M.Hristov

Lawyer and guest blogger

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah 2 of 2. I watched the film yesterday and De Gaulle, as portrayed in the film, is very like you. Principals and ideas, however unpopular (or sometimes wrong), never abandoned. Of course, the book shows Roosevelt preferring a possibly pliant Petain (an illusion) to De Gaulle

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah 1 of 2 I read Julian Jackson's book and watched the film. The book is outstanding and the film is gripping. I have to thank you for writing up the book before I read it or I would not have heard of it. I have since given it to friends, as a post visit present.

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah 2/2. This was supposed to be a copy of extreme capitalism and it killed hundreds of thousands of people. Productivity linked to food sounds like something an ultra-right wing party would put in their manifesto today but the idea was lethal.

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah 1/2 One of the ideas of the Gulag was devised by an extraordinary character, Naftaly Frenkel, who in the very early days of the Gulag rose from being a prisoner to camp commandant on the strength of his ideas. One of which was that your food ration was linked to your work rate.

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah Trotskyists were a primary target for the Yezhovshina (Great Purge). Gulag author and inmate, Varlam Shamalov was a Trotskyist.

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah I think the fellow traveller line was not that it never happened but that it was exaggerated. Of course, the result of it was that it killed the woke 1920s Soviet Union ( free love,experimental theatre, gay rights and avant garde art) dead and created the Stalin middle class

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@wmarybeard Totally agree. We should show respect for the dead.

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@montie @BenWallace70 Please speak to Matt Goodwin about his "Freedom, Courage,Truth" paper and its classification of people born abroad as "White Other". Many Brits were born abroad because their parents were British Empire officials, or more recently, their parents were serving in Cyprus or Germany

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah In communist Romania and Bulgaria these flats were sold to people on subsidised mortgages. They still have a 90% owner occupier rate. We gave up such subsidies years ago and ridiculous house and flat price inflation means starter homes are soaking up middle class salaries.

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah Furthermore, you illustrated your argument with a picture of grim looking flats. Having seen many such flats in the Eastern Bloc, particularly in Bulgaria but elsewhere as well, I can say their floor space is larger than current UK starter homes.

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah I think you misunderstood me. I was suggesting that the way of life in the 1970s, that you trumpeted in your Mail column recently, were not that different from the GDR, if you were working class. Obviously the UK middle class lived better then but not today, alas.

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah It is a bit like your view of the UK 1970s, as a golden age. Everyone had a job and a home but not a car (unless you were a senior official). You are very dissmissive of these tower blocks but youngsters are paying £2500.00 pm for comparable housing in London.

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah @YouTube Thought the history segments were excellent.Not so sure about the predictions but anyone who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc is entitled to think the current UK elite have absolutely no idea about financial ruin and the end of the rule of law.

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@campbellclaret Prince William says his father "hates football" but the press seem to think the King supports Burnley. Goodness me, I wonder who told them that? I can't think of a prominent Burnley supporter who might be instructed to boost the monarchy by his boss. Can you?

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah 3/3 even if it was sitting under the stage in a fiesta, so you saw nothing and of relative poverty. I remember a Guardia Civi soldier,on a moped, with a Bren Gun or similar strapped tp his back. Society waa set in aspic and then the much maligned Juan Carlos 1 swept it all away

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah 2/3 agreed to stop participating in politics (he had tried to starve them to death but was thwarted by American food parcels). I remember visting Franco's Spain yearly from 1968 and my abiding impression was of a real police state where you did exactly what the police told you

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah 1/3 That review is a thought provoking piece of work. You tackle the enigma that was Fransisco Franco very well. Of course, he was a soldier first and foremost. Smiting and starving his enemies but he could let you live, as he let the family of my Republican Aunt live, once they

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah The night time economy is patrolled in most places where huge groups of drunken revellers gather. Not, I grant you, in North Oxford. Too posh for that.

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah If we went back to your so called golden age of policing before PACE, we would soon have offensive tweeters held in the cells for the weekend or longer followed by lengthy written confessions to a lot of racist tweets with additional pages of racist tweets added by police.

[M.Hristov @LegalOrel]

@ClarkeMicah @DailyMail The idea that the police forces of the 60s, 70s and early 80s were paragons of virtue is rubbish. Many officers were corrupt and PACE, which you hate, was introduced to stop police locking suspects up all weekend or longer. Police forces were radically cleaned up in the late 80S