Macron's 'Five year' pledge is pure fantasy

Little Macron confirmed his status as a fantasist yesterday when he pledged that repairs to Notre Dame would be finished in five years. He featured on this blog previously for his vision of Europe based on the computer game Sim City, a teenage boy's pubescent make-believe fantasy world.

Using structural steel or reinforced concrete one can create large buildings quickly. Portland cement gains strength rapidly. Gypsum plasters set almost instantly. Off-site manufacturing of entire bathrooms and kitchens which are craned into place is increasingly common. Click-together polymeric components even avoid Tadeusz, his nailbag and hammer.

However, lime mortars and lime plasters mean slow building - as does ashlar or cut stone. Lime mortars cure by CO2, and this can take months. When cathedrals were first built, the building season halted in the Autumn, before the first frosts. Recent work was covered in straw and thatched and left to cure for several months. There are no accelerants for hydraulic lime.

The damage to cracked but uncollapsed rib-vaults at Notre Dame will be infinitely harder to repair than the collapsed ones. Those flying buttresses are presently pushing the roofless walls inwards, and a temporary but substantial steel structure will be needed to stabilise the nave - wind loadings could still collapse the fragile structure.

Not to mention finding sufficient European Oak timbers. As an aside, a Nelson-era frigate took about 600 oak trees to build - and we had a fleet of 900 ships. Those oaks were planted in the 17th century by Pepys expressly for that future purpose. We no longer have a reserve of large structural oaks. For the stone, old quarries must be re-opened, masons recruited from all over Europe and the cathedral close will be alive with the clink of stone on bankers.

My own guess is twenty years. At least between fifteen and twenty-five. Something in that scale. Notre Dame will be covered with a vast temporary roof and be encumbered within by a massive steel structural frame for a generation. Macron is a fool and away with the fairies.

And now for the first of my EP election memes - I return to Twitter for such events with all the enthusiasm of a plumber clearing a blocked toilet.  

Conservative Leadership Contest

Six months. Not enough time for RII unless it happens in October (which we would win again), but long enough to replace May.

She won't go until after May 2nd, around three weeks away, and I'm sorry for the decimation of sitting Conservative councillors that will occur, but go she must. Members haven't had the chance to elect a leader since 2005, and given the schism between the parliamentary and ordinary party means there will be many Red Tories who will want another Parliamentary stitch-up to prevent the over 70% Brexit grass-roots party from finally democratically electing our Leader. However, the new leader will welcome the delay of a full election - the process won't be complete in time for the EP elections on 23rd May, which is likely to see both UKIP and the Brexit Party take many of the existing 19 Conservative seats. Thus the inevitable EP wipeout will still be yet another May disaster without tainting her successor.

Usefully also, party members are beginning to realise that the truly dreadful Hague party constitution is in deep need of reform. It is a patrician stitch-up that institutionalises the power of the party grandees and reduces members to the level of dumb leaflet deliverers. A petition of members will need 10,000 signatures to start with just to change the 12-month rule - to twist May's arm if she digs her fingernails into the Number 10 door posts. Where do I sign?  

We can NEVER trust these shameless Liars

The Daily Remain dignifies their perfidy by terming them Hypocrites - but as Brendan O'Neill wrote, in reality they are no more than Liars.

These are the rogues, the crooked chiselling worms, who want to impose a system of censorship on the internet to regulate truth-telling by the public - yes; this cabal of meretricious deceivers who cannot open their mouths without gushing a foul stream of noroviral bowel content think they can impose their crooked falsehoods on the British public.

We don't need a White Paper to sort out their lying sleaze - we need an election to cull them!

Update
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Well, I missed it. Yesterday morning I noticed our 4 millionth visit was coming up and thought I could catch it this morning. However, overnight it came and went. So, erm, please join me in raising a glass to having achieved 4,000,431 pageviews

Some of our most popular posts include

And so this is Christmas (December 2017 - 2,908 views)
London 2012 - Whores, drugs and corruption (June 2012 - 2,315 views)
Blair struggles to rise from the political grave (Feb 2017 - 4,766 views)

But the outright winner is..

