Will Starmer defend China?

It is apparent to epidemiologists that three nations - China, Iran and Russia - are not being honest with the rest of the world about the extent and development of the Wuhan virus in their countries. For Iran, the US openly shares satellite images of mass graves but has not yet revealed its satellite monitoring of either China or Russia for fairly obvious reasons. In addition, as the Telegraph reports, China has been flooding Facebook and Instagram with ads attacking the US and even blaming the Wuhan virus on Trump. In Belarus, the unreconstructed Soviet dictator Lukashenko has told his people that driving tractors and drinking vodka will cure the disease. Putin is also pretending that Russians are somehow immune whilst taking what measures he can, given Russia's primitive health infrastructure. In Iran, so many devout Islamists were licking shrines that I have considered changing their moniker from crane-hangers to shrine-lickers. I won't even mention the snake-oil cures peddled within diverse cultures.

These dodgy nations of course sit with us on the world's supranational forum, the UN - two of the epidemiologically irresponsible ones actually on the Security Council. The WHO is run by an Ethiopian chap of no apparent international distinction who has gladly done everything that China has asked of him.

The media is also filled with stories of the failure of that other supranational body, the EU. Failure to offer leadership at time of crisis, failure to implement mutual assistance requests from Italy, and an ongoing failure to release Germany's grip on its gold to help implement the European solidarity they talk about so much.

The reaction of the pro-Globalist, pro-supranational Left in the UK has been predictable; first, accusations of racism against anyone mentioning the origin of the Wuhan virus. Then a vigorous defence of the People's Republic, a defence of the lies, executions, concentration camps, organ removal from prisoners and all. Some bed fellows, Keir. It reminds me of that other old gulag-apologist Nye Bevan - who defended Soviet Russia even as he knew that the Holodomor was killing millions.

Of course, the Left are always helped by the far-right. In this case fake video of crowds at mosques during lockdown, promoted by Voldemort, Hopkins and Batten amongst others, never missing a chance to further their anti-Moslem hate campaign. This allows the Left to add to it's unequivocal support of supranationalism and authoritarian dictatorship its defence of Globalism. Yes, the Left and the global corporates are singing from the same hymn sheet.

Starmer is everything the metropolitan elites are looking for; a characterless technocrat devoid of charisma who supported Remain, adores supranational bodies, excuses Globalism and dismisses the concerns of labour's traditional voters. I'm just listening out for his defence of China - probably just before it's revealed they've been removing the lungs of condemned criminals to implant into Politburo bosses whose own have been compromised by the Wuhan virus.

Qom shrine licker

When Globalism failed

Let's take just a couple of samples from the front pages. From the Telegraph -

One of Britain’s few ventilator manufacturers was still prioritising supplies to China only a month ago, even as the Covid-19 outbreak accelerated here. Breas Medical, which makes breathing equipment from sites in the UK, Sweden and the US and is owned by the Chinese conglomerate Fosun, was focused on demand for ventilators in China until early March, when it was first contacted about boosting supplies to the NHS.

And again, from the FT

According to Tagesspiegel the Berlin police had ordered the masks from 3M. They were produced in a 3M factory in China and were due to be reloaded at Bangkok airport and flown to Germany. Instead the delivery went straight to the US.

On Thursday, US President Donald Trump invoked his authority under a Korean war-era law, the Defense Production Act, with regard to 3M’s N95 respirator masks. That allows the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to use “any and all authority” to buy “the number of N95 respirators” it “determines to be appropriate” from 3M and its subsidiaries, according to the wording of the act.

We haven't even got to drugs and chemicals yet, but you can bet that most of the kit so expertly assembled by the army to construct those Nightingale Hospitals was made in China. As, absurdly, are the trousers, smocks and stable belts worn by the soldiers, the MoD having outsourced uniform and clothing production to China.

Time after time in comments both here and in the media, in riposte to my attacks on the failures of Globalism, failures that have condemned huge cohorts of our population to hardship, have halted social mobility and have made our children poorer than their parents, supporters of Globalism have pointed out the compensation. That in return for destroyed lives, hollowed communities and social decline, we have enjoyed cheap stuff. Chinese tat. Uniforms and boots so shoddy that many soldiers buy their own kit. Electric drills for £10 and jeans for a fiver.

