Fond O' Lying?

Ursula von der Leyen has, as expected, been shooed into the position of EU Commission President by the faux democratic process of voting, from a shortlist of candidates including herself and… er, herself. The result has been loudly touted as 52% to 48%, mirroring the Brexit referendum and therefore as equally valid. After all, sayeth the righteous remoaners, if 52% is an ‘overwhelming majority’ (something leavers have never actually claimed) why all the belly-aching?

Why? Well it’s as if Keith Vaz were to chair the committee for standards in public life for some time after the cocaine-fuelled rent-boy episode. Or as if renowned anti-white racist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown were to appear on our televisions almost every day to berate us for our skin colour. Or – and you’ll have to admit this is something of a stretch – as if unelected advisors were given titles so that they could take seats in the House of Lords and thereby bypass the election procedure and end up being cabinet members.

It’s all a question of legitimacy and the Brexit Party, among others, are in the EU Parliament precisely to try and open your eyes to what is really happening. To suggest that a disgraced German politician – under investigation for insider dealings in defence contracting – and utterly unknown outside her home country is a fit person to lead the commission is risible at best, sinister if you tend towards darker imaginings.

“But she was voted for!” They cry. Narrowly, yes. But no alternative was given. This wasn’t a contest, it was a rubber-stamping exercise, exactly as Nigel Farage has been saying for years. The majority of MEPs in the chamber are paid up EU devotees and yet they only just managed to get sufficient ‘yeas’ to pass the appointment. But where were they in the selection process? Where were the Euro-hustings allowing the ruled to see who would rule over them? Where were the preliminary voting rounds?

“How did Farage get to be leader of the Brexit Party, then?” they demand, “That’s exactly the same thing!” Is it? Did the BP suddenly take over the country? Is Farage the Prime Minister, or is he, in fact, simply the very popular leader of a party he founded? It is normal, indeed it is healthy, to question nepotism, secret committee selections, graft, corruption and abnormal voting outcomes. It is right to question polls limited to specific cohorts. And it is also right to question the current Tory Party system, but at least its members have had a say and all the selections have been highly public; embarrassingly so.

But the closed-door shenanigans of the EU’s ruling elite are not properly held to account. They aren’t even properly held to the light.  This is the entire point of Brexit. We have enough trouble being informed of the intentions, the motives, the reliability of our own, usually directly elected ‘representatives’. But how can we be represented by people we have never heard of, who often come with political or even criminal baggage and over whom we have no power to deselect?

Me? My, what a surpise!

At a time when more transparency is being demanded here at home; when higher standards are being demanded of our governors; when people are demanding a greater say in how our country is run; it is ludicrous for those who shout “Who funds you?” at Nigel Farage to be cheering on the farce of this ‘election’. There have always been crooks and low-lifes in positions of power, but why should we stand for a system in which this is not a regrettable exception, but an entry requirement?

Mending the Roof

A stitch in time saves nine, they say and how wise they were. I have been spending my annual leave fixing up the house and as with all such projects you realise, too late, how a little regular maintenance can avoid wholesale refurbishment. As you strip back the layers of emergency patching you eventually reach the point where the rot began and belatedly begin to put the underlying structure straight. It takes far more effort than it should, costs way more than if the damage hadn’t been just concealed, but ultimately makes a home fit for the future.

During the week it has struck me what an apt metaphor for our country this is. When the great liberalisation of society began, the minority voices agitating for change were relatively small; a drip-drip-drip of barely acknowledged protest which was ignored for years. But as ‘people power’ grew and the ability to promulgate your grievances far and wide meant that more suggestible, recruitable people heard the calls, change gradually came about. The criminalised became legal, the marginalised mainstream. These were durable patches and they kept out the rain.

But underneath all of that, the foundations supporting the whole edifice were beginning to crumble. The rod was spared and the child spoiled rather more often than was just and necessary. The desire for government to represent the make-up of the people was accelerated and its champions were recklessly vindicated as brick after brick began to spall and was left to crumble, the cracks painted over and a fresh coat of bright, vibrant diversity applied. And as one house flouted the planning rules, others followed suit. The rainbow squat, held together by gaudy paint and the flimsy glue of peace and love, maaan, became the norm, rather than the mildly tolerated exception.

Uneasy at the rapid change the authorities pointed to neighbouring countries and implied that not to follow where they led was a mistake. In fact, they decided, we should go further. If gimcrack shanty towns were good enough for the French, they said, it would be xenophobic to demand we restricted the rate of change and insisted we lead the charge instead. And when the cracks appeared? Why, they papered over them as well, with whatever inferior materials they had to hand.

