Brexit Party - told you so.

Nigel writes in the Telegraph

In contrast, the Brexit Party will have a leader who then appoints a board of their choosing, and the party will ultimately succeed and fail on the judgement and personality of that leader.

This will be a disciplined machine and will run more like a company. Dissenters can go elsewhere

Well, the entire nation owes Nigel a huge debt for getting to the 2016 referendum in the first place. It was an outstanding effort and one which cannot be regarded too highly. And the model that he's chosen for this new political corporation - an autocratic and authoritarian organisation almost certainly funded by a very small number of very wealthy donors who will be in effect Nigel's 'shareholders' - may well reach its objectives.

I look forward to a future democratised Conservative Party, a political party that will be run by its members and funded from the grass roots, working constructively with Nigel's BrexitCorp.

Personally, I would have written 'succeed or fail' but perhaps his chosen phrase is deliberate. 

The EU can never succeed as a rival to the US - in any field

The most naked ambition of the EU and its supporters is to develop itself as a credible rival on the world stage to the US. Their constant yardstick of comparison, like a teenage boy's penis ruler, is with the US; population, GDP, outputs and so on. Such ambitions are little more than naive and jejune aspiration. To reach parity, the EU must develop all three facets that would make the federation a world power; civilian, military and normative. We'll look first at military capacity.

(2012-2016 figures)	EU	USA	UK
Overall
Active military personnel ('000s)	1,345	1,347	206
Total expenditure (bn$)	169	780	50
Expenditure as % of GDP	1.2%	3.6%	2.3%
Naval forces
Capital ships	27	129	9
Destroyers, frigates, corvettes	153	113	19
Other vessels	260	38	19
Submarines	49	70	11
Land forces
Armour – MBTs & AFVs	20,909	44,706	5,705
Artillery	9,159	2,942	658
Attack helicopters	773	973	190
Air forces
Fighter and ground attack aircraft	1,821	4,792	222
Transport & refuelling aircraft	381	5,248	54

The figures above are as good and accurate I can get without spending hours in research, and I believe are good enough to paint the picture. Happy to take corrections and addenda from our many more expert readers in the comments.

The picture this paints for me is an EU with a last-generation military, heavy on unskilled conscripts, with little state of the art kit and virtually no force projection capacity. Towed artillery, for example, is essentially Great War technology - and without GPS (Russia / US / China would restrict use of their own systems and quickly disable Gallilleo in the event of conflict) simply does not have the vast reserves of shells needed for random and inaccurate wide-area bombardment in Great War style. The conflict in Ukraine has shown how easily GPS can be blocked locally, and new, ad-hoc low tech such as the use of cheap civilian drones to spot targets and correct fall-of-shot can be used, how home-made EW can easily block digital and satellite radio comms and how forces have gone back to last gen HF radio comms.

Even where the figures look to have some equivalence it is illusory. Only France has a military worth anything at all. Low skills and low expenditure mean much EU kit is unserviceable and only a small fraction can take to the field in short order.

The EU is low on both military transport aircraft and on naval vessels other than littoral patrol vessels. This lack of force projection capability in turn undermines the EU's aspirations to be a normative power.

Without NATO, without the USA and the United Kingdom, the EU does not have even the most basic capacity to resist an attack from Russia, a nation with the GDP of France. For a considerable time to come, the EU must rely on the goodwill of other, 'third party' nations for the Federation's fundamental security. This at a time when the EU has been at least encouraging, if not fomenting anti-American sentiment that campaigns for US bases in the EU to go. It is an incredibly risky strategy. 

If we are to ask British servicemen and women to put their lives on the line in eastern Europe for the EU, if we are to share the most sensitive products of our well-developed intelligence capabilities and alliances such as 'five eyes' with the EU, if we are to look out for the EU's security whilst the EU avoids this most fundamental responsibility of defending itself whilst at the same time refusing to buy UK or US made aircraft, military kit or technology and after explicitly naming us both as 'potential enemies', one really has to wonder how much longer the people of Britain are prepared to cover their backs.

Britain's competitive advantage

I've been trying to find learned economic opinion on which of two events has had the greater effect in Britain's economic renaissance since around 1970 - the US coming off the Bretton-Woods gold standard in 1971, or our joining the EEC in 1973. And which now leaves us more vulnerable to the winds of change blowing around the globe.

