Power

So Guy Verhofstadt, 47^th Prime Minister of Belgium, author of The United States of Europe and grand architect of federalism has been campaigning for the MEP elections alongside the most ironically-named party in British politics - the Liberal Democrats (if you discount Change UK, or whatever they are called today). The LibDems are, of course, far from liberal and intent on defying democracy, so Guy ought to feel snugly at home.

At the core of Verhofstadt’s political thesis is the ultimate transfer of sovereignty of all the countries of Europe to the caring stewardship of the oh-so-benign European Union. He wants nothing less than a country called Europe and pursues this end with a zeal which would be admirable were he, say, a philanthropist or an athlete, or an artist. But he is none of these things; he is instead a purveyor of a sinister and potentially dangerous ideology.

Eschewing nationalism and what he calls populism (you know; what we used to call democracy) he calls for people to abandon patriotic bonds with their home nation and replace them with a singular love for a new, bigger, more powerful country. This is literally what he wants; that people become citizens and patriots of a superpower. He repeats, time and again, that nationalism is what caused all of the wars in Europe, but somehow believes that a new supra-nationalism will bring peace. I can only assume he thinks the old nationalism was the wrong type of nationalism; much as 'true socialism has never been tried'.

This is ever the reasoning in the EU; the problems arising from uncurbed power can only be solved by devolving yet more power to the EU. The problems caused by the too-rapid integration and harmonisation of EU idealism can only be solved by the imposition of more and faster EU regulations and diktats. Even Tony Blair recognised that the rationale for the EU was not peace, but power, something he appears happy to subscribe to.

But the problems begin at the very first whiff of power and influence. It changes people; it distances them from those who put them in office. And if you somehow think this isn’t so, cast a glance in the direction of Alastair Campbell, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, Muammar Gaddafi, Adolf Hitler (obviously), Pol Pot and Tony Blair himself. And if you think this is outrageous – listing living influencers in the same sentence as tyrants and dictators – maybe you haven’t really understood the true nature of power.

If nationalism is such a bad thing, why do Euro-federalists want to be a nation? And when this single, giant nation becomes too powerful and begins to threaten the security and peace of neighbouring states, who will bring them to book? In other words, what will the EU do with the power and how can we be even slightly mollified by apparently peaceful intent? In the too-often quoted but inescapable 1984 another Blair writes “Power is inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing... Power is not a means; it is an end” It is time to put an end to this.

Kippered

Nigel Farage has done it again. Whatever his detractors say – and I have been among them – the man has charisma and nobody pulls a crowd quite like the bloke they are calling the British Trump. Like Trump he is loathed by those among us who consider themselves better people; the more educated, the ’creative’, the more likely to be engaged in securing powers (not rights, powers) for minorities many were unaware even existed. Like Trump he is accused of various forms of extremism, clumsily labelled far-right and like Trump he continues to defy the political calculus of the establishment.

Listening last week to the Radio 4 analysis of the Spanish elections the result was being hailed as a glorious victory for the socialists and a defeat of the far right. In reality the socialist vote was dented but the soft-right vote was slashed, it’s deserters staying away in disappointed disgust, or else backing candidates whose common sense views (far-right, to the bien pensant commentators) chimed with their own experiences, their aspirations and, well, their down-to-earth view of society.

Society, if anything, should surely be an orderly collusion to include everybody, seek fairness and try and improve the lives of the many, not the few. The few, in this case, not being Jeremy Corbyn’s imagined barons, lording it over the peasants – they inhabit a totally different realm and many of the peasants adore them for it – but the societal outliers who currently, it appears, have far too much influence over political discourse. Misgender somebody and you can end up with a criminal record – on what planet is that a proportionate response?

Ask a former Labour voter why they no longer support the party and Brexit betrayal will be high on the list. But just as important will be the rationale of feeling displaced by ‘others’, people not like them. You can’t – at least you mustn’t – force people to accept too much change too quickly. That the left’s response to this is not to throttle back on the crusade but to criminalise the ‘othering’ of outsiders is to misread the mood so completely as to render many of their better and more honourable ideas equally facetious.

So, we are pushing back. Bully us so far and we shrug it off, but step over the line and don’t expect there not to be consequences. This is being repeated across the western world as people say ‘enough’. But the form of the message is just as important as the message itself; possibly more important. You could be a near saint, but should somebody manage to apply the merest shade of bigotry to your portrait the chances are it will stick and try as people might to understand the true character, they will never be able to unsee the metaphorical swastika, the emblem du jour of those who have appointed themselves as commissioners for the thought police. Examples of perfectly decent people cast as villains abound; scarcely a week goes by without some venerable sage being un-personed.

