Freedom is the Freedom to Enjoy Pornography

Do you think the world has gone mad?  I don’t.  I know it’s gone mad.  More and more the human race resembles a heard of lemmings, rushing towards that final precipice.  I am the little girl looking at life’s absurdities, shouting, as the parade passes by, that the emperor is naked.  Nonsense, the mass response comes: he is just beautifully dressed!

Speaking of nakedness, I have porn on my mind at the moment, specifically the dire Fifty Shades of Grey by the talentless E. L. James.  Who buys this appalling rubbish, I wonder?  What purpose does it serve?  Is its bewildering success a measure of just how empty the emotional and sexual life of middle aged women has become?  Is it an indictment of middle-aged men?  Alas, I fear it must be.  More than that, I fear its commercial success shows just how stupidly gullible a great many people are, how stupidly gullible most women are, particularly women of a certain age.  These are the people who look before and after and pine for what is not.  Actually they pine for what has never been, for what they have never had, true erotic fulfilment.  All they can do is feast on it vicariously, dining on fifty shades of boredom. 

E. L James is really Julia come to life.  Surely you remember Julia?  A pledged member of the Anti-Sex League, she is Winston Smith’s lover in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  When she’s not having extra Anti-Sex League sex she works in Pornosec, Muck House, as it’s colloquially known, a sub-section of the Ministry of Truth, which produces erotica for the masses.  Specifically she works on the novel writing machines, turning out boring, ghastly rubbish, as she puts it. 

Still, it’s important to recognise that rubbish, particularly pornography, serves a purpose.  It’s often a way of mopping up all sorts of residuals energies and frustrated libidos.  How prescient Orwell was to make an outwardly orthodox member of the Anti-Sex League a functionary in the manufacturing of muck!  For porn, it might be said, is really just a form of anti-sex, judging real sex to be contact between real people, people who are emotionally and physically engaged with one another.  Who knows?  Without porn to compensate for vacuous sterility hordes of frustrated and under-fulfilled proles might cause social chaos.  “The people have such empty lives”, the queen is told.  “Let them read Fifty Shades of Grey”, she responds.

The underemployed members of the European Parliament really should be told that they close down Muck House at their own peril.  This week, you see, they will be voting to ‘ban all forms of pornography.’  This will include yet more censorship of the internet in an attempt to “eliminate gender stereotypes” that demean women. 

Our MEPs, the dear old things, are also proposing the establishment of an Anti-Sex League.  No; what they actually want is for governments to set up state sex censors with “a mandate to impose effective sanctions on companies and individuals promoting the sexualisation of girls.”  Would that include girls, I wonder, promoting their own sexualisation? 

The charge is being led by Kartika Liotard, a left-wing Dutch feminist MEP, bedecked with the characteristic red sash of the Anti-Sex League, who wants "statutory measures to prevent any form of pornography in the media and in advertising and for a ban on advertising for pornographic products and sex tourism.”  So, Amsterdam’s red light specials can - excuse the profanity - get fucked! 

There are of course unenlightened people (aren’t there always?) who see this as just another erosion of free speech.  The accusation has been given added weight by the fact that the parliament has blocked the orgasmic rush of protest emails that followed when news of the measure emerged.  Criticism in any form, the vox populi itself, is being treated like so much rubbish, dumped straight into the Memory Hole by the spam filters. 

Yes, indeed, we move ever forward into a modern version of Orwell’s super state.  It is not governed by malign forces, though, just those who act for our own good; those who know what is best for us in their magnificent condescension.  The anti-porn drive comes soon after a report urging tighter press regulations, including the right of Brussels officials to control and supervise national media, with powers to enforce fines or sack journalists.  Censorship is clearly the wave of the future in our brave new – sexless - Europe that has such people in it.

I have little or no interest in porn.  I agree with Julia - though not E. L. James - that commercial erotica is boring and predictable.  I do not want to read about sex, still less watch other people having sex.  I’m far too hands-on for that.  No empty and unfulfilling fantasies for me, thanks ever so much; I leave that for the mummies and all others who are past it, assuming that they ever drew alongside it in the first place.  No, I could not care less about porn, but I do care more about freedom. I will speak as often and as loudly as I can against Big Brother, or Sister, in Brussels, whose creeping tyranny does not creep any more.  Freedom is the freedom to enjoy pornography, even if it is something as banal and lifeless as Fifty Shades of Grey.  

Vaffa!

I’m going to ask you to imagine that we have just had a general election.  I’m going to do more than that: I want you to imagine that the Monster Raving Looney Party has emerged as the strongest force in Parliament.  Impossible, you say; such a thing is beyond imagination.  Oh, no, it is not; at least it’s not in Italy.  Following the recent election Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement attracted a quarter of the vote.  It now has 108 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house, and 54 in the Senate.

Who’s Beppe Grillo, you ask?  He’s a comedian, that’s who he is, part of a long tradition of Italian funny men.  Where people once chanted ‘Du-ce!’ ‘Du-ce!’ then now chant ‘Bep-pe! Bep-pe!’ His story is remarkable, even more remarkable in some ways than that of Mussolini.  Turning from jokes to political activism, Il Beppe founded the MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S) – the Five Star movement – in Milan in October, 2009, the very same city, incidentally, where life was first breathed into Fascism in 1919.  The capital V in the party title – well, not so much a party as a movement – stands for Vaffa!, the leader’s own signature, which roughly translates as Fuck off! 

And how Grillo wants so much in Italian life, particularly to Italian politics, to, well, Vaffa!  Ever since 2005, when he started his blog, now the most popular in Italy, he has gathered a large following among the disaffected, chiefly from the young.  Many of his new MPs and Senators only just scrape past the minimum 25 age limit for entering Parliament.  These are the people for whom, in their disgust, Vaffa! has become the watchword; these are the people who have been the devotees of Beppe’s Vaffa! Day, or V Day, set up in 2007.

All politicians are crooks, says Beppe, apart from his own, of course, a line that echoes all the way back to 1919.  He’s now had his very own, and rather remarkable, March on Rome.  The Economist, that maiden aunt of political journalism, is tut tutting its disapproval in the latest issue.  Send in the clowns, the old dear trumpets across her front cover, with an additional How Italy’s disastrous election threatens the future of the euro.  Inside the humourless dowager drones on about those naughty Italian children, determined as they are to avoid reality.  It’s not just the future of the euro that is threatened, she witters on, but the future of Italy itself.

