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Saturday 26 January 2019

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

Thursday 24 January 2019

Prepare for the tsunami - " An ungovernable tumult roiling with rage"

There can hardly be anyone left who believes that Brexit is just about the EU. It has come as a shock to the Patrician establishment that all this .. hostility .. to everything they hold dear has come out of left field, and 'Remain' is coming to mean not only remain in the clutches of the Federation, but to remain in a Britain ruled by this scabrous elite.

Two professors of War Studies at Kings, London, have written a piece for the Bruges Group (HT Delingpole) that is recommended reading. It is a succinct precis of much that we have featured here over the years. And the outcome is not encouraging.

They write about 'State Capture' - the process by which the Patrician elite have progressively taken over the State -
"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."
Well, we won't have it. We want our Parliament back, our democracy back, our public administration back, our schools and universities back and an independent unshackled media free to speak. But just what will it take? Will we spawn a domestic Gilets jaunes movement? And this is where I have difficulties. I deprecate violence and disorder. I hate riots. I can never advocate such action except in the case of foreign invasion, for the preservation of our realm. And yes, I can anticipate your responses. The profs go on to say
"Cumulatively, over the past three decades, then, the empirically demonstrable lesson is that violence and threats work. Crudely, there is simply no arguing with the fact that violence is the deus ex machina for changing the way people think and act. Physical force is a method of political communication, and when it is sustained it invariably succeeds in changing minds and changing policies.

Under the threat of violence, it is often easier for governments to knuckle under for the sake of maintaining a semblance of peace, to wax piously about societal cohesion and resilience, and to climb onwards as though the status quo ante were not crumbling beneath them. The progressive factions of academia, culture, and media cheer them for it. So, if the populace don't really react in the face of such threats and actual violence, and merely light candles and hug teddy bears, then the bet of the political classes is sustained. They have gambled correctly."
And here in intense self-examination I ask whether writing this blog is on the candle-lighting and teddy bear-hugging side of the spectrum, or on the side on which thirteen Gilets jaunues have already been blinded by State munitions? But then this blog is utterly irrelevant in the face of the tsunami about to engulf Britain, a crashing mass of reform that will sweep away the deep ordure from the Augean stables our nation has become. Betz and Smith write
"But we are expert on these matters. We have for decades studied why things fall apart, how a stable, essentially self-policing, productive society can turn into an ungovernable tumult roiling with rage. We know that this happens at first very slowly, a creep-creep-creeping to the limit; and then very fast indeed after the limit has been passed. We also know that no amount of free beer and pizza parties will swiftly return a society deranged by the shattering of the social contract by its own elite back to normality."
Should Parliament betray Brexit, that limit could be passed next week.

Please be very careful in the comments.

David Betz is Professor of the War in the Modern World, Department of War Studies at King's College London.
MLR Smith is Professor of Strategic Theory and Head of Department, Department of War Studies, King's College London.
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Apols to those expecting the HRA today - I'm holding this over 

Wednesday 23 January 2019

Britain's New Patrician Establishment

As a youngster I first encountered the British establishment through satire. Private Eye, TW3, the Pythons, and notably Derek and Clive. So as I grew, I saw in my mind red-robed judges invariably with ladies underwear, stockings and suspenders hidden from view, priggish bowler-hatted paragons mired deep in sleaze and vice, MPs preaching virtue then stealing the silver, sin-damning bishops caught cottaging in public lavatories. Of course, cases such as 'Bunnies can and will go to France' provided joy and hilarity, and Peter Cook's take on that bent judge's summing up remains a classic.



However, these things aren't static. That 1960s establishment is just a crude parody today. Pompey's faction, the new Patrician Class, is in the twenty-first century a very different cohort. Here are my candidates for its composition.

THE POLITICAL CLASS
Professional politicians of all shades, lobbyists, advisors, SPADs, researchers, consultants. In particular, those who have never had a job in their lives unconnected with politics, those following explicitly the fast-track Oxbridge PPE - researcher - MP route. Neither party, sex, race or faith preclude anyone from membership and indeed one of the most egregious exhibitions of political nepotism is from Labour; Jack Straw's son Will, Tony Benn's boy Hilary, Kinnock's lad Stephen, Corbyn's son Seb, McDonnell's 'political advisor' and being groomed for a safe Labour seat are amongst the most famous.

