Toby on Tuesday

'The Path Of Least Resistance'

Last week I wrote about Edward Heath, his acolyte Douglas Hurd and the conspiracy in the House of Lords to sabotage Brexit.   Today I want to say something about the risk of a similar plot in the House of Commons and to introduce you to David Lidington who last month became Leader of the Commons.   And what is extraordinary is how the same thread runs through so much of our politics and the same suspects re-emerge in new guises.   Now David Lidington is yet another Eurofanatic politician, who in 1987 became Special Adviser to none other than Douglas Hurd himself.   In 1989 they moved to the Foreign Office together.   In 1992 he was elected MP for Aylesbury with the support of his patron, who was by now Foreign Secretary.  With the return of a Conservative-led Government in 2010, David Lidington became Minister for Europe, where he predictably trotted out the Foreign Office’s Euro-fanatical line at every opportunity, and then last month he became Leader of the House of Commons.   And where this is relevant to Thirsk & Malton is that the other day our own pro-Remain MP Kevin Hollinrake was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to David Lidington.  So the picture is unfolding.   Now Kevin Hollinrake is a charming and genuinely likeable character, whom any of us would be happy to have as a friend, but his open wish to please everyone makes him politically dangerous a time of great risk like the present.   Taking the line of least resistance is the wrong response in a world where the dangers are growing by the day.

The situation now resembles increasingly what was happening in the 1930’s, when news from the Continent was routinely censored and evidence of growing atrocities was routinely suppressed.   And in just the same way, the Foreign Office and the BBC, two of the worst offenders then, are still offering a rose-tinted view of the realities of Europe.   Yet now as in the 1930’s the Poles, who are a hugely courageous and resilient people, are ready to offer a blinker-free view of developments in Europe.  That Poland has survived at all with Russia on one side and Germany on the other, both eyeing up its huge territory with hungry looks, is a miracle in itself.    And in the same spirit that brought so many young pilots to fly with the RAF in the Battle of Britain, which could well have been lost without them, brave Poles are now speaking out.   Jacek Wrona is a former Polish Central Bureau of Investigation officer who has just declared, “The worst problem for the police service is political correctness...Europe is at the end of its existence...Western Europe is practically dead.   These people live in a void, without ideas.”   And Dr. Rafal Brzeski is a military historian who has just said likewise. “The Germans have had enough of this, which does not mean the government has had enough.   There are two different approaches...The whole Balkans are flooded with weapons, and from the Balkans have come two million people.   Together with them came arms dealers, gangsters, drug dealers.  Buying a Kalashnikov in Bosnia and Herzegovina is as it was after the war with us.   You can buy one for peanuts.”   Predictably the governments of Poland and Germany have fallen out over absorption of the migrant flow.

And even ordinary Germans are starting to speak out against the suppression of the news.   ‘Bild’ magazine has just reported a high-ranking police official in Frankfurt as saying, “There are strict instructions from the top not to report offences committed by refugees.   It is extraordinary that certain offenders are deliberately not being reported about and the information is being classified as confidential.”   And according to Andre Schulz, head of Germany’s Association of Criminal Police, 90% of sex crimes there are not being reported – this in a country where the rape crisis has spread to cities and towns in al 16 of Germany’s federal states.   It is to prevent the virus of violence and terror within the EU reaching our own shores that we need to regain control of our borders as a matter of urgency.   Brexit-lite, or even worse no Brexit at all, for which so many members of both the House of Lords and House of Commons are now working, is a growing danger to the peace of our country.   However delightful a character our own MP may be, and I’m sure his own patron David Lidington is equally delightful on a personal basis, the failure to recognise and acknowledge what is really happening within the EU represents a political risk that none of us should have to face.   So Brexit really must mean Brexit!

Until next Tuesday! 

Toby