Is this the real reason Oliver Robbins negotiated the Treaty?

One final comment - or rather question - arising from that remarkable documentary.

It was absolutely clear throughout the process that the EU side were stunned by the incompetence, weakness, unpreparedness, naivety and sheer stupidity of the British team led by Oliver Robbins.

Is it possible that that he was selected by Mark Sedwill not because he was the best that the civil service had to offer, but the worst? A head negotiator warranted to screw it up and produce a treaty advantageous to the EU? A humiliation of a treaty equal to Versailles?

Just asking.

Meanwhile, the Brexit Party scores 34% of YouGov's latest poll - more than Labour and the LibDems combined. And that's before May does a deal with Corbyn.

And can anyone explain why my London ballot paper has on it 11 independents who can each afford a £5,000 deposit?

'Standard Oil' time for the Global Corporates?

Blogs such as this are more often than not a good indicator of coming swings in political consciousness. For years we've banged on about the growing dangers to democracy and the need for Big Bang Localism, the malign influence of the global corporates, the disconnect between the powerful and the disenfranchised, the dangers of a patrician political class. Well, such things are by no means all mainstream, but it's astonishing just how frequently they are now popping up in the mainstream, particularly over the past year. 

Liam Halligan's piece in the Telegraph today is yet another that gives us a warm feeling of validation. It warns of the malign effects of the global corporates. In the Telegraph.

Doubts are being raised, more widely and loudly than at any time since the end of the Cold War, about the future of capitalism. With British youngsters struggling to attain living standards enjoyed by their parents, and after years of real-terms pay cuts, faith in market economics is slipping. Swathes of voters now view the UK not so much as capitalist, but corporatist or even “cronyist” – with good reason.

Liam covers familiar ground - our children poorer than their parents, excluded from the housing market, laden with debt, subject to the market dominance of oligopolistic service providers. Firms obese with QA cash, inflated assets, stock bubbles, the wealth of the 1% and the disadvantage of the 99% are all listed. He even recognises the Elephant.

But while inequality between countries has narrowed, inequality within countries, certainly the post-industrial West, has got worse That’s why, across much of the UK, stagnant living standards and escalating corporate profits are fuelling a sense that capitalism is skewed, with the benefits accruing to an elite few at the expense of the many. Our natural sense of opportunity and fair play has meanwhile been reversed. A recent government study found “an increasingly stark social mobility postcode lottery across Britain”, with life chances increased bound to who your parents are and where you live. That’s why, for millions, Corbyn’s dangerous rhetoric about aggressive renationalisation, punitive taxation and class war holds appeal.

For the Right of the political spectrum, that raises a challenge we must meet. It's simply no good parping like sheep that Corbyn is wrong; we must recognise our failure to regulate the effects of globalism and the power of corporatism, the failures of managerialism and the bleeding of the benefits of capitalism away from the vast majority of people in this country. In short we must take democratic action that reboots capitalism, and not allow Corbyn to destroy it.

Now Liam isn't quite as radical as we are - he recommends limited competition action against the oligopolies most disbenefitting the young

Very few policymakers I know acknowledge or even understand the issues I’ve just described. One who does is Andrew Tyrie, the former Tory MP who is now chairman of the Competition and Markets Authority. Last week, Tyrie gave an important speech pointing to “fragile public confidence in the benefits of market competition”. UK competition law currently “falls short of what consumers are entitled to expect”, he told the Social Market Foundation. Tyrie talked of “price discrimination against the vulnerable in energy, insurance and other essential services”.....

Every now and then, if capitalism is to survive, its supporters must overhaul the rules to tip the balance of power away from overbearing, all-powerful corporate lobbies and back towards ordinary people.

Today is such a time.

It's a decent start. 

Democracy is alien to the EU - voters are held in contempt

"We got rid of them. We kicked them out. We finally turned them into a colony, and that was our plan from the first moment"

I could not leave the subject of BBC4's astonishing EU documentary without mentioning Charles Moore's observations on the two programmes in this morning's Telegraph.He writes -

Perhaps most striking, however, was what was absent. At no point did Guy the Great and his rather foul-mouthed pals give the slightest thought to why all this was happening, which is that more than 30 million British people had voted on it, and the majority had decided to leave. Contempt for Britain was almost unqualified ...