Of course, every leader and government across the globe knows the deal with the Wuhan virus. Knows that the Chinese government and propaganda machine have lied and lied, have repressed, threatened and removed doctors and scientists trying to be internationally responsible, have lied to the world, have corrupted the WHO and it's pathetic puppet head, Dr Tedros. They all know the 3,000 deaths the PRC reported are really 300,000 or even 3,000,000 - until we have the declassified spy satellite images we just don't know. Yet whilst so much of our essential goods and supplies comes from this hellhole, we are obliged to be politely friendly to the PRC. No government has openly criticised the evil regime - for now, we need those masks and ventilators.

My anger is for the 1%, the greedy, fat bastards who have not only impoverished and limited their own peoples and nation to make themselves rich, but have hobbled our ability to deal with the consequences of their avarice. If this bloody virus doesn't lead us to make a bonfire of their odious Globalism, we are utterly lost.

Capitalism good, Globalism bad

Take a look at this graph of UK GDP growth from 1955 to just about now. Clearly, it's in two halves, as they say - but what marked the change of the roller coasters of the economy in the sixties, seventies and early eighties and the dull, mediocre, flat performance since then? The 2008 shock is the only visible bit of excitement (though the virus will do something interesting)

I've been reading David Graeber, lefty LSE academic and Corbyn supporter, but a man with half a brain. His observations are good, his conclusions dire. Here are a couple of good bits, the first on Neoliberalism -

.. global economic performance over the last thirty years has been decidedly mediocre. With one or two spectacular exceptions (notably China, which significantly ignored most neoliberal prescriptions), growth rates have been far below what they were in the days of the old-fashioned, state-directed, welfare-state-oriented capitalism of the fifties, sixties, and even seventies. By its own standards, then, the project was already a colossal failure even before the 2008 collapse.

He manages to miss the real reason for this dire economic performance despite describing its manifestation .

While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs.

Yes, Globalism. What Globalism has managed to achieve is to destroy the benefits of the version of capitalism that made us rich up until about 1990. Oh not rich in terms of disposable incomes, consumer toys, cars that we don't own but in the important things.

You may also note that the falling of the Wall and the start of NATO's decline also coincides with this Globalism - indeed, helped to enable it. All economics is human behaviour, so here's an anecdote.

Back in the 1970s I had a gap year before going to university. At the end of the year, I had enough saved as a deposit on a little flint-rubble cottage, which cost the princely sum of £5,250. The attraction was the rear garden, which was huge, with a little orchard of six trees and enough room to run a gaggle of hens and grow a crop of tobacco - but that was for later years. I was going away, and my student grant wouldn't pay the mortgage - no problem. A quick call to the USAF produced the first of my Master Sergeants, superlative tenants whose rent payments were generous and warranted by the US government. That sort of thing was possible back in those spiky, variable years.

If you measure wealth not in the volume of cheap £10 electric drills and £5 jeans one can buy but in having a stake in the country, a country with a standing army of over 100,000, a navy of a least 50 warships and an air force with more than a handful of squadrons, in which there was the freedom to take the sort of financial risks that we did, and enjoy the rewards that we did, then we were rich. Pre-Globalism we also had personal freedom and independence to a far greater degree than subsists now, and even though the State owned a lot more business and industry than it does now, it was also somehow a much smaller State. The Big State that supports Globalism is also supported by what Graeber calls Bullshit Jobs -

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’.

The paradox, as Graeber points out, is that the new de-nationalised capitalist Neoliberal West shouldn't allow such massive economic inefficiencies, such a huge waste of resources. Yet it does. That's an answer in itself. What's the point of having a Big State, a regulatory state, if you don't have a society replete with willing, conformist drones to enforce all the regulations?

I'm sorry, but all the cheap Chinese electric drills in the world and the availability of flash new cars I don't own don't come close in compensating for the real wealth of those pre-Globalist days.

Update
=====
The costs to the UK economy of over regulation, from the IEA

The report concludes regulation has become a political tool, used to drive social or distributive objectives, rather than to correct market failures. Failure of regulation, including over-regulation, has led to increasing barriers to entry for new businesses, stagnating competition between incumbents, and in many cases no evidence of beneficial outcomes for consumers.

