Homer's birthright

LAZINESS SHOULD NOW BE TREATED as a ‘disease’ according to Dr Richard Weiler and Dr Emmanuel Stamatakis. Because obesity is now seen as a disease, the two doctors believe that laziness should be accorded the same nomenclature. According to an article they wrote in the British Medical Journal: " Given the significant associated mortality and morbidity, we propose that perhaps physical inactivity [laziness]should also be considered for recognition as a disease in its own right."

I cannot help that it is more than just coincidence that the theory has come to light just as David Cameron threatens to launch his assault on the system of Incapacity Benefit, a benefit that is universally recognized as a meal ticket (created by politicians) for the very people the two doctors refer to in their article. This does not mean of course that there are not hundreds and thousands of genuine claimants, many of which will no doubt be trawled up in the net the prime minister proposes to cast without targeting his catch; but even for such people these two doctors’ theory is as laughable as it is repugnant to the hard working people who no doubt pay Dr Weiler’s and Dr Stamatakis’s salary.

It is tough on those hard working taxpayers to see it through the lens of these two doctors; indeed they may, to put it mildly, see them as an easy touch for anyone who cannot get out of bed in the morning.

As for trying to get this vice recognized as an ‘illness’ by international bodies within Europe as well as the United Nations on the same basis that obesity was treated, just beggars belief. These two doctors know about medicine but very little about human nature. If, along with tomes on medicine, they had broadened their literary horizons toward dipping into Dickens for instance, then they would have perhaps had a better insight into human nature than human anatomy; if of course it is their field.

EVEN IF THEIR THEORY proved medically sustainable, no politician (however liberal) would buy into it; it would mean certain defeat at the polls, and on this occasion I would support their cynicism.

Laziness, Idleness, lethargy or slothfulness. These are characteristics that are not to be tolerated in a modern or any other, society. To parade yourself as having such an ‘illness’ and therefore depended upon the resources of the tax payer opens society up to the same disease, resulting in its economic decline.

If laziness is treated as a disease in the same way obesity is treated; then if you think that Incapacity Benefit was abused, you will have seen nothing to compare with what will happen if these two men of medicine manage to succeed in their efforts.

Medics of all kinds are idealists as well as men of science. They believe, no doubt, in mankind’s innate honesty as well as their medical welfare. When it comes to measuring the lazy person’s entitlement to suckling from the public tit, how do the two doctors propose measuring how genuine the truly idle are?

But then, even if they do manage, through part theory and part technology, to separate the wheat from the chaff, society itself will never accept it.

They will not accept it because it is not a virtue to be idle. Not only is it open to widespread abuse, but even the genuine cases should not be supported by what are after all the hard working taxpayer.

I do not care whether these two doctors are right or wrong. But I hope they may prove to be right in order to advance my argument that laziness, medically justified or not, will become a cancer on the our country’s economic development.

I find it incredible that two such obviously intelligent men can pronounce upon what they consider to be a new disease. Society regulates itself according to the free market. It has proved itself more than adequate to the task throughout centuries. It relies upon ambition and energy to function.

What we in the West call the Capitalist system needs ambitious wealth creators to advance our civilization. The whole ethos is built upon business and the wealth generated by their success. These entrepreneurs are the life blood of any economies success; they employ millions of people who pay the taxes for the likes of Dr Richard Weiler and Dr Emmanuel Stamatakis to come up with their theory of disease-laziness.

THESE TWO DOCTORS should and undoubtedly will be ignored. Perhaps they even know this themselves. Perhaps they have managed to see far into the future when they will be absolved from the ridicule they now face. This is the ‘martyr syndrome’ commonly sought after by liberals.

Laziness is just that; the refusal to engage with society through work and production. If laziness is a disease then work should be its cure. Pandering to such indolence by doctors no less, is no help to the individual.

Our country's foolishness

LONG AGO (TO THE MODERN GENERATION) our prime ministers and senior politicians were well grounded in the history of the country they served. It all came to a head however (and this is the un-researched view of a 60year-old) in the 1960s; that facile decade that dealt in the abandonment of tradition and the bombardment by satire of what were regarded as Victorian morals, by those who belonged to what was known, in part, as the ‘counter culture’.

It was the decade of nihilistic impulses. Everything was up for grabs, especially for the middle class children. I say middle class because it was from that standing that the decade of the radical and the hippy were drawn. The working classes never had a look in, unless you belonged to a successful pop group. But even then they were few and far between.

