EU protectionism kills trade and innovation

I have commented before on a deeply protectionist, almost corrupt, culture of business in the EU that appears to offer advantages but in reality strangles innovation, stifles growth and deepens a sclerotic inefficiency that costs jobs. My old example was hairdressers; here a hairdresser must serve a three-year aprenticeship before she can pick up the scissors, whilst in the UK a 16 year old straight from school can hang her shingle without hindrance and get creative with hair. The result is that most women here look like their hair is styled by a Soviet camp tonsorist from a 1950s gulag, whilst Brit girls pioneer the world's most fashionable and glam hairstyles.

Over the Easter weekend I recalled another. I've known about this for three years but for some reason haven't written of it; it is the network of 'business only' suppliers here. It's the way in which buyers in these nations are forced to engage professional tradespersons by restricting or preventing other means of carrying out the work. Many firms simply won't deal with you unless you have a business registration number. There is no equivalent to UK Builders' Merchants for example - just the DIY stores or the 'profi' wholesalers. One can't buy glass at €8/m2 in stock pieces to cut yourself but must order each pane in a finished size at €35/m2 from a glass retailer. You can't have a palette of bags of mortar delivered next day or buy rolls of building membrane except at consumer prices.

There are ways round it for some things - Germans are slightly less constipated than Austrians, and consequently it's been cheaper, including transport cost, to order bulk plasterboard and insulation from Northern Germany than from the local stockists of the same-brand material down the road. It's always worth searching .pl and .si sites as both Poland and Slovenia sometimes carry German and Austrian made materials at a substantial discount.

The most absurd result of local protectionism is Travertine. I'm tiling the new bathrooms in Travertine stone tiles, quarried and cut in Italy, just to the south. You'd think they'd be cheap, then; wrong. You can't buy them for under €65/m2 anywhere here - but I can buy the same tiles from the UK for €22/m2. The transport costs were exactly the same. Now explain to me how it's cheaper to truck stone from Italy to the UK and back to Austria than direct to Austria?

Over the weekend I needed to order some German Häfele ironmongery for a project - you may know the name, we use it widely in the UK. No chance. Häfele only sell to the trade - and helpfully offer to put you in touch with a local profi to do the work for you. They even make their buyers sign a declaration to promise they won't resell the Häfele kit.

Well, you won't be surprised that all of these restrictive practices are unlawful in England - not illegal, but contrary to Common Law. Contracts in restraint of trade are unenforceable. My hinges are available here on the grey market for €24 a pair; I've ordered them openly from Birmingham, from a trade supplier, at £9 a pair and will have them within a week.

It's a small thing perhaps, but an irritating barrier to economic freedom. It's one of the reasons for the zero VAT threshold here - you're either a tradesman or you're not, with no room for the sub-threshold activity we have in the UK. But it will kill them - it's a system that can only work in the absence of the internet.   

Attenborough and other Eco-Liars

Readers may recall we don't have much time for Eco-hypocrisy and virtue signalling; back on 2017 we pointed out that Bloomberg's much acclaimed 'greenest ever' building actually cost around 250,000 tonnes of CO2 to build - a Carbon cost that will NEVER be repaid by energy-efficient plant over the building's entire life. It will be demolished as it stands - a vanity project, a rich man's virtue signalling, and a huge Carbon cost.

Well, another Eco-liar, it emerges is Attenborough. many viewers will have seen his heartbreaking footage of an Orang Utan attacking the backhoe that had destroyed its home. As the Daily Remain writes, these forests are cleared and replanted with Palm Oil plantations to satisfy the European market for 'clean' 'sustainable' and 'environmentally friendly' biofuels. He didn't tell you that, did he?

His home destroyed for EU virtue signallers to feel good about themselves

 CHRIST IS RISEN! Happy Easter All.

Lyra McKee's death at the hands of Remainers

The three-year long refusal by the losing Remain side in the referendum to accept the result has so far seen a bent Speaker and betrayer parliament of lying MPs using every effort to nullify the people's choice, the State media and all but one newspaper stoking the fires of anti-Brexit hatred and the illiberal metropolitan elites, who also think that 'chavs' and 'gammons' should be denied the vote, using every means to pervert, distort and disrupt our exit from the EU. Even the Deep State, a cabal of anti-democratic mandarins who will expect honours for their betrayal of a democracy that they should defend, have used all means both legal and unlawful to sabotage Britain's democratic outcome

Nowhere else in the world would such an unconscionable delay be tolerated. No advanced democracy in the world would permit this travesty of governance, this denial of a voice to the 17.4 million who won, to continue.

