Europe trades freedom for comfort

Domestic peace and union were the natural consequences of the moderate and comprehensive policy embraced by the Romans. If we turn our eyes towards the monarchies of Asia, we shall behold despotism in the centre, and weakness in the extremities; the collection of the revenue, or the administration of justice, enforced by the presence of an army; hostile barbarians established in the heart of the country, hereditary satraps usurping the dominion of the provinces, and subjects inclined to rebellion, though incapable of freedom. But the obedience of the Roman world was uniform, voluntary, and permanent. The vanquished nations, blended into one great people, resigned the hope, nay, even the wish, of resuming their independence, and scarcely considered their own existence as distinct from the existence of Rome. (Gibbon, Chapter II)


These first Europeans as a result became soft; avoiding military service, they relied on foreign mercenaries to defend the Empire. Immured in the comfort of trade and modest prosperity they were content to put aside local allegiances and bonds of culture and nation, prepared to unlearn the ancient legends that defined them as separate and distinct peoples, and in the process lost the clarion that would rally them together in their defence. They burned their colours as symbols of superstition. Their identity was further diluted by mass immigration, as every aspirational would-be came to claim a share of the wealth and comfort;


A perpetual stream of strangers and provincials flowed into the capacious bosom of Rome. Whatever was strange or odious, whoever was guilty or suspected, might hope, in the obscurity of that immense capital, to elude the vigilance of the law (Gibbon, Chapter XV)

As a result, Rome fell not after brutal conquest, not after some epochian battle, but with a gentle shove at the border barrier by the barbarians. It was an uncontested walkover. And Europe plunged into its first dark age.  

Next week, much of Europe is set to surrender its sovereignty and democratic freedom in exchange for the mess of pottage that is technocratic rule from Brussels. The prospect of financial hardship has frightened them in a way the unimagined prospect of democratic non-being has not. Comfort has triumphed free will. As slaves they will be fed, housed and cared for, more or less, whereas as free men they would have to fight, struggle and face failure and destitution. There are also many on our Island who would embrace the comfort of slavery over the hardship and uncertainty of freedom. For the sake of our descendants, and in obligation to those our ancestors who have shed a thousand years of blood in defence of our realm, they must not prevail.

EURO going, going ....

Another day, and the Euro will become even more endangered. "In 30 years, I've never heard such talk from a bank chief" quotes the Mail, as the Bank advises us all to take cover as the imminent end of the Euro approaches. Meanwhile, in the Brussels bunker, Von Rumple calls on non-existent divisions and corps to move to his aid, but all he's got defending the Eurocapital are a few insane boys and some decimated BB rated banks. The Reich gold is in the alpine redoubt, as Generalfeldmarshall  Merkel prepares for the Fifth Reich, jealously guarding the wealth that will back the new NordReich Eurozone from the ruins of the Berlaymont.. 


It's time to let the Eurobanks fall as they will. Apart from the banks, firms are strong and cash-rich and asset-rich; these will not diminish as the banks crash, and will enjoy a bounce and a recovery in share values once the drag of the bankrupt Euro financial sector is removed from the markets. 


We're not going to move on out of recession without this major catharsis. It will be a huge hammer blow, but suddenly the chains and shackles will have been shattered and fall away, and the economy will rise. C'mon. let's get it done. 

RIP King Leka I

RIP Leka Zog, Son of King Zog the First, who didn't rule as Leka I. His son, born in 1982, also won't rule under the title Leka II. The House of Zogu goes on.  

Ford, British Leyland and Fleet St Print Chapels

The 1975 Employment Protection Act obliged employers to allow paid employees time-off to carry out Trade Union duties. This actually just recognised and enshrined in law the position then obtaining at the vast Midlands auto plants, and in Fleet Street, where the papers paid 'protection' money to the print chapels that included many TU officials drawing full wage packets without doing a stroke of work. 


Folk forget it was the much-despised Murdoch who broke the back of these practices when he moved NI to Wapping. The car plants just became insolvent and disappeared. The law is an anachronistic little bit of Socialist legislation way beyond its sell-by date and needs to be quietly scrapped. 


Cameron's announcement yesterday that it was to go in the public sector (and presumably the private sector, too) was just common sense. 

Government fails to protect Britons

The British people have a pretty highly developed idea of what's fair and what isn't. And it's nowhere near the idea of State-enforced inequality that Brown called 'fairness' and miles away from anything that Blair imagined, if his vacuous thought-process gave any attention to the thing at all. For it was Blair of course and his risible and narcissistic efforts to ingratiate himself with the US administration who signed the UK up to a grossly unequal extradition treaty with the US, intended to tackle terrorism but used in practice to extradite Britons running online betting sites or scamming UK banks. It was also Blair, of course, who signed us up to the European Arrest Warrant, which condemned Britons to automatic extradition on the writ of any semi-literate stubble-chinned Balkan police kapo. 