Celebrity Superinjunction - Why we're naming them (April 2016, 17,708 views)

Censorship and Repression - May's Ceauscescu moves

A leader desperately clinging onto power and fearful of the whispers of the people will inevitably enact repressive measures to restrict free speech - and it's therefore no surprise that the doomed May has gone down the Ceauscescu path with proposals contained in the Online Harms White Paper for widespread government censorship of the internet. 

She is supported by her sinister Grand Vizier Sajid Javid and by Labour's Noncefinder General, Tom Watson - whose credulity in giving his support to criminal fantasists who flung accusations of paedo assault against the wholly innocent matches only his deep Socialist support of any measures that restrict free speech and repress democratic freedom.

The way they're going to do it is this. First they establish their ability to impose swingeing penalties on the online service providers - Facebook, Twitter, Google (the host of this blog). Then they task these firms with implementing government censorship requirements or risk even greater penalties. For blogs such as this, the duty will not be simply to remove censored content when notified but to act proactively to identify those blogs likely to offend the government and close them down in advance. With MPs whining like babies about people being rude about them, you can be sure they'll include censorship of political criticism in a government-imposed list of censored blog content including (Chapter 7)

Guidance to companies to outline what activity and material constitutes hateful content, including that which is a hate crime, or where not necessarily illegal, content that may directly or indirectly cause harm to other users – for example, in some cases of bullying, or offensive material. (my underlining)

In other words, anyone the government wants can now become a 'protected group' under censorship law - including MPs, the patrician establishment, the betrayer civil service, scum corporate globalists, mutton-headed Whitehall dags and plod chiefs, the EU capos ..

Neither will blogs be able to remind readers for example of Yvette Cooper's home flipping or her mendacious pledge to house migrants in one of her homes -

Being harassed online can be upsetting and frightening, and online harassment can amount to a criminal offence. Far too many people, from public figures to schoolchildren, have experienced this kind of behaviour.

Yep - non-criminal, wholly lawful  'harassment' of public figures will also cause Google to censor blogs under May's Ceaucescu Law . Take a look at this - it may be the last time you see it

And finally, the Ministry of Truth will come to life as the government decides what information and informed comment can be published on this blog

(Information) can harm us in many different ways, encouraging us to make decisions that could damage our health, undermining our respect and tolerance for each other and confusing our understanding of what is happening in the wider world. It can also damage our trust in our democratic institutions, including Parliament

Oh boy - so it's blogs that damage our trust in Parliament - not Parliament's betrayal of democracy or corrupt MPs as I previously described  them as denizens of Dante's eighth malbolge  - pimps, seducers, flatterers dipped in human shit, liars, fornicators, barrators, perjurers, corrupt office-holders, half-wit frauds and peculators. And I can name at least three of each. And have candid photos of one (widely circulated on the net) who importuned another pervert to shit on him.

As even the 'Daily Remain' comments

Tory MP and former Culture Secretary John Whittingdale, writing at the weekend, was completely justified in warning that the proposals risk dragging Britain into a 'draconian censorship regime' more akin to China, Russia or North Korea. No other Western democratic state has countenanced similarly far-reaching controls.

Government censorship of blogs, FB and Twitter will be wide ranging, using the government's own tame Ministry of Truth agencies including the BBC - and even forcing GFT to push BBC pro-government propaganda onto users;

• The steps companies should take in their terms of service to make clear what constitutes disinformation, the expectations they have of users, and the penalties for violating those terms of service.
• Steps that companies should take in relation to users who deliberately misrepresent their identity to spread and strengthen disinformation.
• Making content which has been disputed by reputable fact-checking services less visible to users.
• Using fact-checking services, particularly during election periods.
• Promoting authoritative news sources.
• Promoting diverse news content, countering the ‘echo chamber’ in which people are only exposed to information which reinforces their existing views.

