Representing Nobody

When, in 1998, I told a disbelieving Australian backpacker that the UK would not join the Euro he mocked. “What?” he said, “The single European currency that’s happening next year?” We were in the USA at the time and a small crowd of ‘Mercans gathered as we debated the point. Yep, I said and expounded my belief that while it might work for some unknown country called Europe, it would never be to British tastes. He argued that it would be just like the dollar in the fifty United States. I argued that Europe was a long, long way from being a single country with a single constitution, shared struggle, traditions and political values. He was young, so he didn’t really grasp why we couldn’t, you know, like, come together, dude.

So imagine my utter lack of sympathy for the plight of the Eurozone today... Now I’m not claiming seer-like powers of prophecy but I knew a bad idea when I saw it. I admit my aversion probably had more to do with being English – avowedly not European - than having any deep economic insight, but I felt that was enough and besides, my forecast proved to be the equal of - better than - any economist on earth. And so here we are today; me with a strengthened confidence in my original convictions, Europe, mostly fucked. I try not to laugh, but you know, up yours Delors and all that.

Another fabulous ideal of the EU was of course the free movement of people and some deaf, dumb and blind kids still fly the flag for the Schengen zone. Hey, I’m all for treaty partners having agreements which make border checks more perfunctory and allow employment wherever you may find it, but once again the disparity of the member states has created unnecessary turmoil. As I retweeted yesterday, courtesy of @OffencePolice, “If British businesses need foreign workers, they can make the case for visas. If the case is ‘We want to pay staff less’, they can piss off.” 

The result has been a labour drain from poorer EU countries to richer ones, making it impossible for those poor states to retain talent and they now largely rely on the charity of the rich states whose taxpayers resent them for doing so. And of course, the formerly working poor of the rich states are being parked on benefits as business prefers to exploit utilise cheaper and more compliant/grateful employees.  As for the absurd notion that legions of low-paid, low socially-involved migrant workers will somehow do anything more than fuel the inevitably catastrophic model of ever greater consumerism, long warned against by people like Aldous Huxley, that dream, too is coming unstuck very rapidly indeed, isn’t it, Mrs Merkel? 

Of course, once into Europe – that great big soft touch with the flimsiest of borders between it and Africa – migrants from anywhere in the world can feast on the hard-won riches of the west without ever making any contribution other than by fouling the shallow end of the gene pool and causing mayhem. And then there’s that Calais thing. Anna Soubry may believe – as she stated yesterday - that we didn’t have a positive debate about immigration, but, given that a majority of her own constituents disagree, maybe they already had that debate and she just wasn’t listening.

It's a jungle out there...

And that, in a nutshell is it isn’t it? Politicians not listening. In a representative democracy we don’t want or need a referendum on every issue; we elect our representatives and then we expect them to actually represent us and not just assume that after the vote we will leave them to govern in a vacuum for five years. But since John Major we haven’t had representative government but assumptive government. Tim Farron can whinge all he wants about Brexit showing us up as fools but his party could be said to be the most representative of them all at  the moment in that virtually nobody gives them the time of day. If he can figure out why that is - and that is a pretty long shot - he may be in with a chance of understanding why nobody gives a toss what he thinks.

Cruise Control

They are going to carry out a trial with driverless lorries on British roads. Soon. Ten-truck, computer-controlled convoys will take to the M6 in Cumbria and if the trials work out the job of ‘lorry driver’, as has happened with so many blue collar jobs, will go the way of the wheelwright and the cooper. Once were factories and fields teeming with workers who needed no skills other than the common human ability to copy and carry on. The future appears to teem with technology replacing people and throng with ever more humans without means of making a living.

Oh sure, we’ll all become programmers, controlling the robots, except that even parts of that job is already being done by the machines themselves. Remember the Three-Day Week? Under the last days of Ted Heath’s government the industrial base of Britain was compulsorily reduced to working just three days a week from the start of January and into the first week of March 1974 to conserve fuel. This was brought about by miners working-to-rule and was indicative of the fear in the country one year before the first EU referendum; back then the Common Market offered some hope of being free of the union stranglehold. No wonder Labour swept into government on the gamble of a promise of a vote to leave. And no wonder the unions were all for pulling out.