Of course many a red-brick student imagined themselves to be from the working class, which is why they had their heads filled with Marxist ideology fed liberally to them by their social science lecturers from guilt ridden middleclass backgrounds.

There followed from this radicaldemia yet another feature of the late 60s and early 70s, the university sit-ins; where radical chic fashion was, it now seems, always on display to the media. Denim and cheesecloth were the style symbols of student radicalism, and our education system is paying the price today for their inanity. Especially, as I believe, many of them went on to teach another generation, and remain part of the educational establishment to this day.

THE INTENTION OF THIS PIECE is to show how those who govern us and call themselves statesmen seem to have disregarded this island’s history through personnel ignorance, and how the 1960s, to a great degree has to take the blame.

Our history is our birthright; it tells us how we came to be here, and hopefully instructs us how to behave in the future as well as telling us our story. But the modern politician has abandoned all but history’s bare bones – the Roman occupation, Alfred the Great, 1066, the Battle of Britain. These bare bones are the sole remit for the modern politician, made up collectively by media arrivistes such as journalists, PR men, and lawyers. This is part of the modern curricula vita of the modern politician. Personnel ambition it seems, has been allocated the priority.

Just the bare bones: no love or enthusiasm for history or tradition, let alone knowledge of it, is left to guide them and enforce their patriotism.

But are they even patriotic in the traditional sense? I think not. The modern politician from whatever of the three main parties, looks increasingly toward Europe and agonises not about when, but how they can deliver our nationhood up to becoming a mere federal state within Europe; while also hanging on to their jobs- viva cynicism!

BRITISH HISTORY HAS TAKEN TO THE back burner on the school curriculum and it is no accident that it has done so. Regarded as it is by social liberalism as a monster enslaving other cultures in the interests of the British Empire; no wonder so much of British history has been edited out - which is why British history now appears so low down on the curriculum.

It is about time, instead of ignoring our colonial past, that a British prime minister for the first time should promote our legacy, especially to India. We left this country with a fully functioning civil service, a road and railway system as well as an architectural inheritance.

There were many wrongs done, but also many rights done when it came to our departure. So when David Cameron visited this great country, I hope he reminded the Indian prime minister of the many favourable legacies left by the British. But, no doubt, he was as ignorant of them as were his Foreign Office advisors, educated as they probably were under the ‘post-colonial’ curriculum and taking their anti-colonialism for granted.

Someone once forecast the end of history, well as far as our educationalists and politicians are concerned, British history may not yet be deadt - just never spoken off.

WEALTH IS GOOD FOR ALL OF US

OUR BANKS ARE BACK IN PROFIT AT LAST. You would think that this was a cause for much celebration; but no, there is an air of old fashioned class politics in the way it has been presented by much of the media. RSB, Lloyds TSB, HSBC and Barclays, have all announced profits amounting to billions in total; but you would think this was comparable to the disastrous collapse in the banking system which had to be bailed out by the taxpayer.

Bankers, and city speculators who drive the economy are the modern pariahs because of the bonuses they earn – yes earn in most cases. For the profits they make for their financial houses are taxed by the government to the tune of many billions. Indeed, I would bet that corporation taxation, coupled with what the city hands over to the Internal Revenue Service each year, compares favourably with the contributions every employee has to pay.

Profits still anger people. Not the traditional Lefties who carry ancestral chips around with them, but also ordinary small ‘c’ conservative types like the average Daily Mail and Telegraph reader. Perhaps they feel they have cause to complain; perhaps some of them lost money in investments. But even they must appreciate that a free market economy relies for its success upon profits. Profits which keep people in work and allows companies to expand with even more additions to the workforce.

The system works because it is the only economic system that is at ease with human nature. For it was such a nature that the small ‘c’ conservative types exploited when they invested; and if they had not done so the free market economy which relies upon them would have been in ever greater trouble.

WHAT LED TO THE BANKING CRISIS was in part due to bad lending, yet today our politicians are issuing vacuous threats to the banks if they do not lend more. These are the same wretches that accused the banks of rightly lending irresponsibly in the first place.

Now we have a banking system that takes measured decisions about lending. Sometimes these decisions will be the wrong decisions. But the bankers know that if there is ever a repeat of the last collapse within the next 10-20 years, the taxpayer will not be able to afford to bail them out. So the banks are wisely ignoring the pleas of politicians who care only about votes, and are lending at a pace dictated by probity and not politics.

