‘economically inactive’, many of them with pretend illnesses such as ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’. Meanwhile the productive sector, pensioners, farmers and small businesses, are being hammered to pay for the workshy.

Pubs and restaurants are being crippled by the exorbitant taxes needed to feed the welfare monster. Yet not an extra penny has been allocated to defence, either in the last Budget or Rachel from Complaints’ hilariously disingenuous Spring Statement this week.

Meanwhile, the war in Iran has exposed the ruinous economic folly of Miliband’s demented dash to Net Zero. With global oil and gas supplies seriously curtailed, and even higher household bills inevitable, he still refuses to lift the ban on exploiting our plentiful North Sea reserves.

Instead of Drill, Baby, Drill and Frack, Baby, Frack, which could go a long way towards meeting our energy needs, he continues to insist on depending on imports and carpeting our green and pleasant with hideous solar panels and useless, bird-shredding windmills.

As a result, British industry is lumbered with the highest electricity bills in the developed world, and firms and factories are going to the wall in droves, with tens of thousands of jobs lost.

Our High Streets are ghost towns, punctuated only by money-laundering ‘Turkish’ barbers and vape shops, while chain stores and local family businesses are boarded up for good.

I could go on. We’ve become resigned to Starmer always, always putting the interests of the British people behind his fetish for bending the knee to ‘international law’ and his propensity to surrender to every demand from the EU, however unreasonable.

But it’s Labour’s approach to illegal immigration which seems designed deliberately to drive most people to distraction. His first act on arriving at Number 10 was to scrap the Tories’ Rwanda scheme aimed at stopping the boats.

‘Smashing the gangs’ hasn’t worked, either, despite bunging the French £700 million to stand around on the beaches smoking Gauloises while the dinghies cast off. Today, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveiled her latest plan to cut immigration.

That all went up in a puff of smoke when it was revealed that the government proposes to pay illegals ten grand a head - up to £40,000 for a family of four - to leave the country within seven days.

That’s more than the national average wage in Britain. A decent lottery win, which will only act as a magnet for even more migrants.

Twenty-five years ago I invented a spoof game show, Asylum!, after a group of Afghans hijacked a plane and diverted it to Stansted. The headline was: Hijack A Plane and Win A Council House!

Today, everyone’s a winner, even when their asylum claim and appeal have been rejected. Win or lose, they walk away with a minimum £10,000 and the chance to have another go in the future under another false name.

Callers to Nick Ferrari’s excellent LBC breakfast show were rightly livid. One woman, who through no fault of her own has lost her home and is currently living in a small room in a Leeds B&B, was almost in tears at the injustice of it all. Forty grand would get her life back on track.

Fat chance.

So, too, the Royal Marines veteran who hasn’t received a cent despite being invalided out of the service. Still, they were only born and bred in Britain so they don’t count.

What sticks in my craw is the lack of shame and blatant dishonesty on the part of ministers. Starmer and Reeves were at it again this week, insisting that everything was going swimmingly and according to plan.

Really? A generation ago, the last time British territory was attacked - the Falklands by Argentina - then-Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington resigned immediately, saying he had failed to see it coming.

Yet now our sovereign base on Cyprus has been attacked, and we are ill-prepared to defend it, there has been no one with the courage to admit they may have taken their eye off the ball - even though a U.S.com/Israel assault against Iran has been on the cards for weeks.

Risibly, Starmer claims he has offered ‘calm, clear-headed leadership’ - yet again vindicating my christening him a ‘complete and utter lawyer’ the day he took over as Labour leader.

It’s reported that John Healey, the defence secretary, was overruled by the Cabinet when he said the U.S. should be allowed to use British bases. He’s said to be a decent man. Why then, hasn’t he at least offered to do a Carrington and fall on his sword?

Then again, decency, like honesty and competence, isn’t a quality we have come to associate with this arrogant Left-wing, increasingly hated Labour government and a Prime Minister who puts his own survival above the national interest.

And, disgracefully, while falling out with our - until now - closest ally and ultimate military protector, Surkeir grovels to the Chinese Communist Party, who spy on us and threaten us economically. Three more alleged spies have been arrested this week. He should withdraw planning permission for the Chinese super-embassy immediately. But he won’t. You have to ask yourself why.

Over the war in Iran, his focus has consistently been on appeasing his anti-American/anti-Israel backbenchers, and the vast Islamic vote in the inner cities.

This week, as the bombs rained down on Tehran, Starmer was hosting a special Ramadan reception for Muslim ‘community leaders’. Will he do the same for Christians when Lent ends next month? I wouldn’t hold your breath.

And to add insult to injury, as World War III was about to break out with Britain sitting on the sidelines, the Speaker of the House was Strictly Come Dancing the cha-cha-cha with Angela Rippon in the warm-up to PMQs.

Makes You Proud To Be British? Ashamed, more like.