May, Javid and the Red Tories have truly become globalist dags and tools of the Socialists. The Noncefinder General and his Marxist capo must be rubbing their hands with glee.

OK, I suggest any readers with any interest in freedom investigate using Tor and Signal.If this repressive authoritarian shite becomes law, we're going underground.

Perfidious MPs will be running scared of the ballot box

Not all our MPs will betray the promises their parties made at the 2017 election, when their lies induced 86% of electors to vote for their solemn pledges to Leave. Not all MPs will betray their previous votes to trigger Article 50 and to Leave the EU. Not all MPs will betray their moral obligation to enact in Parliament the nation's democratic will. But most will.

For some, those who lied openly and brazenly, their hearts dark with duplicity and treachery, for whom the rewards of place or office were too greatly loved to be foregone, no words are foul enough to condemn their betrayal. For others, the ninnies, unicorn-chasers, naive credulous fools, babblers, mirror-gazers and assorted half-wits, carried up in the vain delusion that their own opinions counted for more than the Referendum, their fate may shock and surprise them.

MPs may not be clever, but most of them are cunning. And many know what the ballot box is likely to bring. Away from the fairyland of Westminster even the deepest self-deceptions and delusions fall away, and their abject failure to enact Brexit will stand them stark bollock naked before the scrutiny of their electors. Even now they feel the fear.

So don't expect an election any time soon. They will delay it - all of them, each and every perfidious arse on those green benches - for as long as possible. In the hope that the anger of electors at their failure will fade. In the hope that something will turn up. In the hope that another three years sitting as frauds and liars, their public regard prone in the gutter and feculent with filth, will lessen the reckoning they will face.

It will not. 

I despair of our dullard Parliament

The 2010 and 2015 intakes of MPs are possibly the most pathetic collection of witless dullards in the history of the House. I suspect that following the exposure of Parliamentary thievery, venality, fraud and crookedness with the Expenses Scandal under the second most corrupt Speaker this century, party managers paid more than cursory attention to the criminal inclinations of PPCs - and as a result we have benches of dreary mediocre imbeciles hardly capable of tying their own shoes but at least also lacking the nous to charge the cost of their crystal grapefruit bowls to the taxpayer. Perhaps if the parties allowed Constituency Associations to select their representatives ... but no, we're governed by a wunch of guileless morons.

Yesterday they gave up taxing their limited collective intelligences and handed Brexit over to the governments of the remaining 27 Federast members. Now these guys know the reality of the EU - that it's run by the unelected officials of the Commission, and as a consequence only two of its five unelected Presidents are worth a spit. They know the European Parliament is just for show, a fake democratic forum in which everything is decided before it hits the chamber and most MEPs are concerned more with maxing the capacity of their personal troughs than with democracy, so the Council don't care whether Nigel pitches up with 73 Brexit Party MEPs in July to create havoc - to them it's utterly irrelevant. Hof, of course, is incandescent with rage at the prospect that his personal theatrical stage set (his party has all of two MEPs but he heads the ALDE grouping of nonentities from elsewhere) may continue to be polluted by those with less than anilingual reverence for his camp caparisons.

May, beyond all reason, is going for MV3 prior to the meeting of the EC on the 21st, and MV4 after it. On the basis that the majority rejecting the Selmayr-Robbins Treaty is shrinking. It may be down to double figures for MV3 - what larks!

I just want a chance now to show my displeasure at the ballot box. I suspect tens of millions of fellow electors of whatever stripe do also. So a long Article 50 extension would be slightly cathartic at least - allowing us to vote in May, and give the tedious dolts in Parliament a taste of what's to come.

The Day the Political Class declared war on democracy

I really can't improve on Allister Heath in the Telegraph this morning.

He believes, as I do, that the Remainer political and patrician elites are ready to overturn democracy itself to get their own way. His opening and final paragraphs -

At moments like this, when democracy is being traduced, it is easy to be angry, to rage or to fulminate. I’ve been prone to such emotions myself over the past few years. Today, I’m merely grief-stricken: sad, but no longer furious....