If a gifted ‘speculator’ earns billions for his bank or investment house, then he deserves his bonus. If our politicians seek, in order to court popularity, to prevent such bonuses being handed out, then the talent that created the wealth will look elsewhere.

Remember, we in this country no longer have a healthy manufacturing sector to create our country’s wealth. We may have gave birth to the industrial revolution and through its manufacturing capability, gave this nation what we would call today, superpower status.

But our decline in manufacturing has been immense. It has declined to the point where a British prime minister has to go almost cap in hand to countries we once governed to tout for business.

Our one jewel in the economic crown is the city of London. It is the engine steering the whole of the British economy. If we threaten its success, in a fit of pique, by demanding that such large payouts should be stopped, then the people earning them will leave and go elsewhere: to countries that have no such prejudice against wealth creation. It is no idle threat that such talented individuals make. They are used to following the opportunity. To give an analogy the average football supporter would understand. Loyalty is only wallet deep. These people are like footballers. Their first loyalty is to themselves and their families - it is human nature in action.

WE LIVE IN A FREE MARKET ECONOMY; an economy that has provided the wealth that has created the NHS, and a free education system. Wealth is the innovator in medicine, education, defence, and all other departments of the public sector our people have shown an allegiance to.

Wealth and only wealth sustains civilisation. What we do with it is one thing; but its creation has to be permanently in the hands of a free market system where people have the incentive to achieve personnel wealth.

This so-called coalition government seems to have lost the plot. In particular the Conservative Party. This party was once the flagship of free enterprise and understood the mechanics of wealth creation. But this party’s leadership has become today nothing more than a lump of clay ready to be remoulded by the latest manifestation of the contemporary; in whatever field of cultural or political focus it emerges from.

The Conservative Party was once the anchor that kept alive British tradition. But today, the modern party is embarrassed by such a timeline. The centre ground of British politics today is like a pass the parcel at a children’s party. None of the main parties, for all their blaring-off against each other, are in anyway different from each other in the modern world and the sooner their respective activists come to terms with this the better for our democracy.

Bradley Wernham knows he is untouchable -and so does 'uncle' Ken

“Of all animals the boy is the most unmanageable, inasmuch as he has the fountain of reason in him but is not yet regulated”.

Plato (supported by judge Christopher Ball)

THE 19 YEAR-OLD serial burglar (700 at the last count) has finally been given what under our system amounts to a stiff sentence of five years, which usually means, out in two. And what is Wernham’s response to his sentence, written (if that is the right word) on Facebook: “Be out in 18 months or before. Yeeh is guna ride this s**t.”

In court he admitted to 17 burglaries and thefts as well as 645 other offences to be taken into account. He appeared, and not for the first time before Judge Christopher Ball, QC. who, according to the Daily Mail, “insisted he had originally been right to ‘gamble’ by enrolling the thief on a taxpayer-funded rehabilitation scheme that provided him with a rent-free flat and job training”.

Having stole property estimated to be worth £1.1 million which included a £85,000 Mercedes, a £50,000 Porsche Cayman, and a £30,000 Land Rover Discovery, Wernham was still given chance after chance to reform himself. Indeed the state appears to have bent over backwards at taxpayer’s expense to rehabilitate this moron.

No doubt that Bradley Wernham had what is described by the ‘professionals’ allocated to provide for his needs as a ‘difficult childhood’; and no doubt a timeline of his wretched upbringing was submitted in great detail on every appearance he made before a magistrate or a judge. Which is why, no doubt he managed to avoid prison for so long. Or at least one hopes that this was the reason instead of overcrowding.

Now we have a Justice Secretary who supports the unsupportable; if Ken Clarke had sat where Judge Christopher Ball, QC had sat in the Bradley Wernham case. Wernham would today be sent on yet another tax-funded extravaganza and given his 701^st chance to reform.

OUR PRISONS ARE INDEED OVER CROWDED. Some 90,000 inmates are squeezed into a system that falls well short of such numbers. Some 10 per cent of these inmates are, however, of foreign origin. Nearly 10,000 inmates have come from abroad, and at £40,000 a year, they represent in total, a £40 million yearly addition to our prison bill.