Dear, oh dear, there is Beppe and Silvio Berlusconi, the other clown who made a reasonably good showing, moving ever forward while “...Mario Monti, the reform-minded technocrat who has led Italy for the past 15 months and restored much of its battered credibility, got a measly 10%”  Really, there is only one word for that and the word is...Vaffa! 

Democracy would be all right if it wasn’t for the voters.  That’s the reality of the European Union, a reality clearly endorsed by the Economist.  The people did not want Monti; Monti was imposed upon them.  Now the people, rather inconveniently, have spoken, exposing the fraudulent politics of Europe with a bold finger gesture.  Me ne freggo! – I don’t give a damn - , now there is another decent slogan worth reviving. 

The inconclusive result of the election is conclusive on one point at least: Italians do not want to be ruled by the technocrats, either of the Brussels or the local variety.  Monti was imposed on them in 2011 without elections by the Eurocrats.  Charles Moore puts the point very well in his Spectator Notes.  Just imagine (sorry, I hope I’m not overtaxing you here!) if David Cameron was kicked out of office by the European Central Bank, which decreed that Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, the chairman of the Financial Services Authority, was elevated in his place.  Yes, I too would support any British Beppe who came along, Ken Dodd or whoever, rather than the cat’s paw of the European banking-bureaucracy complex.

People can only be pushed so far before they start to get angry.  Our own anger was shown in a small way during the recent Eastleigh by-election, which saw the United Kingdom Independence Party pushing the Conservatives into a humiliating third place.  ‘It’s only a protest vote’, the Tory apparatchiks wailed, ‘The masses will return in 2015.’ Oh, really, will they?  Only, I think, if they are in a gay mood, as Cameron hopes.  But the anger over Europe, over the highhandedness of the dreadful European tyranny, grows by the day.  The Long March of UKIP is by no means over.

And then there is the onward march of Beppe.  His politics are not my politics; he is far too left-wing and statist for that, far too, ahem, fascist!  Still, he is a symptom of a growing disgust across the whole of Europe with Europe, with those who make a mockery of democracy because it does not suit their technocratic ends.  “We are all young”, the sixty-four-year old Beppe says on his blog. “We’re a movement of many people who are uniting from the bottom up.  We don’t have structures, hierarchies, bosses, secretaries...No one gives us orders.”  Yes, I am young. I turn to Brussels and I really only have one word – Vaffa!  

Whistling Dixie

Barack Obama has seen fit to lecture us benighted Brits on the value of the European Union.  I have only one observation: I do so wish that he would stick to his own Union and not ours.  Does he not have troubles enough on his doorstep?  Perhaps he might care for a few helpful tips on managing his own affairs?  Would he welcome such a thing?  I rather think not.

He's a bit worried, you see, by Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposed in out referendum on British membership of our less perfect Union.  His administration has gone so far as to ‘warn’ (good word) our government against secession.  Has Obama, by chance, started to wear a stove pipe hat?  There he is, hoping that the mystic chords of memory will swell as they are touched by the better angels of our nature, that and a word or two from him.

My mystic chords are starting to hum.  I’m a secessionist; I want the bells of Charleston...sorry, London, to toll that day when we are once again free as a nation.  I want to be the first to fire on Fort Sumter, now conveniently located in Brussels.  The better angels of my nature tell me that the European Union is an affront to liberty, an affront to everything this nation stands for; an affront, for that matter, to everything America once stood for.  Quite frankly I can’t stand it; I can’t stand the bureaucrats and apparatchiks, the foreigners who exercise more control over our destiny than our own Parliament.  If Obama thinks it is possible to fool all of the people all of the time then he is wrong. 

But he can stand it, sitting in Washington, knowing not the first thing about this country or Europe.  Apparently he has raised the issue personally with Cameron.  A strong Britain in a strong Europe is in “America’s national interest.”  Oh, really? Well, then, let me return the favour – “Mister President, it is in the British national interest for a strong America remains a member of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.)”  Now, just imagine the reaction to that!

Obama’s earnest desire that the British people are not allowed a vote on their future, just in case that such a vote proves contrary to the ‘American interest’, has a long history in his administration.  Three years ago Vice President Joe Biden (what a perfect foil against presidential assassination he is) visited Brussels, ludicrously describing the place as “the capital of the free world” and the European Parliament as the “bastion of European democracy.”  He went on to compare it with the US Congress.  To that I say he understands little about his own political process and nothing at all about ours.

But, please, please witter on, Joe.  As Neil Gardiner noted in the Telegraph, Obama and Biden’s views on Europe “are as relevant to British voters as the futile ranting of Herman Van Rompuy or Jose Manuel Barroso, and will only serve to reinforce the determination of millions of Britons to throw off the shackles of Brussels.”  If that’s the case then they are to be welcomed! 

American liberals, so I believe, think that the EU is a jolly good thing, a beacon of benevolence, an icon of peace, fairness and equality, as Lionel Shirver ironically observed in the latest issue of Standpoint.  Criticising the EU, she goes on to say, is like “drawing horns on Nelson Mandela, or making lewd thrusting hand gestures at Aung San Suu Kyi.” 

Do they know, do you know, what incorporation in this Union actually means?  Well, let me tell you this – the Southern Confederates of 1860 and 1861 had not a fraction of our grievances.  Let’s play a game, one which may help to focus things just a shade or two better.  Just imagine if the United States was part of a super national Conglomerate, incorporating both North and South America.  Just imagine the capital of this Conglomerate is in, say, Mexico City.  Are you ready?  OK, then, now we are set to go. 

There are so many aspects of your national life that are controlled from south of the border, down Mexico way.  Traders face severe legal penalties if they use any other than the metric system; so forget about your quarter pounders.  Washington has no control over immigration policy or the nation’s territorial waters; foreigners and foreign fishermen can come and go as they please; that’s all to the good, because Guatemala and Honduras are about to join the Conglomerate, thousands and thousands already looking hungrily towards your vanishing border.  Your law making bodies are no longer sovereign; even judgements by the Supreme Court can be overruled.  By the lights of the American Court of Human Rights, based in Bogota, even foreign terrorists will be allowed to remain, living for years on public support, because they have a “right to a family life.”  If, for any reason, the government offers the people a choice on some aspect of the Conglomerate’s policy, then, if the result is a negative one, the people will be asked to vote again and again until the people get it right. 