Tragically, the Remainers, in refusing so aggressively to accept a clear democratic majority, have inflamed weaker and more barbarous minds to violence. The death of Lyra McKee at the hands of a Remainer 'New IRA' gunman is a new low in our democracy.

We will catch and imprison the gunman, but make no mistake - it is the mass of bien-pensant Brexit Deniers, our betrayer MPs who have blocked Brexit, May's toxic Remainer government and our poisonous Remainer media who were equally responsible for pulling the trigger. For them there will be no forgiveness.

Toxic Theresa May election broadcast "cost us another million votes"

I was chatting on the phone last night to a London chum after I had accidentally caught the Conservative election broadcast transmitted just before the ITV evening news. I found it extraordinary that the thing had featured May at all - but half way through, there she was. There was no escaping the most loathed woman in Britain. I suspect about half the ITV audience flicked channels at this point. I mentioned this in passing on the phone later - to be told "Don't! The idiots have just cost us another million votes".

As the Telegraph reports today, Conservative canvassers out on the knock have been trying to pretend that Toxic May isn't the leader of the Conservative Party and that she hasn't completely screwed up Brexit. They have been met by angry shouty Tory voters either slamming the door in their faces or venting their anger over the parliamentary and government sabotage of Brexit. For anyone who missed it, the misjudged May broadcast is HERE. I won't embed it. There's some content for which we won't give blog-space. 

I think the difference between these local elections and the Euros is that for the former, Conservative voters are simply going on strike. They will not turn out to vote, far less to campaign or donate. Even if the Labour or LibDem loonies win Councils from us, who cares? Council tax has a legal ceiling (which most English Councils have hit this year) and stuff that Tory voters don't mind paying for - a decent school in their catchment area, pot-hole free roads and a local library - have either gone or can't be made worse by a Marxist administration. For the Euros, they will vote TBP. 

My guess is that an appalling local government result will galvanise final moves to oust May. I suspect many fellow Conservatives think the same. You really can't blame them.

Toxic May talks down to the nation - election broadcast

Reasons to be Cheerful ..

Ian Dury should be compulsory for all those suffering the Brexit Blues.

Today very briefly, I offer you Farage achieving top place in the pre-EP opinion polling (which as a loyal Conservative I should deprecate cough cough) and Boris achieving top place in an Express leadership opinion poll. Add to this the spectacle of the self-loving little Sadiq Khan making an utter arse of himself in London trying to get down wiv der yoof (actually most of them went to £45k a year public schools and live in Surrey with Mummy) who in turn are pretending to get down wiv der Man.

Enough to make one smile.

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.  

Our cultural heritage is more important than foreign aid

I wept bitter tears of loss as I watched Notre Dame burn and in pain pleaded to God for his mercy.

It is early, but this morning the structure still stands, the photographs suggesting the rib-vaulted roof over the crossing had gone, and a further part of the stone vaulting over the Chancel. However, the roof over the Nave is still at great risk - the fire will have inflicted extremes of heat and streams of molten lead from the roof covering, the cold water used to extinguish the flames then likely to crack the stone. The timber roof structure dated from 1220 - 1240 and is alas now wholly gone.

Notre Dame's 13th century timber roof over the rib-vaulted Nave

When the Germans reduced the historic centre of Warsaw to rubble in the last war, the Poles swore to rebuild it exactly as it was, and even under a repressive and authoritarian Communist regime they did so. Every roof tile and window exactly as it was before the Teuton barbarians subjected it to HE. And this was exactly the right thing to do - for our European cultural heritage has a value above rubies; our nations and our peoples, our forbears and ancestors live in these stones and in this wood and in the craft and art and love with which they proclaimed for the world to see our being, our Sein.

Here's a clear message to government and to our pathetic failure of a Parliament, both antithetical to the interests of the People. Our cultural heritage is more important by a factor of magnitude than pissing away billions of our taxes to corrupt third-world tyrants in the name of modish liberalism. Notre Dame is a warning to you; you have a duty to use every effort, take every measure, spend whatever is needed, to secure our own cultural heritage from damage, neglect, negligence or malicious damage. Your failure will not be tolerated.

