Pension Ponzi

Another day on the campaign trail – can it really be under a week old? – and another barrage of lies and fearmongering from the Remainders. A little over a third of the CEOs of the FTSE 100 companies have put their name to a letter supporting remaining in the EU; to the media and apparently to people like David Cameron this is a ringing endorsement by a majority. It all seems to make so much sense now because the same desperately flawed (and just plain desperate) mathematical thinking informs everything EU-fanatical economists say. Well here's a little fear from me.

Take the Ponzi scheme on which Merkel and Cameron and Hollande and Uncle Tom Bollocks and all are relying on to prevent their being lynched by angry mobs. Pensioners may be old and rheumatic and senile and toothless, but they are a growth market and command many votes. And having paid in through an entire long lifetime of work – starting at fourteen or fifteen years old in many cases – and having been told during that entire time that they must work harder and for longer and pay an ever greater share of their relatively shrinking incomes into the system, is it any wonder that they want their pensions? You know, the pensions they have been promised from the day they started paying tax.

Except their governments have spent it, haven’t they? Like Robert Maxwell, they treated the pensions portion of contributions, whatever fancy name they gave it, like current income; robbing Peter to pay Paul and relying on the sacred, Holy Grail of economic growth to cover the pension costs. If we can only increase the work force, by whatever means possible, we can borrow enough money on the never-never to keep the old fogies off our backs. Now that it looks likely that the keepers of the Christmas Club will abscond with the members’ money their argument is wearing thin.

Nobody in the UK earning less than around £30k and without dependents pays sufficient tax through PAYE to clear their own share of the entire deal. To cover the cost of our engorged state and its commitments, let alone pay back our creditors, every working person needs to contribute, on average, upwards of £6000 each year. Every penny claimed back in tax credits, housing benefit, child benefit and the like is a cost that has to be recovered from the rest of us. Have children and you can forget about making a net contribution unless you are earning what for most people is an impossible dream.

Hey, where did da money go?

Could somebody from the Remain camp explain how importing workers on wages so low they pay virtually no tax at all, or workers who through the tax credit system pay negative tax, contribute to keeping future pensions secure? Add to this the impossibility of many low paid families ever accruing savings or buying a home and you have what can only be concluded is an unsustainable, unstable model. When in future the government raids your bank account – Cyprus style – in a now established EU routine, ask yourself why you voted to stay in a club which cares not one jot for you or your family. Or your pension.

Brotherhood of Man?

France is making threatening noises about the migrants in Calais. Again. Not towards the migrants themselves, having largely given up on any possibility of containing them, but towards Britain, whose fault it apparently is to have allowed them all to cross the whole of the EU in order to get into a country that really doesn’t want them. Calais is the last barrier, the cork in the neck of the Champagne bottle which the EU has been steadily shaking for some years now. When it finally blows, as blow it must, there is going to be froth everywhere and few will escape the consequences.

Paris is bulging, while Italy and Greece are swamped by unwanted migrants and have threatened to issue visas which grant them freedom to roam beyond their own overcrowded lands. Austria is talking of resurrecting its border controls and Hungary is actually intent on building a massive security fence. Nobody wants these people, absolutely nobody, and even those with a misty-eyed and thoroughly unhelpful opinion on the sanctity of human life are doing no more than saying, over and over, that something must be done. Who is going to take in an Eritrean, house an Ethiopian or give succour to a Sudanese? These people are not like us; they do not belong here. And their plight is neither ours to solve nor to feel guilty over.

Populations are anxious and frightened and while the EU refuses to fully acknowledge the immensity of the problem, national governments who rely on democratic processes to retain power no longer have the capacity to ignore them. The awful truth of this race of mankind is becoming clear… we are not equal, we are not one big happy family and in the competition for scarce resources we look after our own first. Every time. After years of being under the mesmeric influence of progressive minority thought, brow-beaten by the propaganda of the faux-meek, people have had enough. When governments won’t act to evict the monster the villagers will break out the pitchforks… and mobs are poor observers of due process.

If Europe wants to save itself from drowning in a scummy sea of crime and violence and hate and suspicion it has to have an effective illegal immigration policy. But not only does it not have one, it is incapable of forming one. The notion of European unity is entirely illusory and this looming immigration crisis might just be the thing which reveals the emperor in all his bare-bollocked glory. On top of all that the USA has been caught red-handed spying on the French and of course, we all know they spy on all of us too. Nobody trusts anybody any more than they ever did and the pretence that they ever really did is slipping round the ankles of international diplomacy like a whore’s drawers.

Every man for himself!

Paris is warning that relations may break down between Britain and France over the Calais situation. Every other major country in the EU is shaking their head, if not their fist, at David Cameron’s ‘negotiations’. True colours are being sported at every turn. This might be the best possible time to get the EU ‘out’ campaign properly underway. Upset all of them, I say, stir up the hornets’ nest. Bring it the hell on.

County Gayo

Appropriately enough on Eurovision Day, the campest day of the television calendar, Ireland voted in favour of gay marriage. This affects me not one little bit; I genuinely do not care who stuffs what parts of themselves up whatever parts of their partners they wish, how often or how vigorously. There are far more egregious physical practices engaged in within the heterosexual world than to be upset over buggery. But what gets me is the scale of the celebration. I genuinely don’t get it (yes, euphemism).

I have absolutely no issue whatsoever with the concept of committed partners entering into legally recognised contractual pairings of the sort practised between men and women for centuries. It’s the urgency and the vehemence, I think, that I find slightly odd. At a time when fewer and fewer male/female couples can be arsed (yes, euphemism) to plight their troth/s, opting for a generally more liberalised arrangement, doesn’t it strike you as strange that a sector of society seen as extra-liberalised should want to adopt the bondage of a former age? ‘Till death us do part’ is somewhat at odds with the notoriously free coupling associated with some elements of the homosexual population.

I don’t care for the ‘cultural Marxist’ objections that making a formerly illegal practice legal is tantamount to making it compulsory. I’m not that engaged by the ‘what’s normal’ argument for inclusion of same-sex relationships in sex-education for children. I no longer understand what ‘normal’ means because it certainly doesn’t mean ‘majority’ behaviours, inclinations or allegiances any more, rather ‘normal’ means that whatever you want to do must now be accepted by everybody, regardless of their own sensitivities… by law.

Again, I have no objections, I merely offer observations and my observation is that we live in extraordinary times when a tiny but vocal minority - for don’t be fooled, it IS a tiny minority - can achieve by sheer clamour and persistence what years of less obtrusive campaigning might never do. The moral of the story is clear; if you want it badly enough and shout about it loudly enough for long enough you will eventually gain the sympathy and support of people for whom it actually makes no difference whatsoever. Look at the polling numbers; at least ten times as many non same-sexers must have voted for their cause than did the LGBT community themselves. That or else Ireland is the gay epicentre of the planet.

There is a precedent for happy separation

Meanwhile it’s ‘nul points’ for the UK once again in Eurovision; they really don’t like us very much, do they? So why not take a leaf out of the book of gay and get everybody on our side? The ‘OUT’ campaign for the EU Referendum needs to look like an oppressed minority and stage demonstration after demonstration to illustrate how badly done to we are within the European community; how we are cast as pariahs and ignored as irrelevant oddballs. If we seriously want a chance of exiting from this loveless marriage we need to continually ram it down the throats (yes… again) of those who want everything to just stay the same.