You think this is a joke, that things could not possibly go to this extreme?  It might be a joke for you; I assure you it is not joke for us.  The EU, contrary to Biden’s BS, is not the beacon of democracy but its shadow.  The European Parliament is not Congress but a hugely corrupt sinecure.  European democracy is a pretence, a hollow shell, eaten from the inside by termites.  It’s not the people who decide on the great issues of the day but the bureaucrats.  Manuel Barroso, the bureaucrat-in-chief who heads the Commission, is a former Maoist, which may give some insight into the political techniques he favours. 

People of my generation have never had a say in whether we want to be part of the EU or not.  The last vote we had on the subject was in 1975, so only people of my parents’ generation have had a choice on something that is of fundamental importance to us all.  And that referendum, I should add, was based on dissimulation, evasion and outright political fraud.  Mother and father voted yes then; they will not vote yes now.

I have no interest in the American interest.  I have an interest in my own interest, an interest in my future and the future of my nation, which is precisely why I want out of this corrupt and deadening Leviathan, this contemptible Union.  For all these reasons and more I’m a secessionist.  Obama can go hang and, for good measure, let the EU drop with him.  Meanwhile I shall sit on my hands and whistle Dixie. 

In Praise of Tolkien

  

Once again I’ve been back to Middle Earth.  What a delight it was to arrive in The Shire in times BLR - before Lord of the Rings; what a delight it was to see Bilbo in his youth in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. 

This is not a movie review.  All I will say is that The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien’s slender prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has itself been padded out into a trilogy, of which An Unexpected Journey is the first part.  Bilbo’s journey is thus considerably longer than expected.  The yarn has been spun out, unnecessarily so, some might conclude.    

No, it’s not a movie review.  I want to talk about something else altogether: I want to talk about old J. R. R. as a cultural colossus.  Germaine Greer, that 60s feminist fossil, once wrote that it was her nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the ‘most influential’ writer of the twentieth century.  What she meant, in her snooty and condescending way, was that he would turn out to be the most popular. 

Tolkien’s popularity might very well be said to be the nightmare of all the Marxist and sub-Marxist literati, forever perplexed by the obduracy of the Masses, who consistently refused to be impressed by such groundbreaking works as The Intellectual Eunuch or Revolutionary Thought for Infants.  Edmund Wilson, that political fraud and fellow traveller, once dismissed The Lord of the Rings as “balderdash” and “juvenile trash.”  By the end of the last century that selfsame “balderdash” and “juvenile trash” was crowned in a survey by English readers as “the greatest book of the twentieth century.”  I expect it was all just a massive case of false consciousness.

Now I do not want you to think I’m a Tolkien groupie, one of the army who believe that the Master is beyond all criticism; I’m most assuredly not.  I do not think that The Lord of the Rings is ‘the greatest book’ of the twentieth century; far from it.  For me it’s too much of a boy’s own world, a muscular masculine mythology created by a retiring Oxford don.  But I can understand the enthusiasm for Middle Earth, for hobbits, elves, dwarfs, wizards, trolls and orcs.  I can understand, above all, the enthusiasm for The Shire, really an idealised England, Merry England, if you like, of a mythical and pre-industrial age. 

The thing is, you see, while Tolkien may not the most influential writer of the last or any other century, he has a good claim to be the most influential conservative writer, and the emphasis really does have to be placed on conservative.  He is the most influential simply because he is the most reassuring, speaking directly to the sub-political conservatism of ordinary people.

George Orwell would have understood this.  In the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier, a journey into England’s industrial north in the 1930s, he discusses the problem of socialism.  In his view socialism, as a cure for the ills of the time, was a jolly good thing.  Even so, he was objective enough to understand that, as a political philosophy, it was deeply repellent to ‘spiritually sensitive’ people.  Why?  Simply because socialism, as he puts it, is essentially an urban creed.  It’s also a creed bound up a theory of endless mechanisation, in the worship of machines.  It must lead to some form of collectivisation; it demands things that are “not compatible with a primitive way of life.”

Middle Earth is a ‘primitive way of life’; life in The Shire is harmonious and primitive, Arcadia at its most benign.  Tolkien spins a moral fable not just of good and evil, but one in which evil is represented as the antithesis of nature.  The orcs are not born; they are tortured into existence, manufactured, if you like.  They serve as the helots of industry.  Who can forget that scene in The Two Towers, the second part of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, where Saruman, the evil wizard, muses on the future of Middle Earth?  As his orcs are busy destroying Fangorn Forest, the trees to be used as fuel in subterranean manufactories, he sees a new world arising, a joyless world where all are subject to the machine.

In a recent article in the political journal Standpoint (Why do precious leftists loathe Tolkien’s Shire?), David Platt drew my attention to A. N. Wilson’s Age of Elizabeth II.  This opens with a tribute to Tolkien, whom the author regarded as the “towering English literary genius of the Queen’s reign.”  For him Tolkien, in his gloomier mood, presaged the post-war destruction of English life, the dismantling of our cohesive social conventions.  The Shire is the yeoman republic, faced with the onward march of industry, urbanisation and deforestation.

Tolkien’s political message is clear enough.  Those familiar with the novels will be aware that Jackson left out an important postscript in his adaptation of The Return of the King.  The Ring of Power has been destroyed.  Their quest completed, Frodo and the other hobbits return to the Shire, hoping to recapture a home that history has passed by.  But it has not.  Saruman has come.  As Platt says in his article, a collectivist and totalitarian regime has been imposed on the Shire folk, one that is subsequently overthrown in a popular coup.  The attack on post-war socialism could not be more direct. 

Tolkien!, thou should’st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.  Just imagine what he would have made of the Shire now; just imagine what this professor of Anglo-Saxon and advocate of Beowulf would have made of our yeoman republic in its senescence.  How he would have loathed our world of political correctness, regulation and shabby acronyms, a world where political labels like Conservative, Liberal and Socialist have become practically meaningless as one movement melds into another, as England merges more and more into a ghastly Continental Mordor, watched over by the Great Eye of Brussels. 

So, yes, Tolkien speaks to the conservative in all of us, regardless of our particular politics.  He speaks to all those who reverence the past, all those who despise theory, anything contrived and artificial.  In a deeper sense he speaks to all those who have a love of England and its ancient folkways.  OK, I confess to a personal lack of realism here, nostalgia for things that perhaps never were, for an England of wolves, of fens and of myths, an England where Grendel still broods in the marsh. But I prefer that to Greer and all her howling eunuchs.  

Ode to Joy? Get Lost!

It’s forty years now since Britain joined the European Union, the proudest achievement of Edward Heath, a former Conservative prime minister.  It’s almost forty years since the people last had a say on the matter, deciding that we should stay in on the ‘better terms’ negotiated by Harold Wilson, a former Labour prime minister. 

