Remember, remember, the Fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot.

But it is being. The old custom of Penny for the Guy (an effigy of Guy Fawkes or of some present-day irritant, then burned on the bonfire while the children who had taken him round kept the pennies) has been almost entirely replaced by imported trick-or-treating. There will still be firework displays this weekend, I suppose. But even so. And it seems rather distasteful to have them the night before Remembrance Sunday. Bring back Guy Fawkes Night itself.

Anti-Catholic? Not at all. Most Catholics had no idea, and would have disapproved in the strongest possible terms. They, of course, paid the price.

Today of all days, let us consider that eighty per cent of the laws to which Britons are subject are now made by a supranational body which meets in secret and publishes no Official Report. A foreign power maintains a huge military presence here, accountable to nobody. That means you, and you pay for it. We have no intelligence capability apart from that power’s largesse, and are about to spend an eye-wateringly obscene amount of money on yet more nuclear weapons wholly dependent on it. Our foreign policy now consists purely of participation in inter-agency talks at that foreign power’s capital.

Several of our MPs are openly, and probably the majority is more-or-less covertly, signed up to the cause of European military integration under overall American command. At least those MPs openly so signed up are under the day-to-day direction, as to the conduct of their parliamentary duties, of a cabal of cranks and crooks an ocean away. The old Members for Moscow had to await telegrams, and even the old Members for Pretoria had to use the landline telephone. But such is progress, for those in both of exactly those same treasonable traditions, now doing their dirty work on behalf of people who are no longer in government in their own country. And as a result, Britain is still embroiled in one of her two most disastrous wars ever, for absolutely no apparent reason.

Meanwhile, a fully armed terrorist organisation is in government in Northern Ireland while still proclaiming its own Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland. A party at best ambivalent about the Union is in government in Wales. And a party whose activist base is ferociously opposed to the Union is the only party of government in Scotland.

Bring on the bonfires.