Mental derangement by Brexit

David Lammy isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. He's also what my old professor would have called an unlucky wight - a blundering ninny with the gift of making himself look foolish. So it's hardly surprising that Lammy should be one of those most publicly afflicted by an increasingly common condition - mental derangement by Brexit.

Boris Johnson writes with an amused tolererance in this morning's Telegraph about Lammy's uncontrolled outburst terming Johnson a 'Nazi'. In Britain this is not an offence. However, living in a country in which calling someone a National Socialist without justification in print or on screen is a criminal offence, it is instructive to contemplate that MP or not, if Lammy had said what he said here, he would find the handcuffs around his plump wrists.

And this in turn leads me to offer Remainers a crumb of comfort. Whilst the UK remains tied to the EU, calling me a Nazi in the comments will make a correspondent liable to detention and extradition using the European Arrest Warrant - if the offence includes an element of racism or xenophobia, which Lammy's jejune mud slinging appeared to have - and an appearance before a Napoleonic court of a sort unknown to British law. Brexit, my mentally deranged friends, will paradoxically free you from this risk.

And that is really exactly as it should be.

Wolf warns that wolves can kill

Readers may recall that we gone to some lengths to present evidence of the malign effects of globalism upon our nation and people. These effects are largely responsible for 17.4m people voting in the biggest vote in our history to Leave the EU and include, but not exclusively

• Increasing financial inequality
• Static or declining living standards
• People excluded from decision making
• Decline of working class power
• Globalism causing disempowerment
• Cultural loss – loss of cultural identity
• Attrition of social institutions, high anomie

Our people and our economy face a triple whammy over the next fifteen years or so. Firstly are the effects of globalism we are already experiencing – both the Elephant, and the uncorrected distortions from the 2008 crash that have left large cohorts of our people worse off but highly taxed. Secondly will be the whirlwind of the coming downturn, for which the banks are better prepared than a decade ago but the British people are not, now carrying record levels of personal indebtedness. As QE is winding down, China slowing, bond market manipulation reaching its peak and the Eurozone intensely vulnerable to shocks, the storm is gathering.

The third blow of the whammy will come from the effects of AI. I recommend a report from PwC that takes a position between other economic estimates of AI impact on UK jobs, which range from job losses of 10% to 47%. PwC estimate that 30% of UK jobs will go in the next 15 years, and the report does a fair job of rationalising the losses. However, it's what the report doesn't say that's important.

PwC and other economists assume that the negative effects of job losses can be compensated for by an increased tax-take and higher GDP from boosted productivity. This will be true - but on a global scale. The probability is, just as globalism has lifted billions out of absolute poverty at the cost of C1C2DE jobs and wealth in the developed world, that in the absence of checks on the distributional effects of the AI revolution, the same will happen. The developed world will bear the losses, the developing world will take the gains, and the global 1% will become even wealthier.

The forces driving globalism are the global corporates, backed by supranational actors including the EU, UN, IMF and OECD. And of course all their dags and ninnies such as deluded young Remainers motivated purely by selfish motives - that their Erasmus freebies are threatened, or that they can no longer wander the Med nations like gypsies, sponging, ligging and dossing their way around the Shengen zone. This short term self-interest blinds them to the real threat of supranationalism

That the current generation in the developed world is one of the most educated, and yet has lower chances of achieving the same standard of living as its parents.

Well guess what?  The OECD, one of the villains of it all, has just twigged that its policies have been killing the golden goose. Gabriela Ramos, OECD chief of staff, has warned that folk like us are waking up to the effects of globalism, and this awareness would fuel the rise of both 'populism' and protectionism. Tyler Durden writes on Zerohedge:

Leave it to Rabobank's Michael Every to break down the hypocrisy in the OECD's policy recommendations. It's not that the recommendations are inherently idiotic. It's that a supranational organization which, more than any other, represents the global elite who are largely responsible for the economic malaise gripping the developed world, is prescribing a policy regime that stands in direct contrast to the policies its members have propagated for the last four decades. How can the OECD shift from advocating for austerity and central bank interventionism, the latter of which has largely fueled the bubble in asset prices responsible for the yawning gap between the rich and everybody else, to the platform of Democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Well, now that awareness of the dangers of the EU, IMF, UN, OECD and the global corporates is finally penetrating the thick skulls of the EUphiles we may just have a chance of rescuing the UK.