And this is, in part, the key to Farage’s current success. He has harnessed the mood and he is dead right about our dissatisfaction. But why didn’t he stick with Ukip, you may wonder? Remember the extent to which he was vilified by those oh-so-clever media types? Remember how he had to stand up and somehow account for some of the more outlandish proclamations of Ukip candidates who were often incompletely vetted and inadequately trained for the public stage? Remember the infighting, the succession of short-lived leaders?

I honestly believe he had no choice. And I honestly believe he thought that after the referendum vote, Ukip’s purpose had been achieved. He left and he didn’t leave a way back in and I think he was right. I like Gerard Batten and I think Tommy Robinson is a formidable player, but Ukip’s day is done, while the Brexit Party is fresh yet full of experienced, principled, known figures. The BP doesn’t need a broader prospectus, like Ukip before it, it has one job. I hope to see them do it.

When Thursday Comes

So the Conservatives are dead. Not just here in the UK, where they have been on life support despite best advice for decades, but in Spain, too, it seems. The supposed ‘fascist’ ‘far-right’, ‘extreme right’ resurgent Nazi party, Vox, has split the right-wing vote, but the jubilant declarations of victory for the left have a hollow ring. The socialists didn’t manage an outright majority and some commentary suggests they only held the seats they did because people believed the negative campaigning against the ‘voice of the people’.

Make no mistake, Vox’s party name is not chosen in vain and its equivalent across the westernised, socialised world is growing in confidence. Socialism sounds so good when you only hear the aspirations, but humans have a habit for acting in their own interests. When a political party promises milk and honey the do-withouts are naturally drawn to them; why would they do otherwise? But when they realise that the left is just as authoritarian, if not far more so, than the right, many find the promise turning sour.

Yes, of course, if you are at the bottom of the heap, of course you should want better. And from that position there appear to be far too many who sail through life without lifting a finger; inherited wealth, cushy positions, more money than they can spend in a lifetime, etc. The sort of people who openly display their good fortunes (boastfulness also being a human trait). But they are just the visible targets, largely because the rest of us are quietly toiling away, getting by and hoping not to be rinsed by the system.

For the fact is, tax and welfare is a zero sum game. Just as you can’t borrow your way out of debt – no matter what Jeremy Corbyn might think - you can’t tax yourselves into prosperity. Yes it could be fairer, yes some people could and possibly should pay more tax, but the reality is that profligate governance got us where we are now and the election of an uber-profligate replacement will do nothing to improve the situation apart from some highly visible, highly popular, but ultimately doomed redistribution.

But it won’t be taxing the rich to feed the poor it will be – as always – taxing the coping to prop up the needy and – as always – it won’t be enough. The only outcome of same-old-socialism will be even more support for the right in the future; and it will come from the very people on whose side the left always claim to fight. Instead of the moderate right who are currently winning support, socialists will embolden and empower the sort of ignorant far-rightism they are currently crying wolf over.

The voice of the people - coming to a country near you.

So, this Thursday and quite rightly, the Conservatives are going to take a hammering in the local elections, but will they learn from it? Of course not. Labour won’t suffer so badly, but will they understand why? Almost certainly not. Brace yourselves for your council taxes to increase again, your potholes to go unfilled, your street lighting to splutter and die and your town centres to decline still further... yet expect no realistic solutions to come from any quarter. Politics as usual.

Rebellion Extinct

The revolting kiddies– Extinction Rebellion – have eschewed their chocolate eggs to take to the streets, rend their garments and openly weep into their iPhones about how they may never get to be parents. Give me strength; having survived the any-four-minutes-now imminent assured mutual nuclear destruction hysteria of the nineteen sixties and seventies and the great extinction scares of the nineteen eighties, please excuse me if I call bullshit on ‘the end is nigh’. Repent, sinners, they all seem to say: the religious, the climatists, repent and admit thy sins and... what? Go on, what?

The climate will change and no doubt we will have some effect on it, but running all our transport on coal isn’t going to help a jot. A recent German study claims that electric cars are environmentally more disastrous – if that disaster can ever be proved – than diesel. True or false one thing is for sure and that is, once governments stop raking in the massive fuel duties, expect the price of electricity to soar. Once again – like solar photo-voltaic farms, or planting forests, or carbon trading - the costs will be disproportionately borne by those least able to gain an economic advantage. It’s the poor wot gets the blame, etc.