Regulations are being judged on their intentions – not their outcomes – and increasingly weak mechanisms for accountability of state regulators risk undermining the rule of law, the report warns.

Dan Hannan is confused

Dan Hannan is an odd cove. His habit of buttoning up all three buttons on his suit earned him the nickname 'cockvirgin' on Twitter, and indeed there is something of the prissy schoolboy about him that limits the human warmth necessary for political success. Still, he was on the right side over Brexit and has been loyal to the party. It's just a shame his piece in the Telegraph today is so confused between globalism and globalisation. I suspect he knows. I suspect his piece is the first of many we will see in the coming months defending the interests of the global corporates as Covid-19 casts them as villains. It's not a good time for the CBI.

For any newcomers, globalisation is the neutral and unmanaged process through which trade, travel and technology makes the world a smaller place. Cheap airline travel, capitalism, electricity and the internet have brought 4G phones to the favelas of Rio and South African townships, primary health care and the polio vaccine to equatorial Africa and the Hindu Kush. Even the floods of young male migrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Bangladesh heading for the Greek border are followed by mobile phone charging vans equipped with adaptors for everything from a Nokia to an iPhone, selling juice for a few Turkish lire.

Globalism is the process under which capital seeks those places with the lowest factor costs - labour, power, land, raw materials, transport, regulation, penalties for environmental degradation and pollution - in which to invest. Globalists love supranational government, the globalisation of commercial law and standards, open borders, free movement of people, capital and goods and everything else that facilitates friction-free profitability across the globe. Internationalists, in contrast to globalists, want wealth-making trade between sovereign nations, not for the world to become a single technocracy.

Globalism has lifted billions of the world's people out of absolute poverty. It has also hollowed-out the middle and working classes in the UK, Europe and North America. Median incomes have remained completely flat from 2008 until this year, whilst the 1% have grown hugely more wealthy. Globalism has destroyed our post war social mobility, globalism means our children will never be as wealthy as their parents and it has created a bitterly divided and unequal society. When Hannan's Telegraph piece claims 'Globalisation brought us unprecedented riches' it is false on two counts. First, it was not globalisation but globalism that so altered the world's economies. Secondly, it was not us to whom globalism brought unprecedented riches but 'them'.

The fact is that globalism has left the UK in a position in which we have not a single manufacturer of the type of ventilator we will need in the tens of thousands. The PM has mobilised British industry and we will put our taxes into British businesses to remedy this; sorry, Dyson, you get nothing. You've gone to Singapore. The irony is that the 1% here who have so enjoyed the material benefits of globalism will be no more exempt from ending their lives with their lungs flooded with Covid-19 than will the elderly working classes whose families they have robbed of futures.

14/03/20
EU/EEA and the UK	Cases	Deaths
Italy	17660	1268
Spain	4231	121
France	3661	79
Germany	3062	5
Denmark	804	0
Netherlands	804	5
Sweden	775	1
United Kingdom	707	10
Norway	621	1
Belgium	559	3
Austria	504	1
Greece	190	1
Finland	155	0
Czech Republic	150	0
Slovenia	141	0
Iceland	117	0
Portugal	112	0
Ireland	91	1
Romania	89	0
Estonia	79	0
Poland	68	2
Luxembourg	38	1
Bulgaria	31	1
Croatia	31	0
Slovakia	30	0
Hungary	25	0
Latvia	19	0
Cyprus	14	0
Malta	12	0
Lithuania	6	0
Liechtenstein	4	0
Total	34790	1500

The return of Internationalism?

Reading the newspapers this week has been not unlike Christmas day as a small child - not quite knowing which present to open next, whether to succumb to the intoxicating interest of the one just opened or move to unwrapping another. It's almost as though all those childhood Christmasses were just training for the utter, pervading exhilaration of this election victory. 

Among this cornucopia of bliss, dear readers, I bring you just one snippet this morning. That Boris has instructed his ministers to stay away from Davos this year. Davos, the home of globalism, of the world's supranationalists, the world government and world finance oligarchs, at whose feet pygmies such as Blair and Mandelson grovel in obeisance, a Soros-fest for the 1%. I'm convinced half the British public still confuse it with Davros, leader of the Daleks, the enemy of human civilisation.