Even more striking by its absence was any mention by M Verhofstadt and his fellow MEPs of their own voters. They never once even pretended to be interested in their constituents. I don’t think the word “democracy” crossed their lips. Their identification with the purposes of the EU’s machine, as opposed to its people, was complete.

These EU apparatchiks hold not only democracy but their own voters in contempt - and these astonishing programmes make it plain to see. But this contempt for those whom they are supposed to serve also induces a blindness, an unwillingness to hear, a shunning of reality that isolates these authoritarian demagogues from the world outside.

We're at top of the economic cycle and close to levels of full employment, yet taxes at 36% of GDP are at their highest for 40 years. We are overdue for a downturn, parts of the EU are already in recession and a cold economic wind is gathering strength. Parliament and government between them have created a Brexit debacle that will cost the economy much more than it need have done.

PwC forecast the effects of AI on the British economy costing 30% of existing jobs in the next fifteen years. We're better placed than others – they forecast 37% of German jobs will go – but this scale of impact requires visionary political leadership.

Already, before either cyclical economic or Tier II AI changes have begun to bite, the UK, in  common with much of the developed world, is already faced with mounting voter anger. Brexit is not the cause, but itself has its roots in causes including, 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

Unless we understand the pathology of this deep malaise and take measures to counter it, all else is pointless. But in Brussels they're away with the fairies, victims of their own Prozac propaganda, plotting and scheming the expansion of their empire even as the world crumbles around them.

I think they will learn that sometimes, just sometimes, the voters that they hold in such contempt can bite back.

For the EU, Britain is either a Colony or an Enemy

"We got rid of them. We kicked them out. We finally turned them into a colony, and that was our plan from the first moment"

Having watched the first part of BBC4's extraordinary fly-on-the-wall documentary and last night's episode spooled on the recorder and ready to go, one thing is clear - everything we suspected about the EU is true. All our fears, dismissed as fantasy by the Remainers, are confirmed from the very mouths of the EU's apparatchiks themselves.

I haven't paid the TV Tax since 2015, but if I had, these two programmes alone may have assuaged the insult of the impost.

One thing is already very clear. As much as the EU team were congratulating themselves on having imposed on May, through Robbins, a surrender treaty as humiliating as Versailles,that turned Britain, in their own words, into an EU Colony, the consequences of our refusing to bow to their subjugation were also quite clear. We would become an economic and diplomatic enemy - our territory liable to incursions and claims, our economy liable to sabotage, out trade interests liable to frustration and blockage. Once we had made the decision to Leave, we were either a Colony or an Enemy.

This is why May and her treacherous administration, and all the betrayer MPs in the Commons, are so eager to sign away our nation as an EU Colony. They have neither the balls nor the aptitude to fight for this nation's freedom. May, Grieve, Thornberry, Starmer and Rudd would all have been at the front of the collaboration queue if the Nazis had invaded in 1940, to offer their co-operation in return for special treatment. They would have been the Quislings in the puppet parliament.

We cannot sign the surrender document - May's loathsome and treacherous 'withdrawal agreement' - or any contrived variation of it acceptable to the EU empire. We will not surrender. We will not cravenly give up this nation's proud achievements to become a Colony of Brussels. We WILL Leave.

If you haven't seen the documentary yet, I urge you to do so. I suspect it was never intended for transmission in the run-up to the EP elections, so damning is it to Remainers' lies. I suspect it was scheduled when even the BBC thought we'd be gone by the end of March. These happy accidents do happen.

Is Now the time we destroy the Political Class?

You may recall we previously quoted Betz and Smith of King's on the 'capture' of the British State by the political class -

"Here are different kinds of political ice cream for sale, but when licked they all turn out to have roughly the same unpalatable taste: a bland, socially progressive, anti-traditionalist, globalist, corporatist flavour."