Let’s be frank: we were deceived, our people were deceived by lying politicians, people like Heath and Wilson, whom I consider…  Hmm, I was going to write little better than traitors.  But that’s far too mealy-mouthed.  They were traitors.  I would dearly love to see Heath exhumed and his head placed on a spike a la Oliver Cromwell.  For good measure the head of Tony Blair should be placed alongside for company.  Oh, this is me in my seventeenth century mood.  The past is a foreign country; they did things better there. 

Before Christmas the Economist published an article warning of the dangers of leaving the Club.  I love the Economist.  I subscribe to the Economist, conceivably the dullest publication on the planet.  What?  Why read a publication that I consider dull?  Simply because it is a perfect reverse indicator, almost invariably getting things wrong.  I know what to think by not thinking like the hacks of the Economist! 

Look at Europe, look at the disaster of the European Union, a vanity project that may very well pull us all down unless we get out and get out soon.  I personally consider the Club to be the greatest danger England has ever faced to its integrity as a nation, greater than all the tyrants of history; greater than Philip II, greater than Napoleon and greater than Hitler.  In my more negative mood I take the view that we made the wrong decision in 1939 in going to war with Germany.  Hitler can have Poland, he can have France and he can have the rest of Europe.  Fog in Channel; Continent isolated – is there any better headline? 

So, yes, I’m a little Englander; I really do not care to refute the rebuke.  I would rather that than a citizen of the ghastly European super state, a monster conceived in the mind of lying politicians and mendacious bureaucrats.  What a stupid bunch they are.  How can they not be stupid, those who embraced the euro, the one size fits all currency? 

Look at the consequences; look at Greece, look at Italy, look at Ireland, look at Spain.  Yes, look at Spain, a country with the highest unemployment rate on the Continent, a country shackled to a high value artificial currency.  It amazes me that people are not angrier over the depth of the deception.  How some must look back to Franco with nostalgia.  He at least was jealous over the integrity of his country. 

I once thought that I might go in to politics.  Not any longer.  My contempt for the profession grows deeper by the day.  It really does not mater what the important issues are, the issues that most concern the people, whether it is over immigration or Europe or whatever; the politicians will simply perform their usual conjuring act. 

Democracy is a fraud, a periodic carnival of electoral choice which makes no difference at all to those who have already made up their minds.  I look at Cameron, I look at Clegg, I look at Miliband and I really cannot tell which is which.  Here I am reminded of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  I am one of the creatures outside the window, Benjamin the donkey for preference.  I look from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but it is impossible to say which is which. 

The simple truth is we are not ‘Europeans’ at all.  We are not like them; we will never be like them.  Most of the Continental nations have a slave mentality, something their history shows time and time again.  They are suited to being governed by autocrats, dictators and bureaucrats; they know no better.  We do.  Our history is the history of freedom, of striving for ever greater forms of autonomy.  The EU is suffocating our past and our traditions. 

Only Margaret Thatcher, far too honest to be a politician, eventually understood what Europe entailed.  Of the whole benighted scheme she wrote;

That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European super-state was ever embarked on will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era. And that Britain…should ever have become part of it will appear a political error of the first magnitude.

She was destroyed for her honesty, destroyed by the like of the reptilian Michael Heseltine and his allies, such a parcel of rogues in a party.  Is there any wonder that the predominant emotion that people have over politicians is one of outright contempt? 

I loath Beethoven, I loathe Schiller, I loathe the Ode to Joy, yet another consequence of the EU.  I loathe the memory of Heath; I loathe all who betrayed this nation.  This is no longer a question of political preference.  It’s something altogether more visceral.  So far as I am concerned Europe can sink, the quicker the better.  And it can take its blue star flag along with it.  

Waiting for Siegfried

Let me begin with a personal anecdote.  Father has travelled extensively across the world on business, usually flying first class.  On one trip to Hong Kong he saw Leon Brittan, then Deputy European Commissioner, in the departure lounge for the flight back to London. 

I should add that Brittan, who formerly had served in Margaret Thatcher’s government, is a politician for whom he does not have a great deal of time.  "Never mind", he thought, "he's on his own. I'll ignore him." But no sooner had he boarded the flight than he discovered that he was the only 'independent' in the first class cabin. Every other seat was taken up by Brittan and an entourage from the Commission.  I do not know what the fare is now, but then the first class return flight to Hong Kong cost around £8000, that’s almost $13,000. 

I suppose it’s only to be expected that the Deputy Commissioner would travel first class.  It really is stretching things, though, when all the toadies of his court, who did little but drink the free champagne and talk too loud, should also travel at the expense of the benighted European taxpayer. 

I dare say things are much worse now.  There is so much about this venal and corrupt organisation that simply never comes to light, so much about the waste of its bloated bureaucracy.  I was interested to note, though not at all surprised, that the EU’s own auditors have refused to sign off on its accounts for the past eighteen years. 

For me the EU, aside from the ever present challenge to the integrity and sovereignty of our nation, means one thing – waste.  But it’s not just waste; it’s a total disregard for the interests of the ordinary taxpayers.  It’s almost as if the Eurocrats are an old new aristocracy, full of a sense of entitlement, full of disregard for the serfs who have to pay for this entitlement.  There they are, every one a Marquis St. Evrémonde, sitting in their luxury coaches, tossing the occasional coin to the plebs as they pass by. 

I mention all of this as a background to Saint David Cameron’s tilt with the European Dragon, roaring for more in the latest budget talks.  The beast wants approval on a £809million ($1296million) budget, with lots more perks, privileges and first class junkets.  Cameron wants to cut the monster down.  Contrary to expectations, he wasn’t alone here, with delegations from Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands also pushing for cuts. 

Meanwhile a gang of Estonian farmers gathered outside the dragon’s lair, demanding that his horde grow bigger.  Oh, they are not on the perks; they just get subsidies from the so-called Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which allow a lot of peasants to pursue peasant-like farming that turns the rest of us into, well, peasants.  It seems to be all part of the grand aristocratic plan. 

This is only the first round.  The beast is not even wounded.  It will come back, breathing fire.  Estonian farmers and the CAP can go hang.  The truly important thing is the beast’s own well-being.  Pee Wee Herman Van Rompay, who masquerades as the European President, the Great Bureaucrat in person, was unable to identify a single euro of potential cuts on administration, which accounts for 6% of the total budget.  Alas, the beast may eat him alive if he did.