Every day we read of cases similar to that of Bradley Wernham. This is because our justice system has been hijacked by European legislation which we are forced to obey because our politicians signed up to it (this does not mean, however, that our judiciary do not agree with it). Now the likes of Bradley Wernham can indeed boast on Facebook. They can do so because our criminal justice system has lost track of who the real victims are when it comes to crime.

When a crime is committed, all of the agencies associated with it seek to understand and protect the perpetrator. While the victim is given lessons in something called ‘restorative justice’. A reprehensible and contemptible attempt to bring the criminal face to face with the victim in the hope that the criminal will change his ways in the future. Which leaves the real victim in the position of helping his or her assailant. Just another liberal overture for the likes of Bradley Wernham to abuse.

Liberal ‘justice’, for this is what it advertises itself as, has governed this country since the mid-1960s. We have had 45 years of having our sense of right and wrong blurred into grey areas by social workers, probation officers, educationalists, ACPO, Amnesty International and uncle Tom Cobly and all. The liberal diorama that has dominated our society since the ‘swinging decade’ of the 1960s, must now meet its nemesis. It must do so because their nostrums have been proven to be wrong.

Yet our politicians are not yet ready to give up the ‘project’ as Tony Blair called it; because David Cameron now wishes still to pursue it alongside his Brokeback companion, Nick Clegg.

THE BRITISH PEOPLE HAVE TO REALISE THAT their politicians are hell bent upon our incorporation into the rest of Europe. Which means their liberal laws will always fall well short of the anger felt by the British people. For the elite that has delivered us into the embrace of Europe ; an elite that encompasses the likes of Peter Madelson, who does not and will never live with the consequences of their liberal approach to criminality.

Bradley Wernham is an abstraction for such people. He will never inveigle himself upon such riches as they own. The likes of Bradley Wernham prey only upon those that can least afford to lose what he takes.

Yet the people who give Wernham chance after chance are the very people he leaves alone including the likes of Ken Clarke.

Witchcraft is still among us

A HOME OFFICE REPORT released today says that thousands of illegal immigrants are being allowed to settle in the country because the police are frightened of asking them the necessary questions about their origins because of being accused of racism.

It appears that a pilot study found that when the proper checks were made more than three times the number of illegal immigrants were found. According to today’s Daily Mail, the police, ‘fear asking questions about their nationality because they will be hung out to dry by politically correct regulations’.

These officers are quite right to be fearful. The term racist is today the modern equivalent of being charged with and convicted as a witch. Such are the times we find ourselves living through that all sorts of new spells are now part of the modern dictionary of witchcraft; spells under such headings as, Homophobia, Islamaphobia as well as that old favourite racism. If anyone says anything that could be interpreterred as having an anti-minority slant then woe betide them: then, like the witches of an earlier age the modern variety can fall foul of the anti-witchcraft laws which forbid the casting of ‘anti-minority’ s curses in the form of what was once known as free speech - but today becomes a crime.

IT MUST ANGER MANY people that laws enacted to curb illegal immigrants are neutralised by other laws, many of which have been concocted in Europe, that hinder the arrest of what are after all criminals. If our police are afraid to even inquire into a person’s background to ascertain whether they are entitled by law to live among us, then the world (or this part of it) has surely gone mad.

It appears that in modern society a person’s human rights has eclipsed any need to act with responsibility. For years the police have profiled minorities for certain crimes and stopped and searched them, not for racial reasons; but because whether they be Russian, Turkish, Somalian, West Indian, Polish or Portuguese; whatever the minority involved, the police chose them because they fit the profile of a certain crime, whether it be people smuggling, drugs or passport forgery. The list of crimes has grown larger since we opened our boarders to the rest of the world. New crimes have been created, crimes which years ago never existed except as an oddity.

If our police cannot police because of laws made by politicians either here or on the continent of Europe, then the time is fast approaching when the people must demand the right to defend themselves; whatever this may entail depending upon how far this current state has yet to go. For if the police cannot protect me and my loved ones then I have the right to defend myself just as any other citizen living with such failure has the right to do.

THE WAY WE ARE HEADING will ultimately lead to anarchy. During the last government begun under Tony Blair some 2,000 new laws were passed. It is only within a multicultural society where you are balancing the rights of so many minorities that such a flood of legislation could ever occur – but then I am only guessing.

But may I suggest this. New laws on such a scale would have had to entail a structural change to our political and economic system of the kind favoured by Tony Benn – and we all know Blair was no socialist.