If you've accidentally driven away from an Italian filling station not knowing that Benzene theft carries a 12 month prison sentence in Perugia, no defence. If you've photographed a Greek military helicopter, an offence carrying a five year sentence in the home of democracy, no defence. If you've inadvertently received a stolen mobile phone from Poland, no defence. If you've given the gamblers of Arkansas and Kentucky the option of placing dollar bets on the geegees on your UK website, no defence. That ignorance of the law is no defence may be fair enough when it's only the UK's own laws involved; to avoid offending now, Britons have to be aware of the laws of twenty-eight other nations - and they don't even have to leave the UK to break them. And don't imagine that our tradition of free speech is any defence; several Euro nations have laws making it a criminal offence to be rude about their President or politicians, so something I write on this blog today about the Mayor of Transylvania may see me extradited within 90 days.


Cameron's government are in no hurry to remedy any of this, of course. What is antithetical to traditional Conservatism - constraints by foreign powers on the freedom of the British citizen - means nothing to the young Dave and his party HQ cabal. However, the case of Gary McKinnon has galvanised backbenchers into forcing a debate at least. The US-UK agreement may even be subject to change. But the EAW? Don't hold your breath. Implementation is a treaty obligation - and as long as we're ruled from Brussels, Britons are wholly subject to the whims and caprices of the many deeply corrupt and primitive legal systems of those lesser nations beyond the Pale.  

Planning for the collapse of the Euro

The weekend papers carried such a number of articles on a single subject - how the UK is contingency-planning for the collapse of the Euro - that one suspects this was no journalistic coincidence but the result of a quiet piece of Treasury spin. If so, one wonders who it was aimed at - those European Finance Ministries who refuse to recognise the possibility of Euro-collapse, the financial markets, UK business and industry or you and I. But clearly the break up of the Euro is no longer 'unthinkable' in government circles, though it's taken a year of bloggers and commentators united views on the inevitable collapse of the currency to get there. And whichever way you look at it, it will cost the UK something. 


It's the tendency of governments and more importantly of the mandarinate to pursue an economic creed long after its sell-by date that's interesting. Kinnock - in the sole achievement of a lifetime in politics - convinced his party to drop Clause Four on the basis that economic power was no longer about ownership, but about regulation. Only to see the most spectacular failures of regulation in the newly privatised / de-monopolised transport, energy, telecoms, financial and technology sectors. Gordon Brown even took the idea to the point that the nation no longer needed to own Gold, on the basis that it could regulate instead. Don't get me wrong - I never want to see the return of a State telephone service that rations copper lines, and the GDP boost we've enjoyed from the privatisation / liberalisation process has been important - but the wave of popular benefits doesn't include better pension provision or a lower national debt. 


Now of course there's not much left to privatise except one huge gleaming asset - the road network. London's already demonstrated that road pricing can be lucrative; a capital investment of £160m produces a net annual profit of £90m (excluding the massive capital premium a private firm would pay for say a 25 year right to charge). Private Toll roads have a long history in the UK, being nationalised only in 1888. Perhaps it's time to flog off the Motorways? 

The evil of Pankaj Mishra

You will not have heard of Pankaj Mishra; he is a non-entity, without academic or serious literary credentials, undeserving of fame through his single claim to notoriety - having had an essay published in the Guardian. Niall Ferguson comments that 'it seems to be becoming de rigueur for mediocrities to build their fame on attacking those more successful than them', and this is the root of the matter. Ferguson, who holds a chair at the LSE and a professorship at Harvard, has suggested in his several books, lectures and TV programmes that colonialism was not an unalloyed disaster for the colonised nations. Mishra, unable to refute the point academically, and without the literary ability to do so otherwise in print, has resorted to the last refuge of talentless scoundrels and rogues by accusing Ferguson of racism. 


By doing so, Mishra places himself intellectually firmly back in sixteenth century Europe amongst a people for whom neither the first or second enlightenments was even on the horizon, and where any departure from orthodoxy, every advance in science, cosmology, engineering or scholarship, could be denounced as 'heresy' and earn the heretic a place at the stake. Mishra is like a Dominican Inquisator, unable to refute or argue the passage of the Earth around the Sun or the impossibility of a literal Genesis, whose sole response is limited to an accusation that Ferguson refuses to accept the given word, that his arguments are unorthodox. But 'racist' is every bit as damning today as 'heretic' was in the sixteenth century, and Ferguson is absolutely correct in not allowing the matter to lie.


Mishra would drag us back to an intellectual dark age in which men of talent and vision would cower afraid of the Inquisitor's knock at the door, an age in which human advance in knowledge and scholarship is suffocated, writers afraid to write, historians fearful of drawing any conclusions contrary to Mishra's blinkered and bigoted orthodoxy. Just as the actions for 'heresy' are now rightly seen as sins against Man, and thus intrinsically evil, so must we now classify the denunciations by these new Inquisators of those they would label 'racist'.