"... At the same time a technocratic political elite has arisen that is willing to contract out decision-making to supranational organisations like the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and United Nations on just about everything from finance, the law, border security, and the environment."

"With the rise of the new political classes, a different political dynamic is emerging. Drawn from similar backgrounds (often middle-class, university educated, with little prior career experience outside politics itself), members of parliament increasingly sound alike, think alike and act alike. The evolution of a monochrome political establishment is producing a radical disconnect, which the Brexit denouement is throwing into stark relief. What we appear to be witnessing is the corrupt mutation of the notion of the representation of the people in parliament, into the substitution of the will of the people by the interests of the political class. We are entering the realms, no less, of state capture."

I think they understated one key aspect, which is now becoming very clear. When the only politicians we see and hear, the only politicians interviewed by the MSM, the only politicians speaking in Parliament are from this homogeneous amorphous globalist corporatist patrician blob, we really can't imagine our democratic representatives as being different. Well, all that is rapidly changing - and again, it's Nigel Farage that's doing it.

Mike Greene, the Brexit Party's candidate for Peterborough, is interviewed in the Telegraph, and even in print he is as refreshing as an alpine spring. On the disgraced and dismissed former MP for the city, Greene, himself a local lad, says

"She was a complete joke - had never lived here to my knowledge. I attend lots of business and charity functions and in two years I never saw her. What a let down. She went to prison for lying, came straight out and voted against the 61pc who voted for Brexit. It is absolutely right that she has gone and my passion for standing is to help deliver the democratic vote."

Well, that's the sort of straight talking we can expect from Nigel's candidates - it's the voice of authenticity. What would the representatives of the mainstream parties say if asked the same question? Probably something like

"Fiona has done valuable work for the constituency and served the people of Peterborough well as their MP. Unfortunately, she crossed the line and now is the time for another to take her place. We will continue both her service to the constituency and the strong duty she felt towards those things in which she believed"

You can hear the dififference; one is a crystal clear mountain rill potable at source, the other a polluted lagoon of putrescent sludge unfit for human consumption.

Mrs May herself is the sine qua non of the political class' hollow rhetoric; there has rarely been an MP so accomplished at dissembling, so practised at omission, distortion and misrepresentation. When faced with authentic, honest candidates who have all had careers and successes elsewhere in life before representing the Brexit Party, politicians such as May are exposed for what they are - dishonest betrayers of all they pretend to represent. If this is the start of the destruction of the Political Class, bring it on.

Mike Greene - an authentic political voice

Ten Years On ..

NB - Blogger / feedburner is acting funny at this end. Anyone else having problems please let me know via email (RH column). Ta.
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 The Telegraph is rightly celebrating a decade since the Parliamentary expenses scandal was uncovered, after a hard fight against both the Speaker Gorbals Mick and the Parliamentary watchdogs, who used every trick and turn available to stop us getting the information. That wasn't all that was going on - in London, albeit a year earlier, we were getting ready to elect Boris. Forgive me for recycling that post; it has echoes.

It's strange, I can't wait to cast my votes on Thursday. My ballot card is pinned ready on the notice board and I'm eager for the off. I can't recall when I've ever enjoyed an election so much - perhaps 1979 was the last time. Then, after nearly a decade of Vic Feather and Len Murray and shots of Congress House in virtually every news report the same feeling for a need for change was in the air.

In retrospect, the 70s and the Thatcher years were where the rot started. In 1974 Anthony Crosland told local government 'The party's over' - meaning the expansionist Client State fuelled by the economic boom of the 60s was over, a theme echoes by Keith Joseph in the years that followed. When Thatcher came to power in 1979, the central State expanded its powers beyond levels that had not even been seen during the dark days of the war, at the time the only measure to rein in the trots in the town halls, but ironically the foundation for Zanu Labour's Centralist control freakery from 1997.