No sooner were the talks over than the leaders slopped off for a spot of luncheon, all washed down with a delightful Chateau Angelus Premier Grand Cru, an unpretentious little claret, a real pinch at £120 a bottle. This is our Brave New Europe that has such worthies in it.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair, shouting from the sidelines, says that leaving Europe would be a ‘disaster for Britain.’  What a perfect reverse barometer Mister Cosmopolitan is, a man who fills me with more contempt than the dragon has gold.  This is a man who, if he had had his way, would have taken Britain into the common currency years ago.  This is a man who clearly knows an awful lot about disaster.  We will be ‘irrelevant’ outside the EU he says.  I just hope we are as irrelevant as Switzerland and Norway rather than relevant as Spain and Italy.  The Dragon and Blair deserve one another.  Personally I’m waiting for Siegfried to emerge.  David Cameron, contrary to appearances, is no dragon slayer.  

Firing the First Shot

Liberty and no Union

Secession is in the air.  I’ve been keeping an eye on the rapidly evolving situation in the States.  The latest information I have is that the Texas petition now has well over 110,000 signatures, almost four times over the threshold for an official response on the White House’s We the People website. 

The 25,000 signature threshold has also been exceeded in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee, with some other states not far behind.  Nationally the petitions lodged in all fifty states have collected close on a million signatures.  America wants to leave America! 

This is all great fun.  I don’t take it seriously and I’m certain that the vast majority of signatories do not take it seriously either.  But it’s most certainly boosted spirits on the American right, deflated by Romney’s defeat.  It shows how agile Americans are at bouncing back.  The people are using We the People in a way that Obama could never have anticipated when the site was set up.  The comment in the Washington Post was spot on; there is indeed something empowering about putting your name on a document that sticks it to the establishment.

I’m a secessionist.  Oh, not so far as the United States is concerned.  That’s a Union best preserved.  It’s the European Union I want my country to leave.  I have little doubt that a secession petition here would gather hundreds of thousands of signatures in a very short time.  But it Americans have some form of empowerment, even if only in online petitions, we have none at all.  All of the main parties are committed to membership of Europe.  David Cameron, the Prime Minister, may blow a little anti-European wind from time to time, but that’s all it is – wind. 

Day by day the European monster eats away at English freedom, imposing upon us foreign laws and foreign customs.  It’s taking liberties, liberties that were once ours.  What I resent most of all is that we have become the victims of France’s fear of Germany and Germany’s fear of itself.  We have become the victims of a history that is not ours, of a political and dictatorial style that is most assuredly not ours.  Secession is the only way of rediscovering ourselves, of reclaiming our own past and our own traditions. 

I call to mind Edmund Ruffin.  If you’ve never heard the name he was a political activist in the Old South, a Virginian and a strong believer in states' rights and secession.  He was in South Carolina when it became the first state to leave the Union in December, 1860.  He is also reputed to have fired the first shot on the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter, thereby beginning the Civil War. 

Well, now, I hate the European Union as much as Ruffin hated the Federal Union.  I hope in my lifetime to see my country take the road to secession.  If we ever have a referendum on membership I would be delighted to fire the first shot.  

Beyond the Economics of the Madhouse

Both the Economist and the Spectator this week have discovered a banal but obvious truth: that there is pain in Spain, yea, even so far as the word itself.  It’s not true, though, that the pain in Spain falls mainly in the plain; the pain falls everywhere, mountain and plain alike.  The pain is the euro. 

The euro crisis is a rolling comedy of false hopes and deeper errors.  And I’ll tell you this much – you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.  Writing in the Spectator, Daniel Hannan, one of my favourite observers on the European farce, rightly points out that that the troubled economies of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus amount together to less than 5% of the Community’s economy.  Greece, in other words, was a sideshow. 

Spain is different; Spain is the main act.  Here the banks are massively exposed.  Not only would a crash swamp the whole of the European economy but a rescue package would drink deep, ‘twoud drink the cup and all.  Drawing again on my Shakespearean well, it may be the point where German taxpayers cry hold, enough! 

There is a form of madness here that I find almost impossible to comprehend. Economics and finance, I freely and wholeheartedly confess, are well beyond my comfort zone.  But at least I can understand the basics, which is more than Spanish politicians seem able to do.  Here is a truth I cannot make any simpler: Spain’s present economic woes are all down to the euro. 

Before the great crash of 2008 the country was running a surplus.  The national debt had been reduced to 42% of Gross Domestic Product.  This is where the real lunacy comes.  With the economy beginning to overheat one sure way of taking the pressure off is by raising interest rates.  But the Spanish could not do that because they were locked into the asylum of the euro.  Spanish governments thus had to apply the interest rates set by the European Central Bank (ECB), low even for the north, catastrophic for the south. 

Again as Hannan points out, in the decade prior to 2008 Spain actually manage to run a negative interest rate.   There it was - money for the taking, and how it was taken.  If you have been to Spain recently you can’t possibly have missed the results, a property crash that makes Ireland’s look like a picnic, unsold, half-completed developments everywhere, waste on a massive scale.  The banks did well, though, hugely over fulfilling their bad debts quota. 

So Spain is drowning because of cheap credit.  What’s the solution according to the gnomes of Brussels?  Why, more cheap credit. Mariano Rayoy, the country’s prime minister, was given a £100million loan to prop up the country’s troubled banks, a great ‘triumph' by his insane lights.  It was a ‘triumph’ alright for every household in Spain, which found they were now carrying an extra debt burden of £15000.  There has to be another solution.  Yes there is – another bailout.  The petrol dump is on fire.  Hurry; pour in more petrol. 

Now do you really want to see something scary?  Well, it’s this.  The Spanish government has to borrow at 7% to prop up banks that can borrow from the ECB at 1%, so they can lend the money back to the Spanish government at 7% so it can bail them out.  Confused?  Yes, I am too.  The expressions vicious circle and downward spiral might have been invented to explain such a crazy scenario. 

For Spain, though its politicians are blind to the truth, Europe is the problem, not the solution.  The prognosis, as the Economist reports, is bleak.  The economy is in serious recession, the public sector is cutting spending and the private sector is reluctant to invest.  Unemployment is among the highest in the Continent, with one person in every four out of work.  High unemployment, falling demand and low investment impacts on tax receipts, which in turn impacts on Spain’s ability to meet its debt repayment targets.  Weak banks, more bailouts, more and more austerity; down and down the spiral goes.  Wilkins Micawber would understand: the result is indeed misery. 

Then this really is the economics of the madhouse?  No, it’s far too insane for that.  