Times change, and how. But one thing that hasn’t changed was the prospect of men being displaced by machine and what would we do when it happened? Job-sharing was seriously considered, effectively doubling the jobs available and offering a life of leisure supported by a mere three working days a week, but of course, only half a wage would be due. Back then, a labourer could support a family of two or three children on a single man’s pay packet without direct assistance from the state. The power of the unions in negotiating pay deals was demonstrated when in 1974 Labour increased miners’ wages by 35% and then again – another 35% - in 1975. The source of that power was their ability to withdraw labour – no wonder management wanted/wants more machines.

There was once some dignity in manual labour – a hard day’s work for a fair day’s pay. But those days are gone. Now we have broken unions, a glut of the low-skilled, with subsistence reliant on the ‘charity’ of higher-rate taxpayers. Nobody earning less than £30k even pays in tax their own simple share of the burden; the ruinous cost of the state is what it is largely because of the economically sub-optimal. If you won’t countenance population control then you have to consider how long we can go on like this. The national debt will never be repaid in your lifetime – at what point will we just throw in the towel? At what point will those who truly fund the economy ‘go Galt’ and abandon Britain altogether?

The EU has exacerbated the population problem but at least we have the Channel (for now). The French of course, are terrified of a Brexit because then they will be left to pick up the funding gap, so they are threatening to actually load the inhabitants of the Calais ‘jungle’ onto ferries headed for Britain, who will be under no obligation to take them, but will anyway. We seem to be incapable of preventing the rush toward a future where ever increasing numbers of economically functionless people rely on a dwindling pool of net taxpayers; a socialism where everybody gets progressively poorer.

The EU Juggernaut rolls on...

It is hard to imagine that this is the intention of the EU, but it is where their policies and intransigence appear to be leading. By the time the union is abandoned as an insupportable failure, the whole of Europe will have been lost to a ruinous idealism. We must get out before it is too late, while we still have the tiniest chance of wresting back control. Driverless lorries seems an apt metaphor for the unelected leaders taking us down the road to ruin.

Fighting Fair?

An interesting article by Anne Marie Waters in Breitbart a few days ago perfectly explains the perverse Newspeak of the forces of mother-state socialism and the lust for uniform mediocrity achieved through coercion and not by any natural human mechanism. In Germany of all places, where half the country was for so long a part of a ruthless communist dictatorship, they are busily rebuilding the wall, only this time they want to include all of Europe within its destructive embrace.

It only came down a quarter of a century ago. Are memories so short that European leaders are already prepared to rebuild a failed ideology and defend it by viciously attacking those who speak out? Once again we hear the trudge of metaphorical jackboots and formalised state terrorism marching back into the heart of Europe. This death wish for freedom, echoes the demands of islam and its ‘democracy go to hell’ clarion call. Never mind hell, what on earth is wrong with the citizens of the new Eurasia?

The deafening screech of the massed voices of eternal protest – the left, for whom it is as natural as breathing – overlay every area of life today and anybody who dare challenge their orthodoxy is shouted down. When they say ‘far right’ they mean you and I. It is ‘far right’ to oppose uncontrolled immigration. It is ‘far-right’ to defend the traditional family. And it is ‘far right’ to want to regain independence from the European Union, whose end game is a totalitarianism just as unyielding as the old USSR.

The dupes on the left are brought into line by swallowing wholesale the narrative that they will bring about a gentler, more caring world of inclusivity and equality if they only band together to threaten violence to those deemed ‘far-right’. Like good little Hitler Youth they believe right is on their side and while the rest of us want peaceful coexistence, the multicultural mantra demands special concessions from us towards people who have no intention of ever integrating. The only way to live with people who hate us is with as great a distance between them and us as is possible; that goes for the left as much as it does for islam. Europe belongs across the Channel.