Gordon Brown is even less capable than Jim Callaghan of steering the ship of state. As he attempts to tighten his grip on every aspect of citizens' lives, as he tries to convince his dying party and an angry nation that he's in control, the more control slips from his chewed fingers. Damned with faint praise by his own backbenchers, held on his back foot by the media, it's not now a question of if he goes but when. In fact, his Jonah abilities are so acute that I'm convinced every high-profile appearance he'll make between now and Thursday will knock points off the Labour votes - Livingstone must be praying he'll stay out of London.

Oh, and as for Parliament - we only jailed three. It wasn't enough.

Focus turns to Sedwill

Things are moving fast in the breaking down of old conventions. And the old adage about those who live by the sword are playing out - or the rule of karma for the gentler souls amongst our readers. Over the weekend, capo di capi Mark Sedwill has featured more in the press than Gavin Williamson, his most recent victim. In the past, it was considered not the business of the top mandarin and National Security Advisor to be the story.

Unlike Jeremy Heywood and Gus O'Donnell, Sedwill is feared and respected rather than liked. He has made few friends either in the press lobby or amongst MPs, including cabinet ministers. A technocrat, a cyborg security warrior, he is perhaps perfectly suited to the temperament of an autistic Prime Minister unable to connect emotionally with either voters or colleagues. He comes across as an alpha wolf, feeding with the pack, greeting and grooming, but ever ready to curl back his lips to expose his fearsome teeth and assert his primacy. Poor Gavin, who reminded me of our class idiot, ever entertaining but frequently caned, was simply not up to a scrap with a killer.

Thankfully the press pack are not ready to let it lie. They smell a story, and I think they are right. For some time Sedwill has been unable to kill claims advanced by Sir Richard Dearlove and Maj Gen Julian Thompson that the Sedwill-approved Selmayr-Robbins Treaty betrayed UK defence interests. Huawei is a part of the same campaign.

At the heart of it is Britain's future defence alignment - with a choice between an EU-led, Brussels driven military Axis or a US-led reformed NATO defence pact. The popular suspicion is that Sedwill favours the former whilst professional spooks and soldiers favour the latter.

Sedwill was caught out last year when Alastair Brockbank, then a Cabinet Office security adviser and now a member of Robbins' team, was captured on tape giving assurances that the UK would stay loyal to PESCO interests after Brexit, and would find a way to keep paying the EU to develop its army.

For the EU, defence is all about money, contracts and corruption. Military effectiveness is second. When one looks for the beef, there's a whole bullock being carved up right now. A trade off is rumoured whereby the Navy will contract out to Spain the building of new support RFA vessels in a quid-pro-quo for not niggling over Gibraltar. It's also being called protection money.  In Germany, not only are there plans to abandon the US made F35 5G aircraft for the Euro made 3G Eurofighter, and even to contract H&K to develop a new infantry rifle that uses neither the 5.56 x 45 or the 7.62 x  51 NATO cartridges. Europe's big globals sniff the billions of tax money swilling around and want the snouts in the trough to be solely from this side of the Atlantic.

At the helm of the UK sits Sedwill. It is quite right that we should subject him to far greater public scrutiny - largely through televised questioning by Select Committees, the sole recourse that Brexit MPs have left to expose the truth.

Sedwill - Williamson's nemesis

May in last ditch struggle to stop Brexit

The Telegraph reports that the besieged May is engaged in a last ditch struggle to block Brexit. Securing Corbyn's co-operation in sabotaging Britain's exit looks doomed to failure as even the Comrades are unwilling to leave their fingerprints on an act of electoral suicide when they can leave May to achieve this for the Conservatives on her own. The Telegraph claims she is planning a new referendum with three choices -

Mrs May and her advisers are understood to have 'war gamed' the possibility of giving voters a choice of her deal, no deal and remain, though Government sources insisted it would only become relevant if talks with Labour collapse and Parliament forces a vote on a second referendum.

It is exactly this three-way option that is designed to split the Leave vote and allow her to defy the Brexit vote. However, since it is so clearly biased, it is unlikely to be agreed even by the deeply Remainer Electoral Commission - it would earn them opprobrium from across the developed democratic world and mire them in legal challenges. In this form, a referendum would be almost impossible to engineer before the end of October - our final end-date for EU membership. Agreeing it would mean agreeing an extension with the EU.