Yet today, this wonderful political tradition is in jeopardy. Thanks to the sabotage of Brexit by the Remainers entrusted to deliver it, the majority of the political class is declaring war on all Brexiteers and all democrats. I can think of no greater tragedy.

It's all falling apart quite quickly now. May doesn't even enjoy control of her own cabinet any more - ministers, and Hammond, can simply defy her as they wish. I doubt the EU Council on the 21st will grant or require a long extension - they want to isolate the infection, not encourage an epidemic of democracy. Nor I think will they now grant even a short extension - 29th March will be the day.

So my view remains as yesterday's post - the anti-democrats can now only either revoke Article 50 altogether, which I give a 50/50 chance, or between the 22nd and 28th they swallow the Selmayr-Robbins treaty. 

London - more children slaughtered

Bridget Prentice, who used to be my MP, left the Commons when scandals about her expenses mis-spending began to emerge. I was about to present evidence of her using Parliamentary expenses to subsidise the running of a constituency Labour Party office when she threw in the towel. She ligged a job as an electoral commissioner which came to an end in September 2018 - putting her well within the frame of the 'Corrupt Commission' that acted so partially against Brexit bodies that it was condemned as 'not fit for purpose' by leading politicians. Anyway, back in 2008 I wrote to her over the mismanagement of the Met Police - a mismanagement that has got far worse since.

Here in the borough of Lewisham we pay the salaries of around a thousand Metropolitan police officers - our share of the 32,000 strong force. Yet where are they? Our homes can be burgled, fouled and violated, the possessions of a lifetime stolen and trashed, and we are told it's no longer a concern of the police - we're invited to leave our details on an answerphone. This year nearly thirty teenage boys have been knifed to death in London, yet on the buses and in Lewisham market at the end of the school day are scores of knife-carrying teens terrifying each other and causing public fear.

She replied

I do not believe that life in Lewisham is as grim, unappealing and crime ridden as you portray in your letter. If you feel that 'knife-carrying teens' are terrorising 'the buses' and 'Lewisham market' I suggest then that you raise the matter with the police.

The arrogance and contempt of her response was quite typical - Bridget was never a clever woman, and I doubt she had ridden on a bus or visited Lewisham Market since being elected. It is exactly her brand of purblind ignorance that has seen the numbers of dead children in London multiply in just ten years - the young corpses no longer confined to black-on-black violence but claiming victims who really did stand chances of becoming architects or doctors. Yet there is something surprising about this - take a look at the Met's stats

Boris served as Mayor from 2008 to 2016. His first term was dominated by the Olympics - but in his second term, he concentrated his efforts on knife crime, with some success. Then two things happened. From 2015, Theresa May, as Home Secretary, prevented police from carrying out stop and search - and in 2016 Sadiq Khan took post as Mayor of London.

London is now stuck with exactly the same brand of asinine, purblind social democrat stupidity that we had before 2008; there is little to choose between Bridget Prentice and Theresa May in terms of (in)ability, and Khan is as robust and effective as a feather in the wind. May is even now defending her appalling tenure as Home Secretary, and the vain, preening little Khan has only an eye for photo opportunities rather than dead teens.

For whatever reason, the number of fatal stabbings is increasing - counter intuitively, for if the volume of knife crime is what it was in 2008 with thirty dead, one would expect a learning curve in trauma medicine and response to have lowered lethality.

Perhaps now that normal middle-class grammar school kids are bleeding to death in the gutter, London's Labour mafia and their tame Prime Minister might take notice.

The greatest failure of Statecraft since Suez

If was some forty years before Suez, and not in the heat of the Egyptian desert but in the cold dark of the North Sea that Admiral Beatty commented, as two of his prized battlecruisers blew up at Jutland, "There's something wrong with our bloody ships today". The nation, schooled in an invincible navy, in a formidable fleet, found the losses hard to swallow. Likewise, in a Britain schooled in the notion of a Rolls-Royce civil service, in which the best and brightest in the land devote lives to the nation, and  as highly competent mandarins steer the great ship of state with skill and dedication, we are faced with the abject failure of Whitehall.