David Cameron may believe he is cleverly exploiting our fears by pretending that invasion is imminent if we leave the EU. Having tried and failed to make the economic argument which few now believe and realising that the left-wing approach of insulting us all as ‘the far right’ was making little headway against the intelligent, he has gone full-1984 by stating an outright lie as truth. War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength. Taking back control of our borders, he says, is losing control of our borders and brooks no reason.

This referendum is Cameron's to lose but he is relying on fear to win the day. There are no hard facts in the EU debate; nobody knows what leaving will bring, but it is the only option which offers change and goodness knows we need a change. I’m going with the ‘far right’ option of free speech, free thought and freedom from foreign rule, otherwise what’s the point? But, just as Anne Marie Waters explained, I never expected a fair fight.

PS: The French have also called Cameron a liar.

Welcome to The Jungle

Jeremy Corbyn, in his efforts to show how much he despises Britain, has waded through the mud in Calais in a blatant photogenic festival of poverty. Poor them, he says, it’s not their fault and we must let more in. But what about France? Why are they not processed as refugees there? How have they been allowed to get as far as Calais anyway? And now that they are rioting, on what basis do we select the least violent to offer sanctuary. Of course Corbyn is simply riding on the Davos bandwagon, along with every other misguided ‘plight of the poor’ activist. I blame Oxfam.

Every year now, immediately prior to the meeting in Davos, Oxfam – that barometer of our conscience – publish an alarmist report to try and make you hate rich people. As if envy wasn’t enough, Oxfam feel that publishing meaningless comparisons will enrage the feeble-minded enough to... what? Rise up and overthrow the system that keeps even those on the dole here among the richest people in the world? The Romans knew a thing or two about bread and circuses and Oxfam are falling way short of their revolutionary aspirations by preaching mostly to the converted. 

This year, they say, a mere 62 billionaires own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. Good for them, I say, but let’s not fly off in a rage over the towering inequality of it all. Until I pay off my mortgage I’m worth less than a peasant in China who owns a hut and a goat. Because, make no mistake, wealth is no intelligent measure of privilege or even opportunity. Yes, yes, yes, it seems so unfair that some have so much and some have so little but I don’t think even the hard left actually despise success, per se; they just haven’t thought it all through; relative wealth, like relative poverty, is meaningless.

In pure monetary terms the total wealth of two billion poorest people on the planet are worth less than 50p. That’s their combined wealth. And it is because Oxfam’s metric determines wealth as ‘net worth’ which is the simple difference between assets and liabilities. So, like me, everybody with a mortgage which is more than they have in other realisable assets is in that world’s poorest group. Charles Dickens couldn’t have put it more clearly when he had Mr Micawber recite his recipe for prudent financial management: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

In the excellent Radio 4 show More or Less, it was calculated that if the wealth of those 62 billionaires was redistributed across the globe we would all be the princely sum of about £170 richer... which would still leave me and possibly you in negative wealth territory. The programme didn’t state the figure for the UK, but 25% of population of Germany have negative wealth; I imagine it is considerably higher in Britain. A Calais jungle migrant who owns a smartphone therefore, is richer than me, probably richer than you and certainly richer than many millions of people in Britain, by the same technique Oxfam uses to stoke your guilt..

But it’s worse than that. If the Calais migrants do get here they will be exploited by their own, or by organised gangs who will force them into debt they may never be able to repay. The western dream is an illusion. As for the demon inequality – the very perceived unfairness that the Corbynites seek to tackle – the irony is that it is being tackled; by capitalism. Poorer countries in Africa and elsewhere are developing at a faster rate than the declining and increasingly unstable west and global inequality is actually falling. Some of that is being driven by the assistance of those very billionaires who are turning their fortunes over to charity. But don’t let the facts get in the way of your oh-so-worthy crusades.