There are two key problems with May's final defence of her Führerbunker; with Farage set to storm the EP in July, it is unlikely the unelected officials in Brussels will want to prolong this beyond October. The second is that May's political life is limited. The latest poll of members by Conservative Home with 82% demanding May's departure now means her claws will be dug out from the Number Ten doorposts before too long - probably after the EP elections.

The Party's members will only vote for a new Leader who vows to deliver the Brexit we voted for in 2016. The Chairman called upon us to show Unity. Well, I reckon 82% demonstrates a fair degree of bloody Unity.

Theresa May wipes out 1,300 Conservative Councillors

May's done it - she's creeping up on John Major's 1995 record losses for Conservative local government. With 10 councils yet to declare, she's more than decimated Conservative local government; she started with 5,521 local councillors and has eliminated some 1,300 -  24% of Tory Council seats lost.

In contrast Labour look to have lost about 100 out of 2,300 -  around 4%. However, Labour should have been drowning in seats. Last night McDonnell was predicting 400 Labour gains on TV - which meant he was hoping for at least 600.

Now Mrs May must realise this is a damning indictment of her leadership, but never explain and never apologise is the politicians' creed, so both she and the Party chairman have blamed Parliament's failure to pass the Selmayr-Robbins treaty for the debacle. Not her fault at all, they aver.

When the facts sink in over the weekend, when Local Associations stunned by the magnitude of the defeat turn their shock to anger, May's position will worsen considerably. Can she hang on until the Euros in a couple of weeks deal the death-blow? I hope so. I've got a bottle of Prosecco waiting in the cellar for her smug, silly medicated-to-the-eyeballs face trying to laugh off the 3 Conservative MEPs likely to be returned to Brussels.

In fact I'm already feeling quite chirpy - the massacre has somehow cheered me. Surely the end cannot now be far away?

Local elections - Westminster gets a Slapping

Early Doors post - will update as the day goes on 

Conservative and Labour parties have lied their arses off over Brexit, betrayed the nation and yesterday both received a decent slapping from the electorate - nothing earth-shattering, that's yet to come, but a clear enough message.

UKIP have taken an unexpected drubbing, support tainted I think by Batten's infatuation with Yaxley-Lemon. Surprising winners of the night have been the Independent candidates - winning almost as many seats as the LibDems. I suspect if there had been more sensible local independent candidates standing, they would have taken many more seats.

The rise of the Independents in the locals may be a one-off or may presage the start of something magnificent, a grass-roots push for Localism, untainted by the mendacious corrupt foulness of national politics.

And those of you who pushed so strongly for spoiling ballot papers look to have been vindicated. Not, as thought, because the returning officers have to declare the numbers of spoiled papers (which loses some meaning at ward level) but because conscientious, dedicated local council workers have to scrutinise each one individually - a process that takes a great deal of time. As an act of civil disobedience, it works - I've seen a very cross Labour apparatchik on the box frustrated at the delay to his result from the sheer number of spoiled papers that had to be checked, re-checked and confirmed.

May - Corbyn Pact

Now I guess we're getting a taste of how Poland felt on 23rd August 1939.

Götterdämmerung

It is apposite that today marks the anniversary of Hitler's giving effect to his decision to rid the world of his own evil by putting a bullet in his brain. For the previous weeks he had lived in a fantasy world, nominally still running Germany and moving phantom armies and ghost divisions in imaginary counter-attacks as the Germany actually under his control shrank to a few hundred metres around his coward's bunker. It is instructive how those on the verge of self-destruction somehow manage to exclude all realisation of that reality from their consciousness.

There is of course no direct comparison whatsoever between the Leader of my Party and that of the NSDAP; the sainted Theresa is as far from being a fascist monster as the Pope. But they do share the same insouciance when faced with impending self-destruction.