There's something wrong with the bastards today. Despite May's manifest stubborn stupidity, despite her lunacy in treating Brexit, as Nick Timothy described, as a damage limitation exercise, they should never have permitted her ignorance and idiocy to plunge the United Kingdom into the greatest failure of Statecraft since Suez, as Allister Heath phrases it.

'Boomer' Cox is a caricature, a character from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera or one of the supporting cast of Mortimer's Rumpole. Skilled neither in this specialist area of the law or in statesmanship, his mission has quite predictably failed. The Commons team of eight legal experts have nothing to scrutinise.

The EU will not move a millimetre because it is their sole aim to damage, hurt and humiliate Britain, a repeat Versailles. In this they are assisted by May's scabrous government and a Parliament that still refuses to accept that a majority of voters, 17.4m electors, sealed a mandate to Leave.

Well, sooner or later they must face the ballot box. Any notion they may have that the public anger at her capitulation, at the failure of my party to prevent it, will be forgotten is naive. We have not forgiven Blair for 2003, nor will we. Our memories are long and we carry a grudge deeply. They will not, they cannot succeed in preventing our exit from a failed EU - we only question how much suffering and humiliation will they inflict on Britain before they realise this. The more they prolong it, the greater the force with which they will be thrown from office.

Macron's puerile SimEU

The extraordinary document that emerged from the Élysée on Monday night was at first glance in-credible. I thought it was a clever spoof. But no. It seems that M.Macron had kissed his grannie good morning, scoffed his croissant and sat himself down at the big gold desk in his Palace and built his own fantasy SimEU.

Here is the barracks with the SimEU army, here the detention prison of the SimEU Office of Internal Security; here is the SimEU Central Bank and the SimEU Ministry of Finance. And the whole thing populated by busy and happy little SimEU citizens on SimEU minimum wage playing safely on social media regulated by the SimEU Prefecture for Internet Safety, after a hard day's work inventing innovative new Euro things at the SimEU Creative Foundation.

Really, I'm hardly joking. The whole document, of which he is inordinately proud, reads just like a teenage boy's fantasy world. The document even has the Heroes of SimEU, the French and German Leaders, waving graciously from the balconies of their SimEU palaces at crowds of adoring SimEU citizens.

He even addressed it to the "Citoyens d’Europe" despite the Federacy having only 61% of the continent's population under its flag. This degree of self-delusion was not lost on Henry Newman, who replied to Macron via his Telegraph column

I was struck that your letter largely conflates Europe with the EU, eliding the distinction between a political union of 27 members and the broader concerns of our continent which includes proud nations such as Switzerland, Norway and - soon - the UK, which are friends and allies of the EU but outside of that political bloc. Your letter has various suggestions for improving the EU. Some may be welcome, others less so. But each proposal involves the EU gaining further powers and greater influence over people’s lives, at the expense of sovereign states, when we both know that right across the bloc a strong majority want the EU to do the precise opposite. For you, it seems the answer to every question is always more Brussels.

Had this letter been written and published in the late 1990s, at the heights of EU hubris, before the foundations of the Federacy started to show cracks, it might, just might, have been hailed as a visionary manifesto for an ideal EU Central State, authoritarian but benign. But we're now in the second decade of the following century, the UK has left and the remaining 27 are split on everything from migration to finance, the currency is tanking, the economy is sclerotic and the streets are filled with tear gas and blinded Gilets jaunes.

That the President of France is so deluded, so out of touch with the reality of political possibility, so unrealistic about his expectations is of deep concern. Our teenage fantasist really believes he can secure a date with Jennifer Aniston.

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
==========
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'.  

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.