Addendum 
The following taxonomy may assist a confusion in the minds of some of our readers

Progressives – post-globalists. Internationalists, Localists, committed to democratic outcomes and social equity. To sovereign states. Radical reform of tax and welfare systems, renewal of political identities, encouraging responsible capitalism to generate wealth , recognition of the deep and fundamental changes that AI and technology will bring, committed to achieving a Burkean social integrity and coherence in contrast to a globalist anomie

Globalists - Committed to global government, a world-wide constitution and harmonisation of everything, open borders, unrestricted global economic activity, worldwide legal, judicial and justice systems, abrogation of personal freedoms to a class of benign appointed experts who will act in the general good, the growth of the 'citizen of everywhere', the rule of benign technocracy over 'old fashioned' democracy, the supremacy of supranational State authorities – EU, UN, IMF.

Finally - Newspaper polls are self selecting. I suspect if the Guardian polled 20,000 readers, the TIGers and Corbyn's Labour would be neck-and-neck on 40% each, but there's something joyful about the pride with which the Express reveals today its own poll. My poor party barely scrapes 1% - and if there's a message here, it's that MAY MUST GO NOW.

Parliaments we have known

British Parliamentary sittings have, over the years, been characterised as individual and distinct epochae taking their character from the sum of their members; we have

The Short Parliament
1640,  Sat for only three weeks

The Long Parliament
1640 - 1660 England was much engaged during this time with other matters

The Rump Parliament
1648 - To convene a court to lop off the King's noggin

The Rotten Parliament
2009, The Brown ministry, when MPs were found out in theft, fraud, peculation, lying and gross misuse of public funds. Everything from moat cleaning, duck houses, crystal grapefruit bowls, Bang and Olafson hi-fis was charged to the poor taxpayer, but only three of the hundreds of crooks ended up in prison

The Quite Short Parliament
Parliament sitting under the gaze of the diminutive Speaker Bercow, whose little legs swing boyishly from the Speaker's Chair without an elevated footstool. Like many small men, he compensates for lack of size with an outsized ego and profusion of self-love

The Anal Parliament
Going beyond the Rump, the 2017/19 Parliament is entirely up its own arse, incapable of representing the people by whom it was elected but unwilling to surrender power and privilege by facing those electors in the polls.

With the Maybe Parliamentary session that started in June 2017 now coming up to two years without a State Opening, the tourist industry, robe-making and carriage-wheeling industries are suffering and the sovereign must surely be wondering whether she'll manage another one in her reign.

One Parliament however that has been entirely unknown to British democracy since Edgar summoned his first Moot over a thousand years ago is the Honest Parliament.

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
======
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.

'We are ruled by liars'

No polemic from me this morning, but I'd like to give an airing to the final para of a piece by Brendan O'Neill for Spiked;

And the second thing the war on No Deal / Brexit / democracy confirms is that we are ruled by liars. There is no other way to put it. They’re liars, charlatans, betrayers. These are people who promised to respect the referendum result. Who were returned to parliament on manifestos that said we would leave the Single Market and the Customs Union. Who said they would not block Brexit. Yvette Cooper herself, author of this latest reactionary assault on democracy, put out an election leaflet in which she expressly said she would not block Brexit; now she is at the forefront of blocking Brexit. The true mystery in British politics right now is how MPs are getting away with it. How they can be so brazenly anti-democratic and anti-people and not face serious repercussions. Those repercussions will now have to come at the ballot box. The political class needs to be ousted, with haste, and replaced by people who know what democracy means and who do not look upon the public as uneducated scum whose votes can be overridden at will.

Well yes. Yvette says any number of things; she'll house a migrant in one of her homes, that this home or that home is her real main residence .. it really doesn't mean any of it is true.

Plus ca change ...

Some things never change; from the Telegraph

In 1938 John Reith, Director- General of the BBC, asked the German foreign minister to tell Hitler that the BBC was “not anti-Nazi”, adding that if his German opposite number were to visit, he would fly the swastika from Broadcasting House. Even after war was declared, the BBC decided not to allow Sir Horace Rumbold, a former ambassador to Berlin, to broadcast on Germany because he was “too anti‑Nazi”.

They've just replaced their love for the Nazis with love for the EU. 