The Man Who Was Thursday

I wrote this yesterday after reading a piece by David Cameron in the Sunday Telegraph.  It was specifically intended for the My Telegraph website, just me having a spot of fun.  I thought readers here might enjoy it also. 

David Cameron’s recent meanderings on the desirability or not of a referendum on continuing British membership of the European Union brought to mind some lines from A Man for all Seasons.  Sir Thomas More is in conversation with Will Roper, his future son-in-law;

Now listen well.  Two years ago you were a passionate churchman.  Now you’re a passionate Lutheran.  We must just pray that when your head’s finished turning your face is to the front again.

Two years?  My goodness; how slow Roper’s revolutions are compared with those of our dear Prime Minister.  His head can turn a full cycle in as many days!  Last week he announced that he was opposed to an EU referendum.  It was not the right thing to do, he said after the latest Brussels summit to patch and repair the euro.  Now it seems it is the right thing to do, at least it was on Sunday.  It would be hasty to make any predictions here, not when Cameron’s head is still spinning.

It seems that Thursday Cameron misrepresented the views of Sunday Cameron.  The man who was Thursday said no; the man who is Sunday said possibly…when the time is right.  I’m guessing that the time will never be right, that Sunday man is trying to hold off the Tory right.  One hundred of the party’s MPs wrote to the Prime Minister, calling him to legislate for a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU in the near future.

Quick; cue a new u-turn.  Sunday’s child is full of grace!  Britain, the PM wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, is in danger of getting swamped by EU legislation and bureaucracy.  In danger?!  One would almost think he knew nothing of this country, of our present political realities; that he had taken to wandering aimlessly across the world, hither and thither, like the ghastly Tony Blair.

I’m being ungracious.  For the moment Cameron’s head is in the right place.  For the moment he believes that the two words ‘Europe’ and ‘referendum’ can go together.  In that respect they are a bit like love and marriage – they go together like a horse and carriage.  Cameron’s spin comes, I suspect, because of the fox in the thicket.  Yes Fantastic Mister Fox in the shape of Dr Liam, the former Defence Secretary, who is preparing to tell Tory activists that life outside the EU holds no terror.

I applaud his good sense, though I think he is being far too coy.  It’s life inside the EU that’s full of terror, one unpleasant surprise hard upon another unwelcome development.  Inside our parliamentary democracy will get weaker and weaker, until the point where Westminster will have all the glory of a benighted county council.  Oops, I better watch my step in case some eurorat bureaucrat steps this way.  Life has become better, comrade.  Life has become merrier!

I’ll certainly be merry if a referendum is ever called.  I will vote with as much delight as I did in last year’s AV bash, a nail in the coffin of the Liberal Democrats, a party for whom I now entertain a special loathing.  But will it come?  I shall have to ask the man who was Thursday.

I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head really was his face — an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a figure running backwards, and dancing as he ran.

Greeks Bearing Gifts

There is a wonderful, almost divine irony in the fact that Greece, of all places, turned out to be the Achilles’ heel of the European Union, the weak spot that may in the end lead to the death of the whole mad project of a one-size-fits-all currency.  So much nonsense has been written about the Greek debacle that is easy to lose sight of some basic facts.  To begin with it had nothing to do with international currency speculation and everything to do with Greeks bearing gifts…to themselves. 

It’s easy to understand the anger of the Germans, now faced with paying the bill for the way in which the Greeks have pampered themselves, effectively at their expense.  Greece created one of the most madly extravagant welfare and benefits systems in the whole Continent.  The working day often finishes at 2.30pm.  Retirement provisions are absurdly generous, with some people able to stop working at the age of fifty-three.  Add to that a culture of corruption, symbolised in the words “fakelaki”, meaning envelopes containing bribes, and “rousfeti”, meaning political favours, then a bad situation became cancerous.

The revealing thing in this is that many Greeks themselves, at least those who are not communists and anarchists, recognise the depths of their own blameworthiness.  Commenting on tax evasion, something of a national sport, one newspaper headline jeered with heavy irony: “No taxes – we’re Greek.”  In public hospitals doctors often refuse to treat patients until the “fakelaki” is forthcoming.  The private sector has all but been destroyed by an ever expanding bureaucracy.  Loukas Tsoukalis, a professor at Athens University, has said that Greece has a capitalist system with a Soviet state.

The fact that Greece was allowed to join the euro at all when it clearly did not meet the preconditions for membership can be put down to what I would call the ‘Byron Illusion.’  When Lord Byron went to fight and die in the nineteenth century Greek War of Independence he went not for a living nation but for a dead idea, an idea nurtured in generations brought up on the classics.  The Greeks continued to play on the romance of the ancient past in their application for euro membership, something that seduced Europe’s leaders, many of them also educated in the classics.

But Greece of the modern age is not the Greece of the ancients, not the Greece of Plato and Pericles.  Writing in the New York Times, Robert D. Kaplan rightly argued that it is far more the child of Byzantine and Turkish despotism.  The EU, preoccupied with balancing France and Germany, ignored not just economic facts in the rush into the euro but far deeper historical fractures between the north and the south.  Greece is not the ‘cradle of democracy,’ a label that is no more than a shallow pretence.  In the modern age it has more often been the nursery of despotism. 

So forget irresponsible bankers and wicked speculators.  The whole of the sovereign debt crisis was based on one simple truth: it’s impossible to overcome centuries of cultural, economic and political differences in the illusion of monetary and political union.  Europe is not one; Europe will never be one.  History is not fooled. 

Lessons of History

Everything in history occurs twice, so said Hegel and Marx.  Actually history very rarely repeats itself, at least not in the way we expect.  One would be wise not to read the lessons of history because the lessons are invariably wrong. 

After the Second World War the politicians and bureaucrats, washed up on the shores of a European desert, thought that the best thing to do was escape from the past; to escape, as they perceived it, from the nationalism that had brought the Continent so low. 

Out of the ashes arose a new phoenix - the European Community, carrying on the wing the ideal of a more perfect union.  It was nothing of the kind; it was an arrogant fantasy from the outset, one that sought to turn a geographical expression into a political reality.  Nationalism, like a wicked genie, was forced into a bottle.  Latterly democracy, an embarrassment for the Euro elite, was likewise being forced into a bottle, but both have burst forth in springtime of anger. 