EU over-regulation #94

The pasta factory in Gödersdorf is, for an industrial building, quite pretty. Imagine a small Victorian brewery or mill, a range of buildings around a yard, and flowing obliquely through it a crystal-clear bach rippling over its bed of smooth washed stone. People come here from wide around for partly the discount pasta shop but mostly the café - fresh cooked pasta in a range of sauces, and pots of the local lager. The family firm competes quite well against the big industrial pasta factories to the south, and brands are widely stocked in supermarkets in the region.

Finkensteiner have made a unique selling point in their egg content - "Four eggs to every kilo!" is the proud boast. But now they have fallen foul of EU labelling regulations, and face huge costs in re-printing and re-labelling all the packaging to be in exact accordance with EU labelling regulations.

The factory cafe terrace

An official complaint was made to the Justice department, and they have been convicted and fined for breaches including

• Stating the number of eggs per kilo rather than a percentage figure - and only a percent figure
• Using an hourglass to indicate cooking time rather than written boiling instructions
• The storage and use-by instructions are too widely separated on the packets

The illegal pasta label

Ten tonnes of pasta in the warehouse must also now be re-packaged.

Honestly, I can't even begin to condemn the utter stupidity of EU over-regulation.

Where is the gold?

We all know the terminally inept Gordon Brown, Britain's second worst post-war PM, sold off much of the nation's gold at a discount price for a short-term political gain (and no doubt Mr McDonnell will sell off the rest in short order if Labour take power). Britain's gold holdings are now somewhere on the low side, it appears. But are they? (The 395 tonnes sold by Brown would now be worth $13.1bn more - he really was a humungous dickhead)

Our 310 tonnes remaining after Gordon's sell-off seem to leave us somewhere between Portugal and Austria, one of the smaller holdings. And Italy's precipice financial status seems a little less serious when you know she has almost two and a half thousand tonnes of gold squirrelled away - but all is not as it seems.

Zero Hedge reports on an unseemly squabble over who owns Italy's gold - the banks or the Italian State. As entertaining as this is, the more important point is that no-one has physically audited those gold bars since the 1970s. As ZH reports

The Banca d’Italia furthermore claims that 1199.4 tonnes of the gold (or roughly half), is stored in the Bank’s gold vaults under it’s Palazzo Koch headquarters building in Rome, with most of the other half stored in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY), and a small balance kept the Bank of England in London, and in an account of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in the vaults of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) in Berne, Switzerland. But without any documentary evidence or independent auditing or verification of any of its gold, especially the foreign held gold, these claims are impossible to verify.

There are strong suggestions that Italy's actual gold may be somewhere on a par with the UK's holding - just a few hundred tonnes - the rest of it having been stolen, sold off, defrauded or evaporated. Some bright spark may have realised that what's important is how much gold the world believes you have, rather than how much you actually have.

Which really also leaves all the other claimed balances open to question, doesn't it?

Normally this would be a sort of anorak issue, but with dire warnings that should a catastrophic global financial collapse finish-off paper money we will need to return to the gold standard, perhaps it's something that should be checked?

UK's Copper Cage is a national disgrace

The maps below, of southern England and of Austria, show population density (see Dan Cookson's stunning map site). You will see that apart from the Vienna-Munich corridor, Austria is very sparsely populated. It is a country covered in steep mountains, deep valleys and thick forests. This makes for two wonderful characteristics; empty roads that delight any English driver, and total, universal, 4G mobile coverage from the Grossglockner to the Neusiedler See. You are reading this thanks to a little plastic cube on my desk that streams Netflix and concurrently provides high speed broadband and Comms connections throughout the house (with a couple of range extenders as needed - it is after all solid stone) all via the mobile network for €1 a day. It does, rarely, once or twice a year, when Thor is engaged with Odin and the valleys shake and the tiles rattle with the thunder of their battle and scorching actinic thunderbolts explode Larch and Spruce in flame and splinters, drop out. But has always come back before it became critical. 