Duff Cooper, who resigned from the Cabinet after Munich, told friends that if Chamberlain had “come back from Munich saying ‘peace with terrible, unmitigated, unparallelled dishonour’, perhaps I would have stayed. But peace with honour!” Harold Macmillan burnt Chamberlain in effigy on Guy Fawkes Night in 1938.

Theresa May, the deluded Chamberlain of our own age, has the same utterly misplaced faith in her own scrap of paper. She, too, I suspect will decorate many a Guy Fawkes Night bonfire in the autumn.

Power of Recall - Grieve

Our MPs are representatives and our Parliament is sovereign. I am happy with that, with reservations. I'm also a Burkean, committed to the place of the Little Platoons, or in the language of modern non-lefty sociology, Nisbet's Intermediate Institutions. So it's hard for me to disagree with Burke's "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion". Well, I reckon he was right here too. Let me explain.

Max Musterman MP sits for Pepsiton, a town in which a third of the population work for the Pepsi plant. Despite that, he is free to declare that he prefers Coca Cola to Pepsi, and even to stand on his hind legs in Parliament and declare that he thinks Coca Cola is the superior beverage. It may be unlikely to win him votes at the next GE, but is within the limits of what representative democracy allows.

Now imagine that instead of just preferring the taste of Coca Cola, Musterman campaigns openly for the closure of the soft drinks plant in Pepsiton and the government funding of a new Coca Cola plant in Cocaville, the town in the next county, caring not that he will be putting his own constituents out of work. That's beyond the limits of representative democracy - Musterman's judgement may trump the opinion of his electors, but cannot get away with acting contrarily to their interests.

Betrayer MPs have taken refuge in Burke's aphorism, and their pusillanimous chums-together defence of the egregious Grieve is on these grounds. They are cruelly mistaken, if not wilfully disingenuous. It is not a matter of Remainer MPs for Leave constituencies disagreeing with the opinions of their electors but acting directly against their interests.

An MP's very first duty is the defence of democracy, of our bloodily-won rights to universal suffrage and the secret ballot, and their first duty to defend the democratic outcome that 17.4m electors chose. Seeking to overturn that democratic outcome betrays not just the interests of an MP's electors but renders them unfit for further service in Parliament.

With five-year fixed term Parliaments and rigid central party control over candidates, a system that gives us convicts clamped with tags and still subject to recall to prison sitting in Parliament, we need a constituency Power of Recall more than ever. Assuredly, with the bar set sufficiently high to prevent vexatious abuse, but enough to allow the voters of Beaconsfield to rid themselves of this rogue Grieve and elect a representative loyal to their democratic duty.

PS For the benefit of those mutton-headed Home Office dags and Common Purpose shills masquerading as senior police officers, the term 'betray' when applied to MPs has been in use since the 18th century - see the Burke quote above. 

Brexit betrayers need to move quickly - the public mood is changing fast

The Establishment cabal mired in betraying the democratic will of the nation are increasingly under pressure as the public mood turns against them. Here's the most recent poll from Yougov;

The majority of British people want to leave now, without a deal. In fact, every part of Britain with the exception of London is in favour of this. Very few want an extension.

We can also be sure that if there's a second referendum, which will have to offer a Leave option, we will win again.

UKIP has just polled 9% in Newport West - not the 12% - 13% of 2015 to be sure - but it won them third place. The Brexit party has yet to offer a candidate but polling suggests strong support. All over Britain, support for remaining part of the EU is slowly draining and support for Leaving gradually growing. It is quite clear which way the national will is headed - and the betrayers in government and Parliament, and the secret Heart of Darkness within our senior civil service, all conspiring with both legal and unlawful means to sabotage the will of the people, are on the back foot.

But like cornered rats, we must expect them to fight viciously. They must move quickly now, before the mood against them turns into something more ugly. It looks increasingly like the choices offered by the EC will be to leave on the 12th, or in a year's time. That means fighting the EP election next month.

FIne. So be it.   

May betrays Britain for the global corporates

Mr May must have poured his wife an extra slug of Gin last night with a grin on his face, as she traded away her country for the interests of the global car makers. She has made the globalists of the CBI, the European Round Table and remainder of the rootless corporate mafia very happy. Of course, she has condemned 99% of the British people to declining wealth, financial servitude, in many cases penury and debt serfdom, she has abandoned our service industry, one of the most significant parts of our economy, and has ceded control of our nation and economy as a Satrap nation to a crooked cabal of unelected officials in Brussels who hate us.

