Chlorine chicken

The UK has some of the highest food and farming standards in Europe. The US is committed to scientific, high-intensity farming using growth hormones for beef cattle and novel GM food ingredients. They wash their chickens in Chlorine, we wash our ready-to-eat salads in the same Chlorine. These differences, we are told, make a trade deal between us that includes food impossible.

Forgive me, but I simply don't see this. If we Brexit (which is in doubt) we will be in charge of our own food labelling regulations. Why should we not simply require beef from hormone cattle, GM foods and Chlorine washed products to be clearly labelled as such and allow consumers to make the choice?

No-one has produced any evidence that these American foodstuffs are dangerous - and as the US is one of the most litigious nations on Earth, one would have expected any actionable dangers to have been exposed long ago. Surely in an age of food banks we cannot quibble at allowing British citizens ($40k per capita GDP at PPP) to buy the same food as American citizens ($60k per capita GDP at PPP)?

I wouldn't choose to buy hormone beef or GM soya for myself. But then again I'm a food quality snob who wouldn't drink the flouridated ex human urine that Londoners call tap water ("It's very pure - it's been filtered through seven pairs of kidneys by the time it gets here") for twenty years. It's a matter of personal preference, surely?

Chlorine washed lettuce

Theresa May's legacy will be the destruction of the Conservative Party

Prime Ministers are famously focused on their legacy. The illusions of control they enjoy in office inevitably blind them to the reality that all political careers end in failure, and that their legacy is one factor not under their command. Bloody Blair is remembered now only for duping the nation into his dodgy war in Iraq, the dilettante Cameron for losing the referendum, clumsy Gordon for his fiscal incompetence, the sordid Major (and Slugger Prescott both) for improper coitus. Though Prescott has a punch to offset his lustful coupling and Major the Cones Hotline.

I've no idea what Theresa May imagined her political legacy would be, but it's now looking almost certain that she'll be remembered as the PM that destroyed the Conservative Party.

More than 70% of ordinary party members such as myself are Leave supporters. And actually much more than supporters - most of us are Leave activists. If May, as now looks increasingly likely, fails to deliver a Real Brexit, too many of us will be unable to support the party at the next election. There is no other party for us; Batten's Muslim-baiters are unconscionable and Farage, though a sterling chap, values Brexit above Democracy - and I can't help. 

The next General Election after May's Brexit failure will finish the Conservative Party. She will have gone, clutching at the flotsam of an undistinguished career, and remembered only for her betrayal of her nation's democratic traditions and of her party. 

With that failure will come Corby's Marxists. Trident will be decommissioned, our UN seat surrendered to the EU and England's hills covered in windmills. Defence spending will he halved and what remains of the economy devastated. It's about time the youngsters had a taste of what we've fought to hold at bay - perhaps each generation needs to see Socialism in action to believe its malignity.

Edit - Update
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At last - something about which almost everyone can agree. Those who think the government are crap over Brexit is up about 80%, whilst those who think the government aren't crap are down to about 15%, with about 5% 'don't knows'.  

Karfreitag

A cautionary tale.

For as long as anyone can remember, Good Friday or Karfreitag has always been the same. Easter is a big deal here - after the chill snows and dark valleys of Winter, Spring bursts out with a fecundity unknown in Britain; nature is like a teenager pumped with hormones and just explodes into life. Spring flowers push through the last of the snow, and the first of the year's butterflies spread jewelled wings over still-brown herbage.

For Catholics here in the alpine Land, the deal is work until late lunchtime and then home early for the weekend. Protestants, for reasons I can't quite fathom, have always had the whole of Good Friday as a holiday, by custom going back to the 17th century. Paid. Like a Feiertag. Not taken from their annual leave.

Until of course some idiot claimed the arrangement was unlawful and discriminatory and started a legal action. Now the state government has introduced a new law - everyone gets a half-day on Good Friday. Work ends at 14.00.

Of course, both Catholics and Protestants are up in arms. Protestants have lost half a day's holiday, and Catholics used to slink-off home at 2pm anyway so have gained nothing.

The politicians responsible have called it "einen guten, tragfähigen Kompromiss" - a good, sustainable compromise. Everyone else has predicted it won't last the week.

Fury Unbound

The airwaves are filled with Remainer ploys, asinine suggestions, has-been political relics such as Bloody Blair and the deeply sordid John Major all engaged in a final all-out assault against Brexit. Heseltine, dusty and dried as a mummy is wheeled into the studio to wheeze, croak and crumble. Corbyn desperately clutches at a potential referendum to stop the tearing of his party asunder, to the rage of vast numbers of Labour voters who only voted Labour in 2017 because of the Party's manifesto promises. Fifth-column cabinet ministers who lied to voters and to their colleagues and cast false votes in our Parliament now reveal themselves as saboteurs and turncoats, too greedy to forego the privileges of office but too desperate to disguise their base treachery any longer.