Every day people now have to watch what they say. Which in a democracy should never have to happen. We in this country are slowly but surely killing free speech; a device we once thought well embedded within our democratic system, that we never ever feared its removal.

But then our past generations never thought we would have to take into consideration the requirements of multiculturalism.

I read recently that Roy Jenkins, who was, apparently, one of the founders of this concept of equal value given to different cultures including our own.

I also read that he later regretted giving such a system his support.

TODAY’S HOME OFFICE REPORT only exemplifies Roy Jenkins’s later misgivings which he knew would have had to come about. Being, as he was, a Europhile, Mr Jenkins new that Europe would grow in importance and that European rulings would render our own parliament’s rulings meaningless. How he would react to the EUs prohibition of Turkey into the union, one can only guess.

I venture to suggest that our police’s fears are both accurate and worrying and if they are not quickly addressed by what are supposed to be our servants in parliament then somewhere down the road the British people will have to take a hand.

Multiculturalism has proven to be a volatile concoction that encourages much resentment among the indigenous population of yes, the white British. Not only has such an ideology bankrupted any hope of integration of different ethnic groups, but has declared war on all forms of racial integration.

Multiculturalism will always, one hopes, be opposed, not on racial grounds but upon cultural grounds.

This whole business of being ultra-sensitive to minority feeling by liberal sentiment is as vacuous as us multi-racial supporters find it - it is a sham. The Guardianistas who propagate multiculturalism at every opportunity regardless of their own culture, are craven, weak and gutless.

STARVING ONESELF TO DEATH IS ALSO A HUMAN RIGHT

160 DETAINEES AT CAMPSFIELD HOUSE, immigrant removal centre, have gone on hunger strike. It was only last month that Nick Clegg had to retract a statement informing the public of its closure. Facilities are said to be poor and detainees are serving increasingly longer periods in the centre, according to HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, Ann Owers.

If these detainees wish go on hunger strike, then they should be given every opportunity to eat, but should be left alone until they either come to their senses or suffer the consequences; either way the solution lies with them and them alone.

If they are serving such a long stretch, then it is thanks to the European Union and the behaviour of their human rights lawyers both of which are intent upon keeping them where they are. For no doubt the government would send most of them packing tomorrow if they had the power to do so. I also wish that Campsfield House could close, just as Nick Clegg believed and hoped last month.

But until these detainees can be removed back to where they belong, it is no use them complaining about their current situation and threatening starvation. All they have to do is tell their lawyers whose practices have made copious amounts of money from the public purse on their behalf, that they are now ready to return home voluntarily. For if the situation is so bad in Campsfield House, that they are prepared to starve themselves to death, then their situation must be far worse here than the one they will return to.

PLACES SUCH AS Campsfield house and Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire are there because both the EU and human rights lawyers acting on the detainees behalf have kept them in existence, and are now using them to advance their client’s case for release into British society.

Our system of immigrant removal is becoming like America’s death row syndrome where convicted murderers’ lawyers can exhaust an appeal system to limits stretching out over several decades.

The greatest concern of the British people is mass immigration, and the word mass is by no means alarmist. Demographic predictions of a population growth to between 70-73 million people by the middle of this century, largely made up of immigrants, puts untold social pressures upon our society. It is expected, for instance, that to accommodate such an increase, a further 100,000 home per year will have to be built just to cater for such an influx.

If our politician’s choose to ignore the social consequences of their liberal approach to this issue, then they and they alone will be to blame for the consequences. We are an island people still proud of our history, but are nevertheless left with the feeling that the modern generation of liberal politician and journalist do not share such a pride - as their predecessors once did.

Margaret Thatcher once used the word swamped to describe what was happening to this country’s demographic development; and for her foresight she was accused by the Labour opposition of being a racist. And when they came to power, the Labour government opened our boarders and any opposition was greeted with the same rebuke – racist.

By so opening our boarders, the Labour Party hoped that a whole new constituency would be made available to replace the white working class that had caused so much trouble in the 1970s and kept the party out of power from 1979 until 1997. In allowing what amounted to unrestricted access to our country, the 1997 Labour government under Tony Blair, hoped to vacate their dependence upon the white working class, by attracting a new migrant population to their cause.

THOSE THREATENING THEIR death in Campsfield House immigrant removal centre should be allowed to do whatever they wish without interference from the authorities. I do not believe a single individual will partake of the assigned road to death they have promised us to follow.