My brother lives in a busy little town in Suffolk, much visited and photographed by tourists in the Summer months. The land is soft and undulating with the homely comfort captured by John Constable. The highest part of Suffolk is a town called Sudbury, perched on a mountain some 20m high. But neither my brother nor any of his neighbours can use a mobile phone in their own homes. They have to walk or drive a couple of hundred metres to get a signal - a situation to which Anglians are so used for it to be quite unremarkable.

He is amongst the one-third of rural households in England (not even the UK) who do not have access to the mobile network. The Telegraph reports

Brian Wilson, author of the report and chairman of Rural England, said: "Nearly a fifth of people in England live in rural areas, yet the evidence shows that many of them face inadequate services, such as being unable to make mobile phone calls or being without transport options.“Two years after we released the first State of Rural Services report it seems clear that rural residents frequently still lose out in terms of funding and access to services.

“The challenges facing rural communities are likely to grow in the coming years and this will be reflected in their service needs. If policies and service delivery were properly rural-proofed it seems evident that those needs would be much better met."

The report found a basic mobile phone call cannot be made inside 33 per cent of rural buildings - an issue which affects just three per cent of urban premises.

Here in my bit of Austria one can no longer order a land-line for domestic use - the phone networks have abandoned these copper cages in other than the well-populated towns and valleys. The 'handy' is ubiquitous, and officialdom here has even stopped asking for both 'home phone' and 'mobile phone' numbers - almost everyone, including the elderly, just has the one.

I can think of a number of reasons, none of them good or adequate, for the UK's abysmal performance. But then again there may be something I don't know, some compelling and over-riding reason why mobile 4G networks can power one of Europe's most sparsely populated regions but cannot allow a bloke in the leafy shires to receive  a mobile call in his own living room.

One of our local phone masts

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.

You can smell the fear in Brussels

The EU's unelected officials are thugs and bullies, used to throwing their weight around without any voters behind them to teach them sense. They exist in a vacuum, in a rarefied world of pretence and privilege that rarely brings them into contact with reality. Hence they are glacial in reacting to risks and threats, such as the coming financial crisis which will engulf the Eurozone. But like all bullies, when fronted up, when challenged, when thwarted they freeze.

The United Kingdom Parliament has stood firm against their attempts to 'punish' the UK. They are now faced with either modifying or removing the Backstop to the UK's satisfaction or seeing us leave in a Clean Brexit. That is the reality, and one can smell the fear in Brussels. Sure, we have made mistakes. Our biggest was to entrust the draft treaty negotiations to a child. As Fraser Nelson writes in the Telegraph

This time, she needs a proper team. Leaving it to a civil servant, Olly Robbins, was always going to lead to disaster. The mess he led her into – agreeing a “backstop” arrangement with the EU that Britain might be stuck in forever – was never going to pass through Parliament. She’s taking Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney General, whom MPs trust to spot any trap in the EU small print.

Well, there are still plenty of Robbins' mistakes in the draft treaty, but none we can't live with in the short term. We can pick the bones out of it as and when we must.

Parliament's backbone is strengthened if it has public opinion behind it, and the polls are now swinging to a public preference for a Clean Brexit. The British have seen the nasty face of the EU, the bullying, the arrogance and the intransigence and have turned against it. People are prepared to take the hit and get it over with. Yet again, British people have more faith in themselves than do many of their MPs.

Most of all, the unelected officials are now worrying about getting money out of us. Yesterday the threat shifted subtly to 'If you don't pay us you won't get a trade deal', to which we must reply 'Well, no trade deal, no geld'.

We really do want to continue the best possible relations with all the nations of Europe, but they really need to wise up - the trolls, fools and poseurs in the Berlaymont, the folie de grandeur that infects Brussels, with all its silly little medals and petty distinctions, is not serving them well.

