Britain's National Socialists

When I have previously catalogued on here the shared ideology between the British left and the Nazi party, an ideology based on racial purity, Eugenics, State control over breeding and marriage and the horror of 'involuntary euthanasia', or State murder, an ideology that persisted in Polly Toynbee's beloved left wing Scandinavian countries into the 1970s with compulsory sterilisation, I'm sure some readers have thought the parallels a little forced. Bernard Shaw wanted to kill the poor with a 'humane lethal gas'; more tellingly he also wanted to rid Britain of Jews, writing to Beatrice Webb he wrote

We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable, but insisting they do it as humanely as they can afford to

No doubt also subjecting them to a 'humane lethal gas'. Along with Shaw, the Webbs and HG Wells, even Virginia Woolf was a supporter of State murder; after passing a line of the profoundly mentally ill, she wrote "Imbeciles - every one of them a miserable, ineffective, shuffling, idiotic creature. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

After 1945 and the horror of the extermination camps, the Labour Party quickly performed one of those acts of collective amnesia and wiped all memory of their own National Socialist agenda from the record. Just as that loathsome gulag-apologist Nye Bevan has been resurrected as some sort of saint. But no longer am I alone in daring to say these things, it seems.

Jonathan Freedland writes today in the Guardian that it's time the Labour Party and the British left faced up to their poisonous ideological legacy. Until they do, he implies, the worth of each individual human soul will still be subjugated to a left ideology of collective good;

Progressives face a particular challenge, to cast off a mentality that can too easily regard people as ends rather than means. For in this respect a movement is just like a person: it never entirely escapes its roots.

Central Banking State

The baleful and malign Central State is nothing if not cunning in seeking its own preservation at the taxpayer's expense. Whilst Osborne's austerity cuts have been concentrated on the most visible and proximate services to the general public - police, fire, health, libraries, swimming pools and the like - the jobs of the 2.36m employees of the Central State seem to have remained wholly intact.But have they?

I'm tempted to cut and paste the entire list of 2,420 central government bodies making up the total, as used by the Office of National Statistics, but will leave you to download the .xls file if you've a mind. But what struck me most is the extent in the State accounts of the banking sector; not only the entire Bank of England, Banking Department and Issues Department, but also 

ABN Amro Bank NV
Adam and Company plc
AMC Bank Ltd
Bank of Scotland plc
Black Horse Ltd
Coutts & Co
Lloyds Bank (BLSA) Ltd
Lloyds Banking Group plc
Lloyds TSB Bank plc
Lloyds TSB Private Banking Ltd
Lloyds TSB Scotland plc
Mortgage Express (England)
National Employment Savings Trust Corporation (NEST)
National Westminster Bank plc
Northern Ireland Central Investment Fund for Charities
Northern Rock plc
Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc
Royal Bank of Scotland plc, The
Scottish Widows Bank plc
Ulster Bank Ireland Ltd
Ulster Bank Ltd

I'd almost forgotten that Coutts, the Queen's bank, had been nationalised. Likewise the BOS. In the 'years of bitter wrangling over Scotland's future' to come I can see the future of Scotland's nominal banks as playing no insignificant part - if only to get them off the English books.

Drunks support 72,000 nurses

Along with the 'Wales' the 'London Bus' and the 'Football Pitch', the 'Nurse' is a standard unit of measurement well understood by the newspaper reading public (as in 'An area the size of Wales is to be covered with wind towers each the height of six London Buses and with a sail area of 0.3 Football pitches; each is equivalent to the costs of 14.7 Nurses'). You see, the headline news that drunks cost the NHS £2.7bn a year means absolutely nothing to most people. Now let's make sense of it.

Some 80% of NHS costs are salaries and wages, so some £2.16bn of the annual drunk cost. An average Nurse is £30k a year, so the UK's socially responsible and altruistic drunks actually directly support the employment of some 72,000 out of the country's 400,000 nurses. What's more, with government income from Spirit duties at £2.3bn, Wine duties at £2.9bn and beer and cider duties at £3.4bn, some £8.6bn, they're paying not only for these 72,000 nurses but another 215,000 of the remaining 328,000. In fact, without the support of the county's drunks, the NHS would collapse.

Drinkers of Britain, this blog praises your sterling and selfless efforts for the care and well being of your fellow Britons. My you never stint in your duty to quaff, may you never refuse just one more and may you never flee from a round. You are the backbone of the realm.

Going over the edge

As Richard North blogs this morning,German efforts to quietly push Greece out of the Eurozone continue apace. Neither are the Greeks in any doubt who is responsible; these images from Spiegel Online illustrate just how vicious the mood is becoming in Greece; this is fast going past the point of no return.