If however any of the 160 choose to starve themselves, then they will have done so on their own cognisance, and no department of government need to feel responsible for the individual’s actions. All that can be done is make food available to the detainees should they wish to change their minds.

There position is due not to the UK Boarder Agency, or any other agency of government, including government itself. All such people can do is offer those 160 immigrants the sustenance to end their self-inflicted suffering. If they choose, for reasons of gaining publicity, to ignore attempts to feed them, then they are fools.

PERES IS HALF RIGHT

THE USUALLY MILD MANNERED and thoughtful Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres has accused the English of being anti-Semitic. The accusation comes not from someone from the Right, but from a man of the Left. Mr Peres also has the dubious honour (considering the quality of some of its recipients) of being a Nobel Peace Laureate, and the holder of a honorary Knighthood. So something must have provoked him into making such an all encompassing attack upon the English without any kind of qualifying statement.

Look no further than our own prime minister’s visit to Turkey last week when David Cameron compared Gaza to a prison camp. I do not suppose for one minute that Cameron meant the comment to be seen as drawing any kind of comparison with the Holocaust and the death camps. But surely bells should have started ringing after he said it. But no, as we have learnt today, he stands by every word he spoke on Gaza in Turkey, and Pakistan in India.

I also think that upon reflection Mr Peres will also consider he went too far in attributing anti-Semitism to the whole of the English people which his comments inferred if the press’s reporting of them are accurate.

This does not mean that he is wrong about anti-Semitism among certain parts of English society. For instance, the historical evidence is impeccable regarding the old English aristocracy, which is why so many appeasers of Hitler in the 1930s were counted amongst their numbers.

Edward I banned the Jews from English soil because he borrowed money from them and had no intention of paying them back. The Jews remained persona no grata until the arrival of Oliver Cromwell who admired them greatly. He knew their entrepreneurial skills were as much needed then, as Mr Cameron now seems to think those of the Indian sub-continent are needed by Britain today.

I am appalled by Mr Cameron’s comments, not because I think him in any way anti-Semitic, but merely ignorant.

WHEN PERES REFERS TO our growing Muslim population his fears are justified; just as are those of many British people. As cities such as Luton, Bradford, Oldham and Londonistan among others harbour ever larger Muslim constituencies then all the political parties will have to follow the Muslim agenda if they wish to be elected; and there is nothing remotely racist about making such an observation. As demography changes, so does the attitudes of democratically elected politicians, and this was the very point Shimon Peres made in the interview he gave with the historian Professor Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University, published on the Jewish news website Tablet.

In one way Mr Peres is only saying what many an Englishman would like to say openly but are afraid to do so, for fear of the ‘hate police’.

Another aspect of Peres’ comments was that regarding the bias reporting of events between the Israeli’s and Palestinians in the British media; and once again, I think Peres has a legitimate point to make. The conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews has been ongoing since the founding of the state of Israel in 1947. We can of course go further back beyond the Romans renaming Judea as Palestine, but what the hell, it is complicated enough already.

What we have in British society now is an intellectual canton of opinion formers in politics, and all forms of the media, as well as the law who have been educated to the Palestinian perspective. Many of our academics have, for instance, been at the forefront in banning visiting Israeli academics from visiting their universities. Which makes me wonder just what the future social and political milieu will be, regarding the state of Israel.

Simon Peres was wrong regarding the anti-Semitic net he choose to cast among the English so indiscriminately, but I think he was angered by the comments of a Tory Toff, as so many of us are.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL is comparable to ancient Sparta in the modern world. Like ancient Sparta, Israel has been seen as somewhat of a nuisance. Sparta was always seen as the party-pooper by the rest of Greece due to its asceticism. It was greatly respected but not admired. Until that is the arrival of the Persians under Xerxes. Persia was a great empire that like all empires ever since, have always felt the need for total world ownership which they tried to do by conquering Greece. But Sparta held them back at Thermopylae until the whole of Greece could muster enough strength to defeat the Persians.

Modern Israel placed as it is, will prove to be as vital as ancient Sparta when it comes to the medievalism of Islam and the survival of the West. Israel, rather than being treated as a pariah as Mr Cameron seems to wish after his visit to Turkey, we should be grateful for Israel’s existence. For I believe she will play a vital role in the West’s future