Yet here we still are. Despite the regular-as-clockwork predictions of running out of food, water, oil, oxygen, etc, the human race keeps on finding solutions to the problems it creates. Unique among the animals, when we do shit on our own doorstep we can always find another, lesser, human to clear it up, but I expect nothing less than a Malthusian event will ever satisfy the weeping wall of climate alarmists busily recording for a posterity they believe will never be realised just how terribly sad they were about it. But look around and see how much the world gives a shit.

Ukraine elects, by a landslide, a comedian as president. The religion of peas shoots up Sri Lanka and well, the earth continues to turn despite all the protestations of an immediate cessation of such rotational activity. Climatism has far more in common with religion than it does with science - there can be only one orthodoxy and all else is heresy - and to continue that observation, it is much more like islam than it is any other faith. Who else but climatists and islamists would go to the extremes they do?

Think about it. It isn’t long ago that islamic terrorism was being blamed on the wicked climate change of the west. Are they the last generation, the ExtReb children tearfully asked? God, I hope so! But no, there will be plenty of future generations of needy, whiny, entitled idiots, persuaded that they have relevance and that anybody gives a toss what they think. Their new messiah appears to be a Swedish child, Greta Thunberg, now being touted as the next Nobel Peace Prize winner. Children are the future? Take us now.

Get us out

The Tories are metaphorically holding a telescope up to their blind eye and declaring “I see no rocks!” while steering a course directly for the lighthouse. But then they are also pretending that the Conservative & Unionist Party still has a cohesive identity. It is clear that the EU issue which has riven the party for decades should now precipitate a serious discussion about their purpose and their future. It is too late for the local elections, far too late for the unnecessarily upcoming MEP elections and given the parlous state of their leadership contender list probably too late for the next general election... and the one after that.

In the meantime, frantically bashing the Brexit Party isn’t helping either Conservatives or Labour, rather it is aiding and abetting the BP and the Tories are probably receiving the worst caning of their electoral lives. It’s like they just haven’t ‘listened’, or ‘learned lessons’ as they so often insist they must. Have they not seen the ginger ninja over the pond and how his popularity grows with ever publicised excoriation?

Vituperative comments about Nigel Farage - Mr Brexy M^cBrexit-Face himself - are just recruiting slogans for him, especially enticing for the literally millions of people disenfranchised by the open contempt in which they are held by Parliament for daring to vote with their own agency and not as directed by their lord and masters. The blue rosette brigade may claim they are not afraid of Farage but, as much as David Cameron may forever seek to deny it, isn’t this the very reason the referendum was held in the first place?

And what of the non-Farage alternatives? See how both left and right (that is, far left and centre left; Labour and Conservatives) have united to condemn all pro-Brexit parties as fascistic and see how much of a dent that has made. There comes a point while you are being consistently insulted that you realise it is just a bunch of words. And when those words have no basis in reason, no factual validation, David Lamey, Anna Sobriety and Caroline Mucus can call you a Nazi until they are blue in the face and it makes no impact. If ‘they’ are against them, those parties must have a point.

As for a new politics, however, we are firmly back in the usual territory with every side expending all their resources in attacking the others and none actually plotting a course to steer us away from danger. And we are thoroughly fed up of having to vote for the least worse and knowing that our first-past-the-post system and the electoral boundaries condemn us to hamstrung, minority, same-old-parties governance.

So, as much as I know this to be mere wishful thinking, I harbour a hope that Farage and Co can do as much damage as possible to both Labour and the Conservatives and gain enough seats to hold the balance of power. I want to see the Tories recognise that their split over the EU is a genuine and deep one and that they need to burn their current constitution and form two new parties from the ashes. I want Labour to divide into a middle-class luvvies party which every other voter will despise and a genuine workers’ party, which may regain some dignity.

Corbyn comes to May's Rescue

And as for our future relationship with the EU, I want none. Nothing political at least, except recognition that we are not the same and possibly never will be. Listening to various EU leaders and their stooges it is clear they don’t give a fuck about us, so why don’t we reciprocate? I am pretty sure I am with millions of others who will abandon their traditional political allegiances and lend their vote to whatever option at the ballot box will re-send the clear message we signalled in 2016. Get. Us. Out.