Programming note: I'll be back this evening, Monday, with the latest episode of our eighth-birthday Tale for Our Time, Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome.
~A STEYN I-TOLD-YOU-SO MOMENT: As I have written often, the consistent message from the permanent ruling class around the west is that nothing will be permitted to change on anything that matters. Of the two principal popular revolts of almost a decade ago - the Trump election and the Brexit vote - the jury is still out on Trump 47 (America's last chance), but Brexit is dead.
A theme of my book The Prisoner of Windsor is that there is no Brexit. It never happened - or, perhaps more precisely, it was never permitted to happen. And so, as the PM tells the King, Britain is now reduced to the status of a princely state in the Indian Raj, under which, in a nominally sovereign sultanate, every decision that matters was made not by the sultan and his ministers but by the British Resident. The King protests that he hasn't heard the phrase "princely state" in forty years ...but that's why it helps to know a little history, so you can figure out where all the bollocks is headed.
I saw where all this was heading when we first serialised The Prisoner of Windsor in audio five years ago. Sir Keir Starmer, taking time out of his hectic schedule of being firebombed by twenty-one-year-old Ukrainian "male models", has spent the last few weeks enacting my literary jest into formal, binding treaty law. As a popular Steyn Show guest puts it this morning, for the "right" to live under EU laws and regulations in perpetuity, the UK will also have to surrender its fishing grounds permanently. Or, if you like, in exchange for surrendering national sovereignty to Brussels on law, it will also have to surrender national sovereignty to Brussels on fish:
Britain pressed to give away fishing grounds permanently in return for the right to accept EU laws and courts permanently.
You couldn't make it up. pic.twitter.com/BwkyCEG2G0
— David Frost (@DavidGHFrost) May 18, 2025
Brexit is over. The EU has won: It has got what it always pined for during the Thatcher years - a Britain formally subordinate to Brussels but without a vote at the top table. And, as with the Islamisation of Europe and much else, your humble "niche Canadian" committed the sin of being right too soon.
~THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: George Galloway on the Rt Hon Sir Keir Starmer, KCB, PC, KC, MP:
I don't care if he's a top or a bottom.
There Mr Galloway is at odds with the rest of the Internet, which seems to have concluded unanimously that he's the latter. In the legacy media, one is struck by the all the Fleet Street dogs not barking. After all, two properties and one former motor vehicle of the PM have just been rather seriously firebombed, allegedly by a twenty-one-year-old Ukrainian "male model" with minimal English-language skills. At the very least, surely, this raises security questions, no?
On the face of it, yes. It was "counter-terrorism" officers who took down a second suspect at Luton Airport attempting to leave the country. This chap is twenty-six. That's all we've been told. Another "male model"?
It's beginning to feel a bit like the initial reports, two years ago, about a certain BBC presenter being harassed over some lad he'd been corresponding with - in which the alert listener had the vague feeling every media grandee knew what was really going on but they had all agreed not to tell anyone. Or, to go further back, the first morning of the Stephen Milligan story, shortly after his secretary Vera had found the Tory MP dead on his kitchen table, naked save for a pair of stockings and suspenders plus a third stocking tight round his neck and a satsuma and tab of Ecstasy under his tongue. I recall that the BBC's flagship "Today" programme covered the story without mentioning the nudity, the ladies' hosiery, the E, the orange, or initially the name of the deceased, or his demise: the news was that something had happened to someone in a sufficiently unusual way to make it newsworthy, but, other than that, you didn't need to know. When it all came out, the position of officialdom was that the hitherto unknown phenomenon of "autoerotic asphyxiation" was in fact perfectly normal and most of your friends and neighbours were doing it all the time.
Perhaps they were right. Since then, from BoJo resigning over his Deputy Chief Whip groping members' bottoms at the Carlton Club to Two-Tier Keir's incendiary Ukrainian "model", a once great nation's entire political culture seems to have autoerotically asphyxiated.
~Were you at Claremont McKenna College's commencement observances in California on Saturday? Salman Rushdie wasn't. He'd been booked for the big speech, but the Muslim Student Association had objected to his presence - and Sir Salman, more than most of us, knows how that can go. I'm sure Claremont found some obliging tranny of indeterminate direction-of-travel willing to step in. Here's how Isabel Keane reported the news in my old newspaper, The Independent:
The celebrated British-Indian author, whose novel The Satanic Verses has long triggered controversy and even death threats, backed out of delivering a May 17 commencement speech at Claremont McKenna College earlier this week.
"Controversy and even death threats"? That's one way of putting it. The head of a foreign state - Ayatollah Khomeini - ordered a planet-wide mob hit on Sir Salman, with a six-million dollar bounty for the guy who killed him. He and his coreligionists didn't just "threaten" death, they firebombed bookstores in Britain and America, they shot Rushdie's Norwegian publisher, and they killed thirty-seven attendees of a Turkish literary festival who had the misfortune to be inside the same hotel as a translator they were seeking to burn to death.