One might characterise the past fifty years as a period of change from internationalism to globalism. Bretton-Woods was internationalist, and its institution the IMF was at its inception a body charged with the regulation of relationships between national capital. However, that has undergone a fundamental change. Under an internationalist system of trade, goods are mobile whilst capital lives at home; once the change came to a globalist system under which capital was also mobile, all the old structures began to crumble. We have a globalist IMF intent on the disintegration of nationality, aided by a globalist UN and a Federast EU busy destroying European national identity.

In a remarkable prescient essay published in 1999, before globalism really began to bite, Herman E Daly wrote;

Since there can be only one whole, only one unity with reference to which parts are integrated, it follows that global economic integration logically implies national economic disintegration. By disintegration I do not mean that the productive plant of each country is annihilated, but rather that its parts are torn out of their national context (dis-integrated), in order to be re-integrated into the new whole, the globalized economy. As the saying goes, to make an omelette you have to break some eggs. The disintegration of the national egg is necessary to integrate the global omelette.

Daly also foresaw the social tensions created during the past two decades that have given us Trump, Brexit and the Gilets jaunes;

  .. globalization implies the abrogation of another social contract. that is the implicit agreement between labor and capital over how to divide up the value that they jointly add to raw materials. That agreement has been reached nationally, not internationally. It was not reached by economic theory, but through generations of national debate, elections, strikes, lockouts, court decisions, and violent conflicts. That agreement, in countries like the United States, on which national community and industrial peace depend, was basically that the internal division between labor and capital will be more equal than the world average. That agreement is of course being repudiated in the interests of global integration. That is a very poor trade

 He also foresaw the Elephant and the birth of the über-elite of the global 1%;

The economic integration of any high-wage country with an overpopulated world is bound to lower wages and raise returns to capital, widening the gap between labor and capital toward the more unequal world distribution.

The UK is Europe's second largest economy, with a preponderance towards services and intangibles. Germany, Europe's largest economy, is based unequivocally upon manufacturing. Which is now more vulnerable to global change? Which has greater agility with which to meet the challenges of the new?

Daly's observations on the effects of globalism on our military capacity, our ability to defend our nation and protect our people, are also of great concern;

But what about the military proper? What precisely are they going to defend in a globalized world? The globe is not under threat of invasion. Do we imagine that national boundaries will long retain any political or cultural significance once their economic significance is gone?

.... No doubt it is considerations such as these that lead some people to favor globalization. It is good, in their view, precisely because it makes the national military obsolete. Given the destruction and waste wrought by national militaries it is hard not to have some sympathy with this position. But while globalization seems to make national militaries obsolete, it does not remove the need for appeal to force. Laws, contracts and property rights still must exist and be enforced, even if they are global rather than national. Economic inequality and class conflict grow as the old national social contract between capital and labor dissolves along with the power of nations to guarantee it. Do the globalizers envisage a global government to enforce global laws with a global police force? Or do we, to avoid really big government, follow the privatization and deregulation model all the way, letting the military evolve into private Pinkerton guards hired by each global corporation to protect its property and enforce its contracts? Global corporate feudalism?

I know that we have not arrived at this point yet. But make no mistake about the fact that globalization is being pushed hard by powerful transnational corporations, and that the weakening of the nation is part of the agenda. Conversion of the national military into a corporate police force is consistent with such an agenda. Maybe globalization will stop before it completely disintegrates nations. But who or what will stop it? Might the nationalism, or even patriotism, of the military provide a barrier? So far it has not.

These issues are all now in the balance. The push-back against globalism by the grown-ups  has started and I am happy to count myself amongst the resistance. Anti-globalism is no longer a naive excuse for youthful agit-prop and overturning rubbish bins in central London, but a fight for national survival.

Europe - Organised crime bosses back the EU

Europe's organised crims and mafiosi clearly believe that contrary to EUphile scare stories, they would be better off under the EU than under the security regimes of individual states. Sinn Fein's Remainer stance comes not only from legitimate political concerns but, one suspects, a certain sympathy for IRA members now deply involved in organised crime. Before the referendum, Irish courts seized €28m from ex-PIRA organised crime bosses, much of which, it is thought, originated from EU grant scams which are funded in part by UK taxpayers. The amount seized is only the tip of the iceburg - perhaps only 5% of the proceeds of ex-terrorist organised crime in Ireland.