If you build a shed on uncertain footings and weatherproof it with wallpaper it will soon disappear into the mud when the rains come. But a shed is a simple and not too costly matter to replace, wholesale. You may have lost some of what you kept in it and you may have had to endure the ribbing from your wiser neighbours, but build it back, properly and harmony will return. But how do you set about rebuilding the whole street, town, city... country?

We're going to need more gaffer tape...

For those hard of comprehension this is, of course, an allegory, a somewhat tortured metaphor for the current and future state of our civilisation. While the Gilets Noirs run riot in Paris, while millions agitate for supranational control of our ability to keep our own house in order, while anti-democratic movements demand that borders be broken down and the rule of law be misapplied to allow it, some of us – hopefully more of us each day – see that it cannot continue. The rain is coming and we are far from ready.

Elite

Oh, the old globalist conspiracy reared its head again recently, although I expect the job of the conspiracy theorists is never just part time; more of a mission than a one night stand. The ‘global elite’ goes the trope, seek to keep us in poverty. Really, they seek to keep us in poverty do they; why would they do that? Surely they would be far better elite global conspiracists if they sought to make us just wealthy enough that we don’t whine about it and dangled just enough gewgaws in our acquisitive little faces that we kept recycling that wealth and in the process made themselves all the richer still.

But such logic can never surface above the film of envy which cloaks every leftists manifesto for their perfect world, filled with perfect humans who never want more than they need. But think about it, really, if your serfs are happy and fed they are less likely to agitate too strongly for change. What would and does make all of us poorer, however, is an insistence on a nebulous, unobtainable ‘equality’ which seeks to restrict those who do better and advance those who don’t. When every little setback is given its own special place in the pantheon of grievance we end up punishing thrift and rewarding indolence and fraud.

Conspiracy? We don’t need conspiracy when so many people have brains hard-wired to see injustice and conclude, therefore, it must be Tory injustice. People being killed off by austerity? Deliberate policies to punish people for falling ill? Seriously, you think that Tories (spit that word, son, spit it) actually, deliberately, wish to cause people harm? Wish to push people into needing expensive treatment which they then deny them? How sick must your mind be to come up with stuff like that? And in any case it’s what you would denigrate as ‘Tory types’ who will foot the bill; it always is. (And you can bet it isn’t Tories who are currently defrauding universal credit recipients to the tune of millions.)

If you want a simpler theory, here’s the evolution-versus-divine-creation comparison: What if making everybody wealthier made the rich wealthier still? What if, people actually having money to spend better serves the globalist ambitions than keeping them in poverty? Steal from people and soon they have nothing left to steal [give a man a fish]. Or allow people to amass spending power of their own and let them buy stuff from you forever [teach him to fish]. Which is the more likely? Which is the least trouble? Which of them requires the least amount of collusion and contorted conspiracy?

Meanwhile we keep on researching poverty and in doing so introduce ever more measures to tell people how badly done by they are when we should be explaining to them how to best participate in the only economic model that has ever really worked – western capitalism - a system in which output has increased 100-fold, work days have been halved and lifespans doubled in the last two hundred years. But all this is wasted on those who would rather wallow in grievance and believe the world is set against them. Now, excuse me, as I must go and skin another poor person for the pot.

Indifferent

In the past few days, several senior Conservatives, including Jeremy Hunt, have warned that leaving the EU without a deal would pose a major threat to The Union, with Nicola Sturgeon already ploughing ahead with plans for a second referendum on Scottish independence. David Lammy tweeted out – in a break from his usually ceaseless anti-white tirade – “I don't remember seeing the break up of the United Kingdom on the ballot paper in 2016”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage has suggested that while regrettable, the break-up of the United Kingdom would be a price worth paying to deliver Brexit. 

From whence has come this shirt-rending angst over the precious union? Teflon Theresa, it would seem, in her latest attempt at leaving office without her only ‘legacy’ being that she could not deliver what the British people demanded. British, did I say? I no longer feel British, but I feel - more fiercely than ever - English to the core and it is the English who have the axe to grind with the EU. May has pledged (though it is hardly in her gift) to keep the United Kingdom together. Boris Johnson has gone so far as to state that preservation of this uneasy union is more important than leaving the EU. I beg to differ.

