The RSPCA is supposed to be a charity, but it seems to be embarking on the modern form of political aggression known as ‘lawfare’. Islamists use this with the libel laws, though the Queen’s Speech has promised to ban it: the RSPCA is trying it on with the Hunting Act. It is launching a private prosecution with 52 charges against alleged breaches of the act. For the first time in hunting prosecutions, it is trying to use ‘body corporate’ arguments to catch officers of the hunt without any evidence of their involvement in the incidents alleged. It hopes by the sheer weight of material about different days’ hunting to prove intent — the problem which has so far made hunt prosecutions so unsuccessful. The hunt it has chosen for all the charges is the Heythrop, whose country, by no coincidence, covers the whole of the Prime Minister’s constituency. Since the RSPCA has huge amounts of money and often, due to its bogus moral status, gets costs awarded from the public purse, it hopes, presumably, to make life for hunting people unendurably expensive and time-consuming. Can it be the purpose of the law to persecute entire communities? How long before they start hurling multiple summonses at Jews or Muslims for kosher or halal slaughter?
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‘Disturbingly’, said the BBC reporter, the Golden Dawn neo-Nazi party is on the rise in Greece. Yes, it is disturbing. But the rise of a nasty group which sounds like a brand of peanut butter and is still well under double figures in poll percentage is only one of hundreds of symptoms of rising misery in Europe. It was disturbing, last year, that unelected leaders were forced by the European authorities upon Italy and Greece. It is disturbing that entire states, such as Ireland, are mortgaged to European control in order to save banks. It is disturbing that, as a result of cheap over-borrowing misleadingly guaranteed by the euro, nearly half the youth of southern Europe is now unemployed. Above all, it is disturbing that the eurozone leaders’ answer to this, the biggest disaster of the continent in my lifetime, is ‘more Europe’. I don’t want the BBC news to tell me what is disturbing, but if it must, it should broaden its definition.
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In 1998, I gave a lecture to the Institute of Directors about why the European single currency was a bad idea. As I prepared the text, I can remember my pen hovering over these words in the draft: ‘Since this [the Maastricht Treaty] means that unelected bankers in Frankfurt will have the power to make millions of people in, say, Andalucia and Sicily and Marseilles unemployed, it is unsustainable. The anger against such power would be so great that it could provoke violence, encouraged by extreme nationalists and socialists. The idea that a rich foreign banker is making you poor and jobless is explosive.’ The reason I hesitated was that people might laugh at me for suggesting that violence might result from EMU. Luckily, I let the sentences stay.
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The other day, I bumped into a friend on a mid-morning train to London. She is an extremely active businesswoman, and normally on impossibly early trains, so I knew something must have changed in her life. Sure enough, she said that she had left her high-powered job and was looking for new opportunities. Not an easy time, I commiserated. ‘Oh no,’ she contradicted me, ‘there’s this new rule that women have to be on the boards of all big companies, so I’m absolutely fine.’
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People are laughing at David Cameron’s backwardness in thinking, when texting Rebekah Brooks, that ‘LOL’ meant ‘lots of love’, when according to the argot it means ‘laugh out loud’. But we fogeys are impressed by Mr Cameron’s modernism: we had noticed it only on huts in Ulster, where it stands for Loyal Orange Lodge.
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Famously, the Scots were the first people to have the poll tax, and have complained ever since. What is less well known is that many of them eagerly demanded it at the time, believing it would be better than the rates. Now the Scottish Nationalists are making themselves the guinea-prigs for minimum alcohol pricing. Will they similarly live to rue the day? Certainly they have devised an impost so specifically targeted on the poor that it makes the poll tax look progressive.
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Because of the prolonged wet and cold, our garden and surrounding fields, when the sun comes out at last, resemble illustrations in children’s wildlife books. Every species of fauna and flora appears at once. Like nature’s version of the prisoners moving to the light in Fidelio, there is a lot of noise — bees, martins fluttering under the eaves, the lark, the turtle dove and the cuckoo. The late Auberon Waugh used to complain that there is no more horrible racket than the dawn chorus, but now that the cuckoo is so rare, it feels like a privilege to be woken at about five by its call a few feet from our window.
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Last week I went into a London club of which I am a member, and found the name of a dead man in the book of candidates up for election. David Hatendi, a Zimbabwean Rhodes scholar in his late fifties, died suddenly in March. He was a wonderfully merry man and remained so, uncorrupted by the regime, in a country where joy became rarer and rarer. In Rhodesian days, he shared a house in Salisbury (modern Harare) with Xan Smiley in an area reserved for whites. One day, a policeman approached the house and found David sitting on the stoep with a glass of brandy in one hand and a cigar in the other. He challenged the black man’s presence. ‘Don’t worry, I’m the butler,’ said David. Although his answer was incredible, his confidence drove the man away. As a banker, an educational philanthropist, a family man, a serious Anglican, and as a friend, David led a life of fun, goodness and generosity. Even though it was too late, I signed the book for him.
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