We have posted before on the murder of journalists working on organised crime stories throughout Europe, many of which involved serious fraud and corruption of EU funds. From Veronica Guerin in 1996 to Daphne Caruana Galizia, blown apart by a mafia car bomb in Malta in 2017, dirty EU money attracts the worst and most vile criminal elements in our society. Unused airports and motorways going nowhere in the Mezzogiorno to the fouling of Loch Corrib in Galway with raw sewage from crooked developers snouting the EU grant trough all bear the hand of organised crime. And it's unstoppable by EU-wide security and police action.

Indeed, some professional UK police officers have deep suspicions as to the integrity of many of those working for both Europol and Frontex, and there have been persistent rumours of deep and embedded organised crime representation in both organisations. These suspicions also extend to the EU itself. Despite the most committed efforts of the governments of many member states, and of individual MEPs, the EU has failed over many years to introduce an effective set of measures to counter organised crime in Europe. Both in terms of a concerted pursuit of organised crime, and an agreed framework for confiscation of the proceeds of crime, the EU has failed to act. In a 2017 EU Observer article entitled "Mafia money pollutes the EU economy", the authors conclude

On 7 October 2016, the EU parliament approved the report on the fight against corruption, prepared by an Italian MEP, Laura Ferrara, which partially adopts the work of Alfano's special committee. The report's 35 pages echoes the same wish-list to the EU commission, that the offence of "criminal association regardless of consummation of criminal ends" should be punishable.

And yet, there has still been very little progress. It's like a broken record.

In the light of the evidence it seems that there is an almost symbiotic relationship between the capos of the EU and Europe's crime bosses. Make no mistake, the UK's fight against crime will be more effective, safer and more secure from criminal infiltration after Brexit than now - and that may also be part of the reason why some Irish factions are exhibiting such sustained opposition to Brexit.

Conservative and other political party democracy

The eagle-eyed amongst you may notice a newcomer to the daily blogroll list to the right - the Campaign for Conservative Democracy. John Strafford has been striving ever since Hague imposed his elitist and centralist constitution on the Party in 1998 to reform and democratise the party. He makes a most persuasive case for we, the members of the Party, reclaiming ownership from the Patrician elite and their globalist backers. I won't dwell on the details, which are of little interest to UKIP readers.

However, this fundamental requirement for a party to operate democratically goes to the heart of many issues now assuming importance. My previous tongue-in-cheek reaction to the formation of the 'Brexit' Party was primarily due to a broadly signalled tight central control that would deny its new members effective governance. Its founder is caught in a Catch-22 situation. She wants a new party that can field 'professional, highly competent' candidates and can exclude the Muslim-baiters and the swivel-eyed-loon tendency of UKIP (of whom it must be said there are remarkably few in my experience) and thus is terrified of allowing a one-member-one-vote system. But a party founded without real member democracy must fail; individuals won't donate to a body in which they have no say (the current Tory dilemma) and the party will be dependent on large donations and therefore be vulnerable to corruption and anti-democratic governance.

One of the reforms that I support most strongly is the limiting of individual political donations to somewhere around £50,000. This is vehemently opposed by both Labour and Conservatives; the former relies on Trade Union bungs, the latter on sometimes shady globalist finance. In the absence of large bungs, each party becomes greatly more dependent on its members for both direct funding and fundraising - and each party must in return allow members a real say in the important things.

These matters have been simmering for some years, but have, like so many other issues, now come to the fore because of Brexit. Charles Moore writes in the Telegraph in a manner in which no-one five years ago could ever have imagined; he advocates the firm but fair deselection of all Conservative Remainer MPs, starting with Dominic Grieve. He writes much as many readers write in the blog comments - 

Recently I attended a country funeral. The people in the pew behind me were pointing out the war memorial on the wall. “People shouldn’t forget what those men did,” said one, “They made sure this was a free country”. “It’s not a free country while we’re in this EU,” said another, “We want to go, and now these MPs are trying to stop us”. Some MPs seem slow to pick up this point, and not to realise that they are moving themselves into uncharted territory.

It seems that ensuring party democracy won't wait even for the 29th March. Thus for my party at least, I support fully Mr Strafford's proposals.