May’s deputy, David Lidington has gone on record to talk about English indifference to the union, as reported in The Scotsman newspaper. But in doing so and just like all the others he does not, or rather refuses to, grasp the reasons why. The Union? Yes, I – we – can see it as a strength and yes, as an island it is preferable not to allow foreign powers to have a border within our shores, but I’m not sure that indifference is the right word; frustration might be closer. What we are certainly not indifferent to is the way in which being English has virtually become a punishable offence. If, as many believe, Scotland should be governed by the Scottish, then why should governance of England not be exclusively the preserve of the English?

Recognising that London is no longer an English city, as John Cleese so rightly remarked, can you imagine the backlash if we were to hold an annual English Pride celebration? Even better, a whole English Pride month; a month in which we could come out of the closet and wear St George emblems and declare ourselves openly English without fear of censure. Well of course it won’t happen; as with the Conservatives, Englishness has been sacrificed on the altar of precarious union and must now only be practised behind closed doors.

Will Boris bring back English pride? Will he strengthen or – as is more likely – widen the divides that exist inter and intra-nation? Whether or not we leave the EU and whether or not the countries of the former United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland go on to peacefully coexist as independents or maintain close union is, at the moment, simply not germane to the pressing urgency of actually delivering Brexit. Indifferent to Scottish independence? If I’m honest I’m just not that bothered.

Are YOU the Baddies?

A frequent demand we hear from Remainers, confused and afraid of a future without anybody to tell them with what they may wipe their arses, is to name one tangible benefit of leaving the EU. Just one they cry; and then, when a dozen perfectly respectable reasons are presented, they dismiss them as unicorns. ‘You don’t know’, they insist, to which we all chorus, ‘neither do you’. But there is one very real benefit which we receive every day, even before we have extended so much of a toe into the greater world beyond.

It is a benefit which brings me joy unconfined. Forget the execrable dirge, Ode to Joy and give me, every time, the true Brexit anthem – the massed weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth and garment-rending of those with such poverty of ambition they wish to cling onto Mutti Europe’s apron strings forever. Oh, how flat the Libdems jolly ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ tee-shirt jape fell as they just looked like kids on a massive sulk. And even better, Molly Scott Cato – Green MEP – announced on Twitter that they had actually stopped Brexit. Ah the innocence of the fresh-scrubbed mind.

But oh, the wrath of the media and the self-righteous cheerleaders for supranational governance. No masked thugs of Antifa, no hysterical TellMama lies about non-existent offences, no milkshakes, no braying idiots with megaphones, no face paint, no 30-year old idiot children in shorts and overly-tight tees, no idiot in a cape; just a quiet, dignified refusal to honour the undemocratic de-facto country called the EU. That was all. The Brexit Party had intended to sit for the odious anthem, but when it was insisted they stand they simply turned their backs.

No bricks were thrown, no fists were raised and not a single reputation was impuned. They didn’t even say Bollocks to No-Brexit, or Fuck-EU; they just quietly turned away from the tune which Hitler, on more than one occasion, chose for his birthday celebrations. Remember Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange – the ninth was used for that very reason. You’d have thought that the association of Beethoven with some of the world’s more extreme ideologies would have been food for thought when selecting an anthem for a supposed peace project.

Anyway, the FBPE hashtags were in a froth right out of the gate. Then they decided to double down with the incessant Nazi Party comparisons; ‘you know who else turned their back?’ etc... Oh, the irony of the fan-boys of the Hitler inspired German dominance of Europe fabricating equivalences were there were none. Even the recently self-nonentitied Gavin Esler tweeted out that very foolish and very easily demolished post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Esler: the search for relevance continues...

Unlike Nazism and Communism and Socialism and Corbynism and islamism and all the other isms inspired by political thinking and deep-rooted desires to re-shape the world, ‘Brexitism’ is not a cabal of power-crazy conspirators whipping up the crowd. There is no ideological kernel, no plot by supposed rich backers or rogue states to destabilise western society and rake in profits. With the Brexit Party what you see is what you get. Ordinary people, dismayed at how their voice is ignored, fighting back; fighting for survival; fighting to be heard.

If you want to dress that up as the resurrection of Hitler himself that speaks volumes about your poverty of empathy, your inability to accept simple things at face value, your refusal to face facts, your loathing for individualism and most of all, your impotent rage at losing a vote. Because, for all your pretending you are the only ones who see the light, you are the ones who are being played. Like a cheap violin. You want to see Nazis? Look in the mirror.