The Telegraph quotes Boris from 2016

"It is in a sense a struggle between people who want to take back control, and a small group of people who do very well out of the current system and who know Christine Lagarde and can go “mwah mwah” with her at Davos, or whatever it happens to be. Of course they’re going to be in favour of the system."

Does that mark a return for Britain to Internationalism, to free trade, commerce, mutual prosperity but national independence for the UK? Brexit doesn't mean less interaction with the rest of the world - it means more. It means extending our friendships and sending out our commercial gents across the globe - and I'm sure we will shortly see the re-issue of that 50p piece and its heartening message

 Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations

No Davros this year for Conservatives

Globalism is still destroying America

No apologies today for letting another voice do the speaking - in this case the distinguished American economist Paul Craig Roberts, writing for Zero Hedge:-

I have reported for years that US jobs are no longer middle class jobs. The jobs have been declining for years in terms of value-added and pay. With this decline, aggregate demand declines. We have proof of this in the fact that for years US corporations have been using their profits not for investment in new plant and equipment, but to buy back their own shares. Any economist worthy of the name should instantly recognize that when corporations repurchase their shares rather than invest, they see no demand for increased output. Therefore, they loot their corporations for bonuses, decapitalizing the companies in the process. There is perfect knowledge that this is what is going on, and it is totally inconsistent with a growing economy.

As is the labor force participation rate. Normally, economic growth results in a rising labor force participation rate as people enter the work force to take advantage of the jobs. But throughout the alleged economic boom, the participation rate has been falling, because there are no jobs to be had.

In the 21st century the US has been decapitalized and living standards have declined. For a while the process was kept going by the expansion of debt, but consumer income has not kept pace and consumer debt expansion has reached its limits.

The Fed/Treasury “plunge protection team” can keep the stock market up by purchasing S&P futures. The Fed can pump out more money to drive up financial asset prices. But the money doesn’t drive up production, because the jobs and the economic activity that jobs represent have been sent abroad. What globalism did was to transfer the US economy to China.

Roberts' conclusion is not positive. "The conclusion is that the United States is locked on a path that leads directly to the Third World of 60 years ago. President Trump is helpless to do anything about it."

The Globalist agenda of the UN

Map day today. I must admit I'm a bit of a map and chart geek; ever since I learnt how to read - I mean really read - the 1" OS edition as a child, they've fascinated me. My father's stint as an instructor, trying to teach young army officers how to map read (a frustrating period of his military career) left me with three War Office manuals the contents of which I absorbed like blotting paper, so even now I can scan a mass of contour lines and identify dead ground, fields of fire, arty FO points and so on. Not much use on a Sunday ramble in the country, but better fun than twiddling with a bloody mobile phone when on a walk. Yes, I mean you. You know who you are.

Right. Below are a pair of Worldmapper cartograms for 2018 population and GDP - each country's area on the map is relative to the magnitude of these factors.

Each country, no matter how geographically large or small, no matter how big its population, no matter how great or insignificant its wealth, has one vote in the UN General Assembly, an equal chance of a rotating seat on the Security Council and a fair go at all the lucrative posts. Indeed, since its inception (the original United Nations were the allies who defeated German fascism and Japanese militarism, the permanent SC members) its Secretary-Generals have all been drawn from the smaller nations; Norway, Sweden, Burma, Austria, Peru, Egypt, Ghana, South Korea and Portugal.

Given that there are far more small, poor nations than large, rich nations how would you imagine an organisation so constituted would evolve, over time, its mission, objectives and strategy? Yep. It's not some tinfoil conspiracy theory or lizard takeover plot - the natural progression for the UN since 1947 has been towards making smaller poorer countries richer and more powerful. Unfortunately, the consequence over the past twenty years has been the economic decimation of the working and middle classes in the higher-GDP lower-population developed world.

Two factors are at play - often confused but actually quite separate. Globalization and Globalism. Globalization is a change that has come about through advances in communication technology, trade, transport, education, and aid and outreach programmes that have spread medicine, infrastructure, agrarian science, and post-Enlightenment culture across the globe.  Globalism is a movement to establish government, legal systems, economic systems and corporate entities without hindrance of national borders across the globe. It is therefore Globalism that drives the agenda of the UN - in concert with other supranational bodies working to the same ends; the EU, World Bank, IMF and WTO.