State overkill

Journalism is a grubby trade. A journalist must be prepared to lie, con, distort, deceive, bribe, subvert, cajole, cozen and pander in order to produce the stories that compel us to buy their papers. Strangely, we rely on this deeply flawed, unreliable, dishonest and publicly loathed breed of men and women to seek out something called 'the truth'. Even more strangely, and perhaps almost by accident, they frequently do so. Despite the many shortcomings of the press, their many failures and weaknesses, they are an essential part of the armour of the people against the sword of the State. Like a bacillus that eats shit, journalism is unpleasant but vital for our wellbeing. 

Trevor Kavanagh's protest against the heavy-handed use of force and sheer numbers of officers who mounted an assault on the Sun's journos is absolutely right. They're targeting the wrong people. It is the business of the press to offer bribes to policemen for information; the most draconian penalties must be reserved for the plods who accept, not the journos who offer. Like those coprophage bacteria, they're just doing their job.  

Sarkozy parrots Orban

There will be a collective case of the vapours amongst the colleagues infesting the Berlaymont this week. They can just about cope with a little nation like Hungary turning to the right on a platform of "Work, Home, Family, Health and Order" but when the President and Presidential candidate of France signals a change in his campaign to focus on "National Identity, Discipline, Order, Immigration, Work and Family" their soft lily-white hands must tremble as they hover over the lavish expense forms.

Sarkozy's turn to the right is a tactical move designed to place him on the same platform as Marine le Pen, and to secure him a run through to the second round. The smart money is on the Socialist candidate Hollande being knocked-out in the first round, leaving a clear race between Sarkozy and le Pen for the Presidency of the Fifth Republic. Whether the French will then pick this unpopular and bristly little haemorrhoid over a woman who could model for Marianne will make this contest the most exciting French Presidential race in years. 

By the time the first round is played on 22nd April, the Greeks could well have held their imminent Parliamentary election, with unknown results. If indeed they are still members of the Eurozone by then. The popular realisation across Europe that "postmodern relativism, redistributive left-liberalism, Frankfurt School cultural radicalism, and Marxian socialism", the ideological bedrock of the European left, has left the continent with a poison legacy of debt and unsustainable social engineering is driving the political pendulum back to basic values. In Greece the left wing PASOK won 44% of the vote in 2009; today their support is down to 8%, their support bleeding to parties on the right.

At home of course this leaves Ed Miliband set to follow Michael Foot as the Labour leader most disconnected from the voters. With no credible alternative to the discredited platform of the redistributive left, and voters still rightly blaming Labour for our economic mess, prospects look bleak for Labour in 2015.

The European Commission will be the toughest nut to crack; even if the European Parliament gains a right-wing majority. The Berlaymont is the Bastille of our age. Maybe it will take a Marianne to storm it.

Honesty is optional for EU, says court

Giacomo Regaldo (left), a grubby little Italian thief, was a former committee member of the EU's EESC (see post below). Not only for almost six years did he claim the cost of return flights from Brussels to Rome from the EU, he claimed the same costs from his domestic sponsoring organisation. The additional fact that he never actually made the trips at all, having a permanent home in Brussels, would add considerably to his sentence you would have thought - unless, that is, the case is heard in a Belgian court.

In a recent judgement that our own bent Parliamentarians would relish, a Belgian court has recently ruled that honesty is purely optional for the EU nomenklatura. It was perfectly OK for Regaldo to defraud the EU; not a crime at all, the system allowed him to do it, even if it was fraudulent and dishonest. 

The EU thinks the UK would be greatly improved by adopting European systems of justice. Now I'm sure I know why.

Criminal Maladministration

The EU has some 500 million 'citizens' with whom it is keen to communicate directly, bypassing national democratic and consultative structures. With its vast administrative budget and human resource, you'd imagine this would pose a real threat and challenge not only to the 'formal' national structures responsible for voter dialogue, but to all of us little folk who use the new media to make our point. Just thank goodness for the natural greed, indolence and incompetence of the EU nomenklatura that such efforts are so risibly hopeless that this blog does a better job than one of the top funded EU agencies leading the initiative.

The Economic and Social Committee (EESC), the lead agency for 'engaging participation', has recently increased its budget by 50% reports EUobserver, to around €130m annually, nearly all of it spent on the salaries and expenses of its 50 officials and 344 members. Six officials are on a minimum salary of €180,000 and the rest enjoy a minimum wage of €123,890; additionally, each member gets travel expenses averaging €49,000 a year and a lump-sum payment for attending meetings. The annual cost of the committee is some €378,000 per member including the cost of dedicated officials.

Their success in 'engaging participation' with the EU's 500m citizens measured via their website places them amongst the middle ranks of UK political bloggers; 31k unique hits a month on the website, about the same as this blog. The committee say their VP for Communication is 'extremely active' on Twitter, though - and has 566 followers, only 393 of whom are fellow committee members and officials.

Any suggestion that the EESC is nothing but a self-serving gravy train operating solely to enrich its members is strongly denied, as are suggestions that this fraud and peculation amounts to criminal maladministration and the whole rotten shambles should do jail time.