But whilst Remainers have the State media and all but three of our national papers (the Daily Remain having already deserted) and any number of tricksy, crooked, dishonest and contrived ploys, those who support Brexit have righteous passion and the furious indignation of 17.4m voters watching British democracy being destroyed.

That anger is palpable. The intensity of that indignation if Brexit is frustrated will raise a storm of fury never before seen in Britain, an anger unbound by restraint at our democracy trampled. The mood I detect is implacable, and is as willing to see Britain destroyed from within by bitterness and violent schism as it is to face the hardships from a Clean Brexit.

Unless Remain withdraws from the brink, concedes that they lost, and abandons these plots to frustrate Brexit, I fear most deeply for our future. 

We must plan Germany's survival

The sheer aggression and hatefulness exhibited in spades by Brussels over Brexit - including words and actions that would not be inappropriate if directed at an enemy in war - have been borne with remarkable tolerance by the British people. But the impact of this louche, amateur, vulgar and unstatesmanlike behaviour has not been lost on the country. When Germany sent us Ribbentrop, pumped with hubris and vanity and claiming a Waltish 'von', he was dismissed by the British as a champagne salesman. Now we are sent a stumbling comical drunk, an angry little Polish dwarf who can't control his mouth and a sinister German Grand Vizier, every one of them ill-mannered, dishonourable and untrustworthy. Just more champagne salesmen. Is Europe so impoverished of talent that from a population of 430m it cannot produce three persons with any vestige of international class or even basic diplomatic competence?

It is important that we overcome our dislike of this unattractive and boorish shudder of clowns, for it is becoming clear that Germany is increasingly in trouble and it is more and more likely that we must assist in her survival in the months and years to come. Mogenthau was wrong then and any revivalists of his inane retribution are mistaken now. We might need another Marshall Plan, and this time we might have to do it without the USA.

Germany is horribly exposed to Italian debt and risk of default. Two of her largest banks, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, are not only on the ropes but slipping unconscious from the ring. With the Eurozone now slipping inexorably into recession, the fall of these giants will reverberate throughout Europe.

Germany's auto industry is a late 20th century rustpile. The diesel emissions frauds, crash in diesel sales, Brexit and US tariffs will be a hammer blow to Germany's car plants and the EU-Japanese trade treaty will halt and reverse any compensating Japanese direct investment, for the same reasons as Honda closed in the UK.

The globalists have hoodwinked the Germans into taking a million migrants - to become two million once they have established themselves and dependents join them - on the false and spurious grounds of 'demographics' - an ageing population no longer capable of standing on the production line. These same globalists must have known what is now in the public realm - that Germany will see some 37% of jobs going in the next 15 years as the effects of AI bite. The UK's figure from PwC is 30%. Training a million migrants in basic numeracy and literacy is one matter; retraining twenty million Germans in computer skills is another. My resentment of the loathsome Peter Sutherland is renewed each time I read his weasel words to the HoL select committee in 2014. The real reason for these migrants, as he makes clear, is to help destroy German national identity and cultural congruence

"If one looks at the key arguments and issues relating to the need for migration, the demographic is the most fundamental for many countries of destination. The demographic challenges in a number of European Member States, however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states, are absolutely unquestionable. They are vital in terms of a crucial dynamic for economic growth. A declining and ageing population is destructive of prosperity—forgetting entirely about the moral aspect of migration. That is particularly relevant to a number of countries in central Europe—Germany has a major issue—and some southern Member States. So demographics are a key element of the debate, and a key argument for the development of—I hesitate to use the word because people have attacked it—multicultural states. It is impossible to consider that the degree of homogeneity which is implied by the alternative argument can survive, because states have to become more open in terms of the people who inhabit them, as the United Kingdom has demonstrated."

In terms of electric vehicle technology and battery production, Germany is lagging behind the rest of the world. It is unlikely that she will be able to recover her lost lead in auto-technology for the years ahead.

German manufacturing has sunk to a six-year low. Jan von Gerich of Nordea Bank called the German manufacturing economy 'scary'

The bad news is that there are no signs that the weakness in the more cyclical German manufacturing sector would be temporary, and the outlook is frankly scary. In light of these numbers, it is crystal clear that the challenges currently facing the German economy go well beyond the car sector.

All the signs are that Europe's largest economy is sleepwalking into disaster. It may be that a change of Chancellor, a fresh administration and a range of new voices breaking the stranglehold of the old political elites on Germany's various parliaments, national and state, will head-off disaster, but we cannot bank on it. A stable and democratic Germany tied strongly to France is the guarantee of peace and security in Europe - and we must be prepared to step in to assist if Germany, once again, fails to find her own way.