THE FOURTH ESTATE
The mainstream press and broadcast TV - Sky, BBC, ITV. For years they've skated by convincing us that the balance they should maintain is that between left and right - when in fact left and right are just adjacent faces of the same new establishment. The fourth estate, the MSM as they are known in abbreviation, are unashamedly pro-establishment, pro-globalist and pro-supernational, and thus deeply hostile to reform.

THE UNELECTED ELITES
Not only the unelected bosses in Whitehall, but those at the most senior chief officer level throughout the civil and public services. Police chief officers, NHS and local government chief executives, specialist scientific and technical advisers and more commonly now those who run the unaccountable NDPBs and fake charities - the agencies and their drivers, doing the dirty work of the establishment away from public control and scrutiny. Salaries exceeding that of the PM, generous golden hello and farewell payments, murky routes of appointment, make this entire cohort so utterly remote, so completely unfamiliar with the ordinary people of Britain they could all be aliens.

THE JUDICIAL GLOBALISTS
British trained lawyers, judges, jurists who believe that the future of law is global, a world legal order, encompassing intellectual property, tax, incorporation, contract, mercantile and relations between the global corporates and the supernational authorities. They support the executive legal authority of the EU, UN and other global agencies and want to see more legal power flow from the world's nations to these bodies, staffed and run by unelected elites. Already they have corrupted part of UK law with Eurolaw, through the role of the ECJ, the EU's political court, in destroying national judicial independence

THE FAT ABBOTS OF ACADEME
As bloated, dissolute and greedy as the greasy-palmed Abbots of pre-reformation days, our university vice-chancellors have stuffed their mouths with ponzi gold. These are the new denizens of an aircraft's first class cabin and free champagne, jetting to Asia, Australasia, the States for missions and conferences, five star hotels and lavish film-star treatment, their air-con limos gliding them from one spurious quasi-academic event to another. The merry go round is reciprocal - hosting their wealthy foreign counterparts at home, with generous hospitality and an official blessing. Theirs is no longer the world of scholarship, education and knowledge but a billion dollar globalist business that makes its elites very, very, wealthy.

THE GLOBALIST THUGS
It's now a familiar game for the global corporates, the mutually beneficial trade-off with the supernational organisations of the EU, UN and other globalist bodies to encourage ever-greater and complex regulation. Regulation restricts competition, creates barriers to entry for new firms, gives huge advantages of incumbency to the existing global actors and disadvantages competition from SMEs and start ups. The globals have exhausted their own capacity to be profitable, and exist solely through this anti-capitalist thuggery and by an ever decreasing series of takeovers and mergers. Their stranglehold over the UN and EU, and through their adherents and beneficiaries in the new establishment their power over us all, has slowed growth to a glacial pace here in the West. Only freeing the creators of growth and innovation - the SMEs and national actors - from the shackles of the global corporates can restore Britain's international competitiveness.

There are more. This list is by no means comprehensive. Bishops and Brigadiers no longer play the roles they played in the past, and though they may hold globalist establishment views, their effect is diminished. For a comprehensive list of establishment individuals, including those in show-business and so forth, see the Wikipedia catalogue of Remain supporters.  

And don't be disheartened by their number and power. They are Pompey's bloated patricians - and they face us, Julius Caesar's lean legions of plebeians. And we always win. 

Tuesday 22 January 2019

UKIP spawns a fourth love child

I'm really not keeping count, but the launch yesterday of 'My Brexit Party' by someone of whom one has never heard could have been mistaken for a fashion or lifestyle piece in the papers rather than a news item. Perhaps, I thought, this is the new equivalent of 'My Charity', much beloved of ladies of a certain age and income. Or perhaps a winter fundraiser, in a marquee at a suburban golf club, with vol-au-vents and Prosecco. Was I out of the loop? Was England frantic with leave socials? Were diaries full of leave book club nights, leave wine tastings, leave clay shooting days, leave fishing trips?

But no. This was the launch of yet another political party offshoot from UKIP. To be frank, apart from Britain First I was unaware there were so many - the others are Veterans and Badgers against Brussels and the Purple Blazers, apparently. My Brexit Party was apparently founded by a lady who was a UKIP spokesperson for something or other, and has only one political objective - to reach Brexit. She claims to have Nigel's support, but I haven't seen anything from the man himself endorsing this.

Well, I'm in no position to criticise. The Conservative party has already split into two, and like one of those comedy joke cars in two halves continues to roll down the motorway out of control but with the Leader in the driving position holding the halves togther with her legs. The Labour Party has become a Matryoshka doll, with more factions than a Scots Presbyterian church, but with the same condition - that two or more must be gathered together to make a conference group.