I know many of you enjoy telling me how dreadful Conservatives are, but I think you're mistaken. I think the vast majority of ordinary grass-roots Conservatives are decent, honourable, sensible and responsible voters with a high rate of democratic participation. We are betrayed by the Party leaders and general staff in Westminster. A privileged and isolated elite, these patrician destroyers are in the process of driving a party that has lasted 200 years to its death. All because of their stubborn stupidity, vain self-regard and one incredibly lethal woman - Mrs May.

The great question is whether she can manage to destroy our country before she follows our Party into the flames. By all accounts the talks with Corbyn's Labour have thrown everything into the deal, every red line, every Tory principle, just for the sake of this most incapable and disloyal of women, so that the utterly useless May can leave office after passing a deal. She's past caring what deal - any deal will do. She no longer cares for nation or Party, only for the shattered remnants of what can be rescued as a 'legacy'. 

For Conservative councillors and activists in local government, I am so sorry. You really do not deserve this double betrayal by our own MPs and CCHQ first of Brexit and now of Conservatism.

The stench of corruption from Germany's businesses

Back in April 2018 we ran a fairly lengthy piece on German corruption. The German government had in effect encouraged widespread business corruption with law changes that made it easy to get away with - and for the past decade, it has been pervasive, deep and substantial. We quoted a report that found

A staggering 43 percent of German business executives polled by EY (formerly Ernst & Young) think bribery and corruption are fairly commonplace in Europe's economic powerhouse. That's a big jump from just 26 percent in 2015.

So who cares if most of German business is bent, the nation's judicial system ranks with Greece in terms of probity, shareholder protection is amongst the lowest in the developed world and there is little creditor protection? Who cares that courts and lawyers are beyond the reach of most victims, who must passively take the hits from German corrupt dealing?  Well, we wrote

This deep and endogenous German economic corruption will not play well in the rest of Europe. The UK, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian nations, with low levels of corruption and high scoring of commercial rectitude and probity, will be feeling fouled by contact with German corruption - and will now be adding up the commercial losses that German crookedness has cost them. The southern nations will be aggrieved that they have been bullied, coerced and hectored by a deeply crooked nation wearing a false disguise of moral superiority. And eastern nations such as Poland and Bulgaria, countries Germany has robbed of billions of Euros in corrupt complicity with Gazprom, will be looking at concrete measures to get their money back.

Yesterday Matthew Lynn broke yet another tale of German corruption in the Telegraph. The latest scandal is fraud at Wirecard - a rapidly ascending start-up that replaced the moribund Commerzbank in Germany's DAX index. The Telegraph and the FT are reluctant to be too specific; one suspects m'learned friends are hovering, and even the linked piece in the Anti-Corruption Digest is careful. Lynn writes

We have an image of Germany as a very law-abiding country, and on one level that is certainly true. The streets are safe, and no one can pay a bribe to get out of a parking fine.... yet right at the top of the country’s biggest companies it is starting to look painfully obvious there is an honesty issue.

The Germans are fond of portraying themselves as the exemplars of responsible, socially conscious capitalism. In truth, however, the hypocrisy is starting to become nauseating. There is clearly something rotten within Germany’s business culture – and even worse, no one seems to want to do anything about it.

It is the sort of casual, 'who cares?' corruption that saw Martin Selmayr's crooked appointment to EU capo shrugged off and Germany's biggest industrial names reduced to international gutter reputations no better than bootlegging prohibition gangsters.

So don't be surprised that when the downturn begins to bite, the entire German commercial edifice comes tumbling down - and the German economy proves as much of a paper tiger as did Soviet military might in 1989.

Ships with Dicks

Huawei - Why May must go now

The Huawei mess is yet another mess wholly of Theresa May's making. There is a technology cold-war underway between the US and China, and we are being asked to make a choice. Making a choice is simply something of which May is incapable - and so she has repeated, in the case of the UK 5G network, exactly the brainless false-compromise that has betrayed Brexit.

Let's take the US side for half the network, she has decided, and go with Huawei for the other half.