My attention was drawn to an article by Ed West in the Telegraph recently, with a particularly apt headline – Europe’s post-Nazi stress disorder has brought it to ruin.  It’s a timely reminder of the realities of history and the blindness of the architects of the grand illusion.  The military historian Anthony Beevor is quoted, airing the obvious;

The great European dream was to diminish militant nationalism. We would all be happy Europeans together. But we are going to see the old monster of militant nationalism being awoken when people realise how little control their politicians have. We are already seeing political disintegration in Europe.

In that same article a panicky open letter published in the Guardian is also quoted, written in the dawn of Golden Dawn, the fascist heavy metal brigade which is on the threshold of entering the Greek parliament.  It was headed We are all Greek Jews now, presumably meaning the readers of the Guardian and not the Golden Boys:

We invite all citizens, political parties, unions, civil society, intellectuals and artists to fight the extreme right by promoting and bringing to life the European dream. We must always remember that this dream was built on the ruins of Nazism. We must never forget about the Shoah. Our dream is of a continent free from racism and anti-Semitism. It is the project of a society based on "togetherness" – beyond boundaries.

Second, we must refute the dogma of "the European fortress", which favours the spread of anti-immigrant speeches and the lockdown of Europe's frontiers, especially when a core element of European post-war identity – its social welfare system – requires the economic input of immigration to remain sustainable.

Actually it’s this sort of meretricious rubbish that is responsible for the present malaise.  The authors simply cannot see that it was the attempt to promote and bring to life ‘the European dream’ which has turned out to be a European nightmare.  Yes, a nightmare, of nations and peoples with wholly different traditions and widely different economies being moulded into One.  The people of the Continent were kidnapped by Procrustes, who proceeded to cut or stretch them into shape.  Rather appropriate, don’t you agree, that a figure from Greek mythology, should serve as the supreme European architect? 

One Golden Dawn does not make a Nazi summer.  It’s the ignorance that strikes me, the utter incomprehension.  It would seem that the only way of guarding against the past is the ‘European ideal’, the only way of guarding Europeans against themselves.  But, as West rightly says, the ‘European ideal’ is not failing because of a collection of laughable Greek heavies; it’s failing because as a vision it’s totally unworkable.  It could only work in the absence of democracy, by new forms of centralised tyranny that the ‘European idea’ was set up to guard against.  Ah, there’s the rub, there’s the paradox. 

A Europe where centuries of difference and inherited tradition were conjured into nothingness, a Europe where uncontrolled immigration has threatened the livelihood and identity of its indigenous peoples, was heading sooner or later for a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t put it back together again. 

Did you note that point by the Guardianistas about social welfare systems?  No, I don’t understand what they are on about either, unless they mean that it is a sign of economic vibrancy for a country to attract hordes of foreign welfare claimants.  The irony is that their dream of a Continent of unrestricted movement, without boundaries, a Continent of ‘togetherness’ is the very thing that has increased anti-Semitism and racism of all kinds.  When people are ignored, when their concerns are ignored, marginal views begin to move in from the cold. 

West mentions his grandfather, who fought in the Second World War.  Both of mine did, one in the Far East and the other in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean.  They had a clear idea of what they were fighting for; they had a clear idea of what was right and what was wrong.  West writes of his grandfather “I suspect that, were he to see Britain and Europe today, he would conclude that it was in the grips of collective insanity.”

I don’t suspect; I simply know all of my grandparents would be horrified by the direction that our history has taken; horrified by the insanity that grips contemporary Europe, as bad as past insanity, only different.  That’s the lesson of history.  

Deeper Still and Deeper

As the euro crisis moves downward in ever tighter circles I recall a piece I wrote a year and a half ago for the Daily Telegraph readers’ blog site.  Reading reports in the Sunday press I thought I would have another look at it.  It’s astonishing how little has changed; astonishing that grown-up people with grown-up minds could ever have embraced this madness in the first place.  How ill-led we are, how deceived; how unworthy are those in positions of power, who have neither prescience nor judgement. 

Anyway, judge the relevance for yourself.  The original article was headed Moussaka Money, published on 16 February, 2011. 

The Greek crisis is a superb demonstration of the intellectual absurdity and institutional vanity at the core of the whole European maze.  The important thing here is that we are dealing with a political as much as an economic crisis, perhaps more of a political crisis. We are dealing more specifically with blindness, blindness and hubris caused by a combination of self-delusion and self-interest.

The euro itself, the single European currency zone, was always about prestige, a desire for the grand gesture.  Looking at it in hard economic terms who would ever have agreed to allow the Greeks, or the Spanish, or the Irish to join the club? All it would take is for these fragile economies to come under sustained pressure for questions to be asked about the operation of a whole euro zone, combining rich and poor and supposedly treating them as equal partners.  

The Greeks, the poor cousins, were effectively given a Euro credit card, and they used it, without caution or reservation.  The Germans were paying, yes, but they also benefited with a massive trade surplus, another source of imbalance.  Angela is resisting a bail-out; she has to, if only for the sake of form and political credibility.  Sarko does want a bail out, but that comes at a price; there has be convergence across Europe. Athens, as I said previously, is facing a new Macedonian hegemony, a new dependency in all but name. 

The Germans in particular are heading for the perfect storm; they have too much of their economic self-interest invested in the euro-zone to allow it to collapse altogether, but they are horrified of the consequences of countries like Greece riding on the prosperity of the old D-mark, abandoned with considerable reluctance.

We know the Eurocrats are not fond of votes.  After all, they have a tendency to go the wrong way.  But the Germans are least fond of a particular kind of vote than any other European nation, so much so that referendums are actually banned by law because of the use they were put to by the nasty Nazis.  Just as well for the Eurocrats, I suppose, because the Germans would never have abandoned the D-mark if they had been given a choice on the matter eleven years ago.  

At the time the opponents of the euro ran a campaign warning of the dangers of being linked up with the ‘spaghetti money’ of southern Europe.  So, poor old Angela finds herself in an impossible position.  Pressures at home force her to talk tough.  Auntie Angela does not come to the Greeks bearing gifts, no, she waves her Aryan finger and talks austerity.  But this is tomorrow and now we know just how much the Greeks have been spending, as if there was, well, no tomorrow.  

Yes, what a mess this is.  If the Greeks get a handout - as they almost certainly will - the markets will turn on the next most vulnerable, the other partners in the union of the Piigs (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain).  The contradictions, there from the outset, are being revealed one by one.  

Angela is a high-wire artist, a gambler as much as those who speculate on the currency markets, who speculate against the euro.  She is playing for time, her fingers crossed behind her back, hoping that austerity in Athens is enough.  And if it is not? Well, then we will perhaps be talking about moussaka money. 

