It's our metric Dunkirk, and we can't afford to give an inch

Last updated at 13:20 13 May 2007

I never liked metres, litres and kilograms, but I never knew why it mattered so much, or why I cared, until they prosecuted greengrocer Steve Thoburn for selling bananas by the pound.

I had noticed that metric measures were ugly, inconvenient, crude and inhuman, that their names sounded as if they had been arrived at by a talentless committee on a dull Wednesday afternoon.

But when I saw Mr Thoburn in the dock I realised that they were also symbols of oppression.

The only reasons Britain had escaped them up till now was because we had not been invaded or suffered a destructive revolution.

Left to their own devices, every civilised people would have intricate customary measurements such as ours, and they all did have them until they fell foul of tyrants and idealists.

The spiteful State-sponsored persecution of a harmless greengrocer was a warning I that we were being invaded by stealth, and that fifth-columnists among our own people were collaborating with that invasion.

The nasty trial of Mr Thoburn destroyed, once and for all, the claim that the European Union did not seek to change our way of life.

It was a warning of something much more important that was coming: the systematic removal of landmarks, the imposition of the miserable top-down systems of doing everything that continentals have long been used to - the idea that we are citizens with a duty to the State, rather than free subjects protected by laws we have made ourselves.

If we had lost the Second World War, if Dunkirk had gone differently, German military policemen would have nailed up proclamations imposing the metric system, just to rub our noses in our new conquered status. That is what it is for, in many ways.

And the ploughing up of Britain that would have come by brute action in 1940 if we had not beaten it off is coming by stealth instead.

Watch the salamislicing away of jury trial, the nauseating plan for identity cards, the European "constitution" that will end 1,000 years of British history.

Most of the things I write about here originate from the same stealthy attempt to abolish the country.

So why don't we resist it more? Why isn't the BBC tormented with complaints every time it uses kilometres rather than miles? Why don't we insist on buying our goods in pounds and ounces, pints and gallons?

Why, even as the EU has - for the moment - slightly relented on the issue of pounds and ounces, do I see "conservative" newspapers sizing British warships in metres and giving the weights of babies in kilograms?

Why don't even allegedly traditional independent schools bother to teach customary measures? If we cease to care about such things, we will rapidly find that our enemies assume we have gone soft, and don't care if we survive or not.

Are they right?


A Minister for the Sinister

I greatly preferred living in a country that did not have a Ministry of Justice. Such countries usually also have a Ministry of the Interior, a President for Life and squalid prisons full of political dissenters.

As George Orwell cleverly pointed out in his book 1984, the more grandiose and elevated the name, the more likely it was to be the exact opposite of the truth.

The Ministry of Peace organised perpetual armed conflict. The Ministry of Love engaged in torture, the Ministry of Plenty supervised rationing, and the Ministry of Truth told lies.

It was a good sign that our ministries all had nice dull names such as the Home Office and the Board of Trade, and a remarkable piece of honesty that the department which made war was actually called the War Office.

I always thought it a bad sign when we were given a Ministry of Culture a few years ago (culture, such as it was, immediately deteriorated with amazing speed). That was just ludicrous.

But a Ministry of Justice has a sinister ring, not funny at all.


Blair, let the bordello pianist who let others pull the strings...

Anthony Blair's latest reluctant step towards the exit was treated with the sort of reverence once given only to royalty.

Nobody heckled, nobody laughed. It amazes me that this absurd personality cult still continues.

The man spent ten years destroying the constitution, undermining our independence, promoting political correctness, attacking our liberty, fiddling statistics and killing innocent people in foreign countries.

Actually, that's too generous. Mr Blair, Olympically dim and ill-informed, has always had very little clue of what his Government was doing, or why.

He performed the role of the piano player in the brothel who provides a nice atmosphere while having no idea what is going on upstairs.

The only polite thing for him to do would be to disappear into obscurity on a small pension.


Ghastly grins of this shameful


I was brought up to believe that the hard path was often better than the easy one, that fighting was better than a shameful peace, and that doing something wrong for material gain would never lead to a happy outcome.

When politicians and the media discuss the current state of affairs in Northern Ireland, they act as if such ideas did not exist.

We are expected to watch the ghastly smiles of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley without nausea or even regret.

On the contrary, we are all assumed to be pleased because Northern Ireland is now

"peaceful", provided you don't upset the lawless rival gangs that now run it, and "prosperous", thanks to huge subsidies from us.

The general attitude towards this national shame, treating it as a triumph, simply demonstrates the deep moral corruption of our political and media classes.


Some seek to blame the poor, tortured desperate parents of the stolen child, Madeleine McCann. Some seek to blame the Portuguese police - though I can recall few, if any, occasions where British forces did any better.

Both are missing the point. The person to blame is the one who wickedly and cruelly abducted a little girl. All our anger should be directed there.


The Big Brother State is silently appearing in our midst.

Across the nation, interrogation centres are being built to fingerprint and register innocent people for the National Identity Database. You can help defeat this plan by renewing your passport, now A Ministerfor the or soon.

At some point in the coming 18 months, you will not be able to renew without being fingerprinted and registered, irrevocably. If enough of us renew in time, the scheme could be frustrated, and even abandoned. Please renew, now or after your summer holiday.