Gary Monro’s blog

Malcolm Rifkind says the Conservative Party is deeply defective.

What’s defective about it?

I offer these clips from Sunday Telegraph interview by means of clues:

“The choice is whether we continue down the cul-de-sac of the last eight years or whether we choose an alternative conservative tradition.”

… criticised the party’s concentration on “classic Right-wing Conservative issues” such as immigration, asylum, Europe, crime and tax.

“We need to be asking who will be acceptable to the public as an alternative to Gordon Brown.”

This is the wrong thinking that has led to the Conservative Party’s last three election defeats. It is the abandonment of strong, instinctive English conservatism in favour of prostration at the feet of the focus groups.

And these are all quotes from one Malcolm Rifkind.

The European Union - one of whose self-appointed tasks is to act as a counter-weight to the US - was apparently furious at an admission - a boast, actually - by an Iranian official that Iran used talks with the EU as a smokescreen behind which to pursue its nuclear ambitions.

“Thanks to the negotiations with Europe we gained another year in which we completed the [project] in Isfahan,” Hosein Musavian, an Iranian foreign policy official told an Iranian television interviewer.

The US was never that optimistic about the talks’ chances of success. The facts bear their pessimism out. And this little episode is just another example of the would-be-funny-except-it-is-so-damned-serious lightweight EU’s attempt to out-class the US heavyweights.

Thanks EU - but I’ll stick with America. Even when they’re wrong (invading Iraq, for example) they’re majestically wrong. You are just plain ridiculous.

“Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.” (From Alice in Wonderland)

The UK’s gold-standard exam is now so easy that almost everybody who takes it passes.

The degradation of the A-level exam is now so complete that the more astute teenager realises that the standard two or three that my generation went for is simply not enough to distinguish them from the crowd.

To distinguish themselves from the mass of candidates, many brighter pupils now take six or seven A-levels. In private, education ministers have expressed concern that the system is forcing the most able teenagers to take on an absurd workload in order to prove their excellence.

The greatest improvements in exam scores are in the so-called ‘fake’ subjects:

In some subjects, such as media studies, the proportion of sixth-formers recording passes has risen even further, to more than 98 per cent, according to a senior education official.

Ruth Kelly promised in February to make the A-level harder - an admission surely that they had become too easy. So these results will require some A-level grade wiggling to get out of.

Now that’s a task they won’t fail…

It’s the first full day of my week’s holiday in Boston and I’m already blogging. Truly, this is an affliction.

Anyway.

Whilst we in the UK try to absorb the idea that some of the people in our country who hate us are finally going to be shown the door, here in the US this is old news. The Americans have been doing the right thing since 9/11. Their primary targets aren’t just those that abuse their hospitality but also those who are simply here illegally.

The US has an estimated 445,000 illegal immigrants with Latin Americans making the larger portion. However, the proportion of Arabs and Muslims being deported is growing. One of the hardest-hit groups are Pakistanis of whom there are half a million in the US - more than 120,00 in New York alone. The government’s 2003 mandate that all males from any one of 24 mostly Muslim countries must contact their local immigration office was the start of a programme of deportations that led to last year’s record 161, 000 deportations of Muslim and non-Muslim illegals nationwide.

Businesses serving immigrant communities are suffering. Brooklyn’s ‘Little Pakistan’ neighbourhood has seen population levels fall 20%. Restaurants have had to close and shops that might be regarded as ’specialist’ by the community at large - Asian grocers, for example - have to diversify to attract the American mainstream market if they are to survive.

Would the British authorities take such a line against illegal immigrants?

They have misled over the figures in the past and to act against illegals now would necessitate them facing up to that fact. With possibly more illegals (570,000) in the UK than there are in the whole of the US the size of the operation alone could dissuade a government whose heart might never really be in it anyway.

So I think we shouldn’t hold our breath…