A Frightful Fiend

Look at this picture. Can you guess who or what it is? No? Well I’ll tell you – it’s the new face of Greek democracy! His name is George Germenis, a black metal rocker, although he uses the stage name ‘Kaiadas’, after the chasm where Spartans threw deformed babies.

Germenis or Kaiadas – whose next album, incidentally, is called Long Live Death – was thrown into another chasm - the Greek parliament. He is there along with another twenty members of Golden Dawn, an extreme nationalist movement entering the assembly for the first time ever. It won seven percent of the poll in the election held a week last Sunday, that’s well over 400,000 votes. It’s a remarkable achievement considering that Golden Dawn was long in the murky twilight of Greek politics, securing less than one percent of the vote the last time round.

Kaiadas and Golden Dawn is a sign of the times, said the mayor of Salonika. They certainly are; a sign of the European times, a sign of Greek anger at the austerity programme imposed at the diktat of the European Union, a sign of the madness that has arisen from monetary union. It’s a consequence of the arrogance of the politicians and bureaucrats who govern the destiny of Europe, who believed that national electorates could be ignored and sidestepped with impunity.

Greece, sinking ever deeper into recession, wanted to make a gesture, and it has. In making the gesture, in retreating from the mainstream into the fringe, people were clear what they were voting against; it’s just that they seemed to have no clear idea what they were voting for. Since the election many have said that they were shocked over what they subsequently learned about Golden Dawn.

What have they learned? Why, that it’s racist, violently so, and reactionary, rejecting, in the words of its own manifesto, “the so-called Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.” It is also irredentist, rejecting Greece’s present borders. We are, in short, dealing with a Nazi-style party which has a Nazi-style logo, though it rejects the label, saying that they are inspired by the regime of Ioannis Metaxas. He was dictator of Greece on the threshold of the Second World War, himself inspired by – can you guess? – the Nazis. They had their Third Reich; he had his Third Hellenic Civilization. In time to come – who knows? -there may be a Fourth Hellenic Civilization.

Golden Dawn is led Nikolaos Michaloliakos, once jailed for the possession of explosives. In the best non-fascist style the party’s charter places him in total control. In the best non-fascist style the charter also authorises the straight armed Roman salute, or is that Greek salute? The leader, though, has eschewed such gestures when his people march into parliament. His people, incidentally, include one who was facing trial for allegedly allowing his car to be used for an assault on a left-wing university lecturer. I say ‘was’ because he will be facing trial no longer; he now enjoys parliamentary immunity.

The ascent of Golden Dawn should not be seen in isolation. The door was already held open, ironically, by the socialist Pasok party and New Democracy, the respectable face of Greek politics. In forcing through the austerity package insisted on by the European Central Bank and the IMF, they formed a less than respectable coalition with the Popular Orthodox Rally, another movement on the extremist fringe, closely allied with Golden Dawn. In other words, Greece’s political class, dancing to a tune played from Brussels, effectively made right-wing extremism a respectable choice.

"May God help us. I dread to think that they got in," said Maria Savelona, a 51-year-old widow, who claims not to have voted for the Golden boys. "People voted in anger, without thinking. When they realize what they did, they'll be afraid." They should be. It isn’t just Germenis, his heavy metal makeup, his knives and his fake blood. No; since the election people have been shown images of his party comrades smiling next to an Auschwitz crematorium.

Michaloliakos, in his first public appearance after the election, said that getting into parliament would not turn his "brave boys in black" into moderates. He warned those who "betrayed the motherland" to run scared, banging his clenched fist on the podium, a bodyguard on each side: "We are coming!" They certainly are.

Like one who, on a lonely road, Doth walk in fear and dread, And, having once turned round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

Scheitert Europa?

A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of anti-Europe!  It’s just so fascinating to watch political developments on the Continent, watch increasing dissent over the whole tawdry European ‘ideal.’  It extends even so far as France and the Netherlands, two of the original six nations who grouped after the Second World War to form the European Economic Community, now the European Union.

In 2005 the electorate of both of these countries rejected the constitutional treaty devised at Lisbon.  No matter; they were ignored by the political class, who proceeded as intended with an act of legerdemain, a treaty that was not the treaty, a constitution that was not the constitution.  But the dog has stopped growling; it’s now biting.  The recent fall of Prime Minister Mark Rutte shows just how unhappy the Dutch are with the EU.  In France, with all in a flux as the second round of the presidential election approaches, even that slimy opportunist Sarkozy has suddenly acquired anti-European credentials. 

Here Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, once made a speech in which he promised to create “British jobs for British workers.”  It was a more than usually stupid sound-bite which immediately bit him on the backside.  The reality, under the new Europe, as he himself must have known, is that no political leader can guarantee the insularity of the domestic labour market.  In the months after his speech the number of foreign workers rose by 175,000 as the number of British fell by 46,000.  There are, in other words, far too many Polish plumbers.

As austerity bites even deeper even the endlessly tolerant Dutch have opened to this fact.  There Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, even has a website where people can complain about Polish migrants.  In France, too, there is mounting anxiety, something Sarko has latched on to, particularly among the low skilled and poorly educated, those most at risk from increased foreign competition for jobs. The Poles can come to France and the Netherlands but the French and the Dutch can’t go to Poland, or, rather, they can, if they want to end up jobless and homeless on the streets of Cracow or Warsaw. 

The future does not look good for the single-marketers, for those who want to base this single-market on a central fiscal discipline.  The tighter euro budgets become the angrier national electorates.  The coming Greek election, scheduled for 6 May, is guaranteed to show just how deep this resentment is. 

The evidence is also there in France and the Netherlands, with more and more voters veering towards parties of the right or the left that are opposed to further European integration.  Add to this the impact of globalisation, which has compounded the problem of sapping wages and diminishing opportunities.  European leaders, the Economist reported recently, are worried by the rise of extremist and populist parties.  It’s their actions, their pursuit of policies that ordinary people neither voted for nor wanted, that has created the best opportunity for such extremism in decades. 

You see, electorates can be ignored; they have been ignored, time and time again.  But there are consequences here.  The European Union was formed in part out of fear of German revanchism.  The only alternative to the EU, as Chancellor Merkel more or less suggested not so long ago, is a German invasion of Poland.  With the EU we have just the reverse: a Polish invasion of the West! 

 Scheitert Europa? - Is Europe failing? - the German daily Handelsblatt asked in a front page headline recently.  I certainly hope so; for the alternative is too frightful to behold.