Thus demonstrating her utter, fatal, unquestionable inability to serve in any great office of State, let alone that of Prime Minister. It is an approach so stupid, so flawed, so as to make her previous worst decision, to try to both Leave the EU and Remain at the same time, appear almost cerebral.

Dear God, how did such cretins ever succeed in getting elected?

Meanwhile
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A consistent Brexit narrative is gaining an wider araldite-like traction; Patrick O'Flynn in Spiked

The Tories, the party of government, are primarily responsible for all of this. We can see now that they installed a Remainer as leader and they negotiated a Remain version of Brexit, behind everyone’s backs. From very early on, Theresa May was sending Philip Hammond and Greg Clarke round to all the multinational corporations to say, ‘Don’t worry lads, nothing is going to change for you’. They promised the multinationals completely frictionless trade, which meant they would be making all kinds of concessions on other things. Brexit voters, on the other hand, were being told they would get the real deal. It’s been a massive con from the start.

 Yep we were right all along about the Globalist betrayers in government.

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

When politicians betray their electors, all trust is gone

No one should be surprised that a Conservative minister who had signed the Official Secrets Act then leaked the outcome of a National Security Council meeting to the press. When ministers, civil servants and politicians have all betrayed Britain's electors, their self-destruction by bitter schism, internal betrayal, back-stabbing, blackmail and vicious in-fighting could never be far away. We are seeing the consequence of a breakdown of both Theresa May's and parliament's moral authority. A biased Speaker acting against the people, lying politicians discarding their election promises, the inane babblings of unelected effete popinjays such as 'Lord' Adonis (if you could buy him for what he's worth and sell him for what he thinks he's worth, as my old ex-NCB tutor used to say, you could retire on the profit) and a State media abandoned by half the population for its lies and distortions are all signs that our patrician class are reaping the results of their betrayal.

The commanders have lost control of their occupying army. All discipline is gone, the troops no longer respond to orders. It's every politician for himself - grabbing what they can in their headlong retreat, pursued by a vengeful electorate determined to clear their stink from our democracy.

Our nation is at a point of great danger. These foul betrayers must go - and make way for a reform, a renewal of our demos, for only a great cull of these patrician betrayers can rescue Britain.

Belgian Globalist sneers at Britain

Belgian globalist and MEP Phillipe Lamberts sneered at Britain today, saying

"Global Britain has already happened and it happened through the EU not through nuclear bombs and nuclear submarines .... Brexit is a lose-lose so you cannot make a success of it"

Well, it could be worse. We could be Belgian.

So, the Globalists think they've won. We'll see.

Globalists - Committed to global government, a world-wide constitution and harmonisation of laws and standards, open borders, the primacy of global economic activity, worldwide legal, judicial and justice systems, abrogation of personal freedoms to a class of unelected 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.

Varadkar's cringemaking letters

It seems that the Teasack is a dangerous man when left alone with some official letter-paper and a biro. It started when his letter to Kylie came to light; in his childish inward-sloping script Varadkar gushed 

Dear Kylie,

just wanted to drop you a short note in advance of the concert in Dublin.
I am really looking forward to it. Am a huge fan!
I understand you are staying in the Merrion Hotel which is just across the street from my office in Government Buildings.

If you like, I’d love to welcome you to Ireland personally

Leo
Teasack (Irish Prime Minister)

Now journalists want to see a letter he wrote to Melania Trump - but the Teasack's officials, wary of more cringemaking gushing being revealed, are so far refusing an Irish FOI request on grounds that it deals with 'International Relations'.

However, we can take a stab at the likely content;

Dear Dear Melania

How wonderful you looked today! How do you get your hair like that? You must tell me your secret. In fact, we should be besties and share all our secrets - I do a thing with yoghurt and cucumber peel which is very good for the private places! I loved your shoes - I could die for the chance of Manolo Blahviks like that, with the cute little bows!

Anyway must dash - Jean-Claude wants me on the phone (boring!)

Leo
Teasack (Irish Prime Minister)

Further requests are to be submitted for copies of the Teasack's letters to Beyonce, Lady Gaga and the blond boy from 'Talent'.

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.