So a little more than "controversy" and "threats", surely? And indeed more recently Sir Salman himself has been stabbed multiple times and blinded in one eye - and the convicted perp was due to be sentenced just last Friday. Which used to be what we'd call a topical news peg. To be fair, Isabel Keane does get around to mentioning it in the eighth paragraph:
The author has also made headlines in recent years after he was stabbed 15 times on stage while preparing to deliver a lecture in western New York. The horrifying incident caused him to lose sight in one eye, his agent said.
Gee, don't you just hate these narcissist types going around "making headlines" by getting stabbed fifteen times on stage? Very "controversial". You'd almost get the impression that Ms Keane's priority is to anaesthetise sufficiently her own exposure to any of Rushdie's "controversy". Either that, or, like most of her fellow reporters in today's press, she can't write.
Still, I suppose we should be reassured that Sir Salman can still make headlines at all. The big change in the western world since the Ayatollah's fatwa forty years ago is that all over Europe you can be stabbed fifteen times and, unless you're a Booker Prize-winning knight of the realm, it barely makes your local paper.
~I mentioned on last week's Clubland Q&A that I have been rather heartened by the way the word "remigration" has swum into mainstreamish public discourse. The cold reality is that, absent "remigration", Islam is now too far advanced demographically to be prevented from imposing a long Eurabian Night on Britain and the Continent.
So I was thrilled to see that a "Remigration Summit" has just taken place in Varese, just north of Milan. Were I healthy enough for travel, I would certainly have attended, if only to support a stellar presence from the Steyn Show, Eva Vlaardingerbroek in fine form:
"These rapes didn't just happen in Rotherham, or Britain, they happen all over Europe. It's time to say the truth. These are genocidal rapes. They are a war tactic used against the native population of Europe. They are used to destroy our soul."@EvaVlaar at @resum25 pic.twitter.com/VKahKRTHVa
— Dries Van Langenhove (@DVanLangenhove) May 17, 2025
Once upon a time, leftie women would have agreed with Eva. My opponent at the Munk Debate in Toronto, Louise Arbour, was the first UN commissioner to prosecute rape as a war crime. But that was then, and this is now. And all across the west the political class has accepted that a certain number of our most vulnerable women and children have to be sacrificed to the volcano gods of diversity. On the Continent Eva is one of a very few to speak out against this disgusting indifference - which increasingly wipes out whatever moral claims we might make to the superiority of our "values".
Yet the most significant development from the Remigration Summit was not on stage. En route to Milan, eight German attendees were prevented by police from boarding their flights - on the grounds that, to permit these six men and two women to exit the Fourth Reich and pass through the New & Improved Berlin Wall to the world beyond, would create a "significant risk of damage to the reputation of the Federal Republic".
New information! @Hadrianrederic , one of my German friends was released after hours of interrogation. It is not Italy, it is the German state, that is banning them from EXITING! When they visit@resum25
— Martin Sellner (@Martin_Sellner) May 15, 2025
there is "significant risk of damage to the reputation of the Federal... pic.twitter.com/2YpeBYBhca
So the best way not to "damage the reputation" of Germany is to prevent its citizens from leaving Germany? Seems like old times.
Needless to say, if one's ability to leave a country is conditional on not "damaging" its reputation, then that country is a prison. Nevertheless, this is how the chaps at another old newspaper of mine, The Jerusalem Post, reported it:
Authorities block German far-right nationals from flying to Milan neo-Nazi conference
Ah. So, just as the "authorities" prevented people from leaving Germany in the 1930s, so too they are doing today. But it's the fellows trying to get out who are the "neo-Nazis"? As I learned in Canada a generation ago from Bernie Farber and his Canadian Jewish Congress, what Ezra Levant calls the "Official Jews" are the Jewish people's worst enemies.
The young Germans prevented from boarding their flight were detained, questioned for hours, and then ordered to report several times a day to zee authorities. Instead, they managed to elude the gauleiters and slip across at least two international frontiers to take the stage in Italy. Impressive. If there is to be anything still recognisable as Europe by 2040, the Continent will need a lot more Continentals with that spirit.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with our continuing eighth-birthday Tale for Our Time: Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome. Click for Part Fifteen, Part Sixteen and Part Seventeen. Part Eighteen airs tonight.
Saturday brought a semi-Eurovisionish edition of my weekend music show, and Rick McGinnis's movie date - Michael Caine in Get Carter. On Sunday Steyn's Song of the Week offered two contrasting hits. And our marquee presentation was the second brand new video edition of The Mark Steyn Show since my third heart attack in Trieste two years ago: a special on the British state's increasing hostility to free speech, with Naomi Fox, Laurence Fox and Dan Wootton.
If you were too busy this weekend wrestling over the lighter fluid with your Ukrainian rent boy, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