The Conservative Party is fatally wounded, sundered apart by May's betrayal. Even IDS was prompted to write "The spectre of Corbyn lording it over us in a Prime ministerial way as he wrecks Brexit makes my blood run cold and fear for my Party and my Country."

Those who believe she is actually clinically mad could well be right.

Allister Heath writes in the Telegraph

Mrs May doesn’t understand or care about any of this: as a technocrat in awe of officials, she sees Brexit as an absurd damage-limitation exercise. There appears to be nothing she won’t sacrifice to stop a real Brexit, no principle she won’t give up, no solemn promise she won’t break, no betrayal that she won’t countenance. Does she not care that she is pushing the DUP and many of her MPs away, and that this will probably mean the collapse of her Government within weeks?

We need to get this bloody woman out of Number Ten, out of the Party and out of British politics with no delay - for the sake of every one of our people, for our nation.

Bob in the Telegraph

For the nation, May's only option is a Clean Brexit on 12th April

If the Conservatives were to opt to fight an election now, under May, we would be slaughtered at the Polls and Britain would have a Labour government for the next five years

If Parliament agrees to a long Brexit extension, the Conservatives will be slaughtered under May at both the May 2nd local elections and May 23rd Euros.

A new referendum will take six months to construct and MUST offer a Leave option. We will win it again, with an increased majority. But the country will have suffered even more, and the Conservatives will have caused more damage to business and the economy than Corbyn could.

In the interests of the Conservative Party, the only option is a Clean Brexit on April 12th

In the interests of Britain, the only option is a Clean Brexit on April 12th.  

Cameron and the Mandarins cannot escape blame for this mess

A narrative is building that the Brexit debacle that has trashed the UK's international reputation is solely the fault of Theresa May and a rogue mandarin called Oliver Robbins. Indeed, Whitehall is already getting its story straight for the inevitable inquiry into the biggest failure of statecraft since Suez. It's a bit like coppers getting the chance to sit around a table and make sure their pocket books all say the same thing after they've just shot some blameless sparky. May and the unfortunate Robbins have already been lined up to take the blame; Whitehall's official histories are already being written, exculpating the mandarinate as dedicated and utterly impartial servants of democracy led astray by rogue politicians, but struggling to do their best.

It's all bollocks of course. Hints are now appearing in the press under the pens of some respected researchers of the role of a small cabal of 'Deep State' mandarins - one writer puts the number at seven - co-ordinating both legal and unlawful actions within Whitehall and without to sabotage Brexit. Whitehall is up to its neck in the betrayal of Brexit and of British democracy.

The Establishment narrative is also being constructed to avoid casting blame at our former dilettante PM, Cameron of the 'kitchen suppers'. Yet this privileged fool is as culpable as May of creating the mess we're in. Whilst this idle flabarse scranned spag bol and Netflix, having instructed Whitehall to do no planning at all for a 'Leave' vote, Selmayr and the Berlaymont's crack shock troops had already agreed a secret strategy to roll over the UK in the event of a 'Leave' win - as is revealed today by politico.eu

It was at 6:22 a.m. on June 24, 2016 — 59 minutes before the official tally was unveiled — that the European Council sent its first “lines to take” to the national governments that make up the EU.

The United Kingdom was leaving the European Union and Brussels was determined to seize control of the process.

Neither did our third-rate Cabinet realise what had happened until too late

The story that emerges is of a process in which the EU moved inexorably forward as Westminster collapsed into political infighting, indecision and instability.

These SW1 people receive wealth and honours for the responsibility they shoulder. When they fail, they should be held accountable. Another mendacious whitewash of an inquiry will not do - nor will allowing the anti-democratic Heart of Darkness within Whitehall to fabricate its alibis at the taxpayers' time and cost. What we must have is a criminal investigation headed by an ex-intelligence chief and run by anti-terrorism experts with unrestricted security clearance. We must weed out this cancerous fifth-column from our public services lest their sabotage of Brexit emboldens them to further mire in filth our precious democracy.

Booker
======
I commend Booker's final column for the Telegraph, which Dr Richard North reproduces on his blog (link right). One of the good.