UK puts Brussels on the back foot

I am a happier man today. The Commons defeat of the Grieve and Cooper amendments yesterday was a slap for the Remainers, and the Brady amendment now passes the negotiating advantage to Britain. Our parliamentary system must be both confusing and frustrating to the unelected officials in Brussels, for whom the decisions of their own puppet parliament are always agreed well in advance of  MEPs voting, and there are no surprises in the chamber.

In past weeks Brussels have shrugged their shoulders and pretended to ask 'what the UK wanted'. Well, yesterday made it clear; NO backstop, but otherwise we'll take the deal. It's a clear message both to Brussels and the world; either withdraw this nasty and unnecessary little attempt to fracture the United Kingdom, or put tens of thousands of German auto workers out of work.

Although Brussels may appear united, this far from the case. The artificial backstop bears all the hallmarks of Selmayr, making an attempt to punish the UK. However, it will be the nations of Europe, not the unelected officials of the Berlaymont, who will actually pay the price for no deal - and now we'll see whether they're prepared to take the hit to satisfy little Martin's infantile spite.

It puts Brussels on the back foot, and the UK in the position of being the responsible mature democracy seeking a negotiated solution. A flat refusal from Brussels will not be a good look for the EU. 

EUROPA RESURGAM!

The continent faces its biggest challenge since the 1930s. We urge European patriots to resist the globalist onslaught

The idea of Europe is born again.

'We've had enough of cultural heritage, enough of the value of place and national self-worth!' The wreckers cry. 'Let us destroy the burden of the past and the traditions of Europe's diverse peoples and create instead the secure blandness of an homogeneous empire, a celebration of mediocrity, a joyless characterless technocracy!'

Europe is being destroyed by bureaucratic socially-progressive corporatists, an elite of patrician managerialists, who would destroy every vestige of democratic self-government, and who would destroy the principles of Westphalian Sovereignty for which Europe's nation-states have striven since the seventeenth century.

This is the noxious climate in which Europe's elections will take place in May. Europe's globalists want to dismantle the historic Europe of Westphalian states and to replace them with an unelected, unaccountable and anti-democratic cabal of permanent and self-replicating officials, law-makers sans Justice, rule-makers sans Right, who wish to degrade our rich diversity into a grey, amorphous, dead culture of compliance and pettifogging risk-aversity.

Those who believe in the legacy of Burke, Hobbs, de Toqueville or Nijaz Ibrulj also believe in our ability to raise ourselves above the corrupt and power-hungry machinations of Brussels, will have faith in our ability to defend our peoples and cultures against this new and barbarous totalitarianism, three-fourths of a century after shedding the last fascist burden, and a generation after we razed the Berlin Wall to a stump.

The nations of Europe have given us Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Voltaire, Verlaine, Mann and Dante. The technocrats have given us the Animal Waste Directive. They have banished love and joy on the Precautionary Principle - such emotions detract from technocratic rationalism. Love of the little platoons, for the local, for institutions within our compass are scoured from our earth in their unforgiving and relentless managerial trampling on the nations and peoples of Europe.

The greed of these unprincipled dullards for power and status will take our souls. So eagerly do they strive for the complete eradication of cultural identity that they will level the graves of our forbears, desecrate sacred memories and totems with the foulness of their touch. We must fight their depredations; we must speak our poems, recite our fables to our children, fire our micro-distilleries, thrill in our dance and our music, take pride in our raiment and costume, preserve the skills of the hearth and the oven and teach them to our sons and daughters in defiance of  the poisonous homogeneity of their multinational globalist factory-fertig foodstuffs.

From Tallin to Vienna, Porto to Budapest, we must fight these globalist managerialists, fight to preserve our nations, our cultural identity, our rich diversity, our local institutions and our allegiances. We are our soil, we are the heart of our lands, we are a Europe of nations and we must strive against the aggression and hate of these soulless monsters for our very existence. 

[written in response to a bunch of obscure 'intellectuals' of little wit and less wisdom who have signed a chain letter in favour of the global corporatists destroying our continent - see The Guardian]

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UPDATE

How could I forget - Happy Australia Day to all the 'Strines in the UK; sink one for me