So why aren't we seeing more change at the centre? They can't be staying together 'for the sake of the voters' because by and large they prefer to ignore us. Perhaps they're having mediation, or sorting out who gets the CDs, the Le Creuset, the Party HQ and the members.

The Chuggers have spent years softening up the nation to take out direct debits for Panda fertility clinics, palm oil re-planting in Niger and a score of causes about which we don't give a fig, but the lady with the clipboard and the cleavage and the smile somehow persuaded us. We're ripe for signing up to £2 a month for a party membership - and the Corbyn Momentum faction have done just that.

But few I suspect will do so for Lucinda from Daventry or whoever she is solely because she's registered a party with Brexit in the name. 

Monday 21 January 2019

Ignore the roar of the public at your risk

The narcissistic Remoaners in Parliament who are deluded enough to believe that their own selfish views, their personal inflated opinions, trump the bellow of the people of Britain, 17.4 million voices crying LEAVE, are sowing the seeds of their own downfall. 

Yvette Cooper, who with her husband Ed Balls 'flipped' main residence three times solely out of greed, to maximise the expenses they troughed from our taxes, now wants to augment her Parliamentary stipend with a Leader's wedge. Her vacuous pledge to house a migrant in one of her several homes has come to naught; instead she is flipping the bird to the people of Britain with petty Parliamentary jiggery. Likewise Dominic Grieve, a man who loves himself so greatly that he cannot conceive that his opinion, contrary to that of 17.4m voters, should not prevail. So like some plague rat he labours in the dark to concoct Parliamentary shenanigans that will frustrate our leaving the EU.

They must be unaware that the public view is shifting. Leavers and Remainers. And that instead of appearing as Robin Hoods to the electorate, they are looking like Orcs. Everywhere it is becoming apparent that the people of Britain are becoming sick of the saboteurs, frustrated with the delay and uncertainty. All Grieve and Soubry and Cooper and their ilk are achieving is to strengthen public support for Theresa May.

Boris in his Monday telegraph column is firm in his view that "These feeble plots won't stop Brexit". More tellingly he observes
Did you see Question Time on Thursday, and hear the roar of audience approval for the suggestion that no deal might now be the best option? There is a sense in which the public are braver – and wiser – than their MPs.



Update
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As Guido spotted, The Grauniad has hidden a bang-up-to-date ICM poll that makes 'No Deal' the most popular option with the public - supported by 28% of voters, against 24% who want a second referendum.

Of course remoaners will doubtless claim that as the polling was done last week, many of those polled will have died or changed their minds since, and that the pollsters only actually polled a couple of thousand random but representative Brits. Polls should ask every person in the UK their opinion, they will say, including babies and infants - with glugs, gurgles and random noise to be counted as support for a second referendum.

Sunday 20 January 2019

EUphiles - The three responses to Brexit

Dan Hannan writing in the Telegraph his morning, describes a situation in Brussels with which many readers of this blog will be familiar;
In Brussels, there are only three correct responses to Brexit: denial (“they’ll come to their senses”); fury (“they were lied to, the vote was stolen”); and contempt (“the arrogant fools deserve what’s coming to them”). The thing no one is allowed to do is to ask why Britain voted Leave, or whether Eurocrats might have behaved differently to make the EU more popular.
I think we've seen just about every spurious, fallacious, fatuous, illogical, mendacious and downright silly variation of those responses. That we hadn't included the votes of babies and infants, that a simple majority was too low a bar, that some voters in 2016 are now dead and others enfranchised, invalidating the poll, that Russians / dark financiers / Martians rigged the vote, the voters were too stupid to understand the issues, that every word of the Leave campaigns was a lie whilst the Remain campaign was a model of veracity and virtue, that opinion polls (which have somehow miraculously become more accurate since the manifold polls prior to the vote) prove people have changed their minds.

It's all away-with-the-fairies fantasy. As both John Curtice and Diane Abbot have advised, don't bank on a Remain result if the poll is run again. Which it won't be.

The truth is that a Goliath patrician establishment with all the resources of the State, the nation's elites, broadcasters, global industrialists, international supergovernmental actors, the then US President, and with a vastly greater campaign pot, twice that of Leave, was defeated by a David with the greatest democratic mandate ever seen in this country. 17.4m electors.

Come to terms with it. It won't go away.