The Light’s On At Signpost. George Fraser MacDonald

interminable, and I came out asking myself why the hell they hadn’t just been content to shoot the original N – B scripts, instead of padding it out with unnecessary junk. But it was obviously going to gross a jillion, which it did.

      Superman II was the better movie, probably because Dick had the direction all to himself. But I like to think back to that Paris hotel room, with Hamilton and me up to our ankles in coloured paper, and tell myself that our labours were not in vain.

* The Macmillan Film Encyclopedia describes Guy as “among England’s most technically proficient craftsmen”, which is an understatement. After his apprenticeship with Rene Clair he graduated to assistant director with Carol Reed and John Huston, and worked on such prestigious films as The Third Man and The African Queen before going on to direct a string of major pictures, including four James Bonds – one of which, Goldfinger, I regard as the best in the series.

* But we may have underestimated his talent; many professional boxers have acted, and acted well, since James J. Corbett and his fellow-champion John L. Sullivan trod the boards a century ago. Rocky Graziano, Max Baer, and Maxie Rosenbloom were all good comic actors, and more recently Jersey Joe Walcott, Tony Galento, and Henry Cooper have acquitted themselves well in supporting parts.

       ANGRY OLD MAN 3

       The Europe Fiasco

      SUPPOSE THAT IN 1945, with the Nazi war machine smashed and Britain rejoicing after the greatest victory in her history, we had been told: “Of course, fifty years hence your leaders will have surrendered your sovereignty to the people you’ve just defeated and those you’ve liberated. In effect they will be your masters, your lawmakers – oh, and incidentally, it will be a crime to sell in pounds and ounces …” The prophet would have been ridiculed, perhaps even reviled as a traitor, and probably put in a padded cell.

      Well, it has happened. Since 1972, when the country was dragooned into the Common Market by Edward Heath,* successive governments, with a cynical disregard for public opinion, have squandered countless millions of treasure for the benefit of the moocher nations of the EU, and in return our farming and fishing industries have been brought to the brink of ruin, our constitution undermined, and our laws, passed by properly elected Britons, brushed aside whenever they are at odds with the directives of unelected foreign bureaucrats whose corruption is a byword, in whose appointment we had no say, but whose will is sovereign while ours goes for nothing. Having been sold out not just tamely, but positively eagerly, we have seen despatched to the governing bodies of Europe our sorriest political failures, cast-offs, and hasbeens, who of course are pro-European to a man, since Europe has provided them (and in some cases, their families) from time to time with a gravy-soaked alternative to the unemployment they deserve.

      We, and the other European nations, have to pay for a “Parliament” which has rather flatteringly been described as “an unspeakable assembly … of self-important nonentities”, and which not only performs no useful function but is a positively harmful and colossally expensive dead weight existing for nothing but the benefit of its members.

      Worse still, our leaders have been criminally stupid in embracing, and enshrining in our law, the wicked and misguided twaddle of European “human rights”, submitting to the ruling of that unqualified kangaroo assembly, the European Court, and using all this farrago of Continental nonsense as an excuse for destroying the fabric of our nation. “We have to do it because Brussels says we must.” How often have we heard this pathetic whine from a gutless government.

      Is it not remarkable that Britain, with a record on human rights superior to any other nation’s, Britain which has done more to spread honest law and democracy than all the European states together, Britain whose ideas and ideals have been adopted by every respectable people on earth, should be lectured on “human rights” by the Continent which gave us the Holocaust, the Inquisition, the French Revolution and subsequent horrors of Napoleonic aggression, the police state, fascism, communism, and other benefits too numerous to mention – to say nothing of being so wicked, corrupt, and feeble that within living memory it had to be rescued by Britain, America, and Russia.

      Brazen impudence is too mild a phrase for the effrontery of the European Court in issuing its diktats to us, and all the epithets of cowardice are insufficient to describe the British governments of both parties who have been so craven and witless as to accept them.

      I am ranting, no doubt about it. But then, I am enraged at what has been done to my country by the contemptible dross elected to Westminster in evil hours, worst of all the Heath government which gave Britain its death blow, and New Labour who have trampled on the corpse. But not half so angry, I dare swear, as our forefathers would be if they could see the betrayal, by worthless politicians, of the country they worked so hard to build, and the surrender of the precious freedoms won by better men at Gravelines and Trafalgar and Waterloo and Flanders and Alamein and in the skies above Kent.

      “Oh, emotive drum-beating!” I can hear the snoopopaths cry. “Jingoism of the most Victorian kind, a bellow from a bygone age!” That is how they see their country’s past, and are too stupid and complacent to look to its future. But even they would do well to ask themselves what Churchill and the first Elizabeth and Chatham and William Wallace and the Unknown Soldier (yes, and Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln) would have thought of the pass to which Britain has been brought in the past half-century.

      It will be said that these worthies belonged to other times, and their notions are out of date. Not so. The freedoms they believed in are eternal, and we will lose them forever if we allow ourselves to be conned or bullied into, first, joining the ludicrous euro, and inevitably thereafter, railroaded into a European superstate, a union of European soviets controlled by people whose ways are not our ways, whose values are not our values, and whose polities have shown themselves inferior to ours at any time in the past millennium.