Lost in the noise of Brexit, the UN endorsed the Global Migration Compact in December 2018. Several nations refused to sign up - Austria, Australia, Bulgaria, Chile, Czech Republic, Dominica, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Israel, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland and the USA. Our own government agreed it - on the basis that it is 'non-binding' under international law. However, as New Zealand's law officers have warned, non-binding does not mean legally irrelevant - and "courts may be willing...to refer to the Compact and to take the Compact into account as an aid in interpreting immigration legislation". This applies also to both UK courts and the ECHR and ECJ.

The migration compact is an unashamedly Globalist policy instrument - to the disadvantage of the peoples of the developed nations, but to the benefit of both Globalist corporations and organisations. In addition, it will shape future EU legislation, which will be framed so as not to contradict or act against the intentions of the Compact.

I do apologise for the uncharacteristic 'Globalism 101' tone of this post - this is for the benefit of our new readers, who have only the most basic notion of how political policy evolves into action. In the past few weeks I've realised how my old dad felt in trying patiently but unsuccessfully to teach somewhat dim young subalterns the difference between the contour lines of a spur and a gully.

Britain's competitive advantage

I've been trying to find learned economic opinion on which of two events has had the greater effect in Britain's economic renaissance since around 1970 - the US coming off the Bretton-Woods gold standard in 1971, or our joining the EEC in 1973. And which now leaves us more vulnerable to the winds of change blowing around the globe.

One might characterise the past fifty years as a period of change from internationalism to globalism. Bretton-Woods was internationalist, and its institution the IMF was at its inception a body charged with the regulation of relationships between national capital. However, that has undergone a fundamental change. Under an internationalist system of trade, goods are mobile whilst capital lives at home; once the change came to a globalist system under which capital was also mobile, all the old structures began to crumble. We have a globalist IMF intent on the disintegration of nationality, aided by a globalist UN and a Federast EU busy destroying European national identity.

In a remarkable prescient essay published in 1999, before globalism really began to bite, Herman E Daly wrote;

Since there can be only one whole, only one unity with reference to which parts are integrated, it follows that global economic integration logically implies national economic disintegration. By disintegration I do not mean that the productive plant of each country is annihilated, but rather that its parts are torn out of their national context (dis-integrated), in order to be re-integrated into the new whole, the globalized economy. As the saying goes, to make an omelette you have to break some eggs. The disintegration of the national egg is necessary to integrate the global omelette.

Daly also foresaw the social tensions created during the past two decades that have given us Trump, Brexit and the Gilets jaunes;

  .. globalization implies the abrogation of another social contract. that is the implicit agreement between labor and capital over how to divide up the value that they jointly add to raw materials. That agreement has been reached nationally, not internationally. It was not reached by economic theory, but through generations of national debate, elections, strikes, lockouts, court decisions, and violent conflicts. That agreement, in countries like the United States, on which national community and industrial peace depend, was basically that the internal division between labor and capital will be more equal than the world average. That agreement is of course being repudiated in the interests of global integration. That is a very poor trade

 He also foresaw the Elephant and the birth of the über-elite of the global 1%;

The economic integration of any high-wage country with an overpopulated world is bound to lower wages and raise returns to capital, widening the gap between labor and capital toward the more unequal world distribution.

The UK is Europe's second largest economy, with a preponderance towards services and intangibles. Germany, Europe's largest economy, is based unequivocally upon manufacturing. Which is now more vulnerable to global change? Which has greater agility with which to meet the challenges of the new?

Daly's observations on the effects of globalism on our military capacity, our ability to defend our nation and protect our people, are also of great concern;

But what about the military proper? What precisely are they going to defend in a globalized world? The globe is not under threat of invasion. Do we imagine that national boundaries will long retain any political or cultural significance once their economic significance is gone?

.... No doubt it is considerations such as these that lead some people to favor globalization. It is good, in their view, precisely because it makes the national military obsolete. Given the destruction and waste wrought by national militaries it is hard not to have some sympathy with this position. But while globalization seems to make national militaries obsolete, it does not remove the need for appeal to force. Laws, contracts and property rights still must exist and be enforced, even if they are global rather than national. Economic inequality and class conflict grow as the old national social contract between capital and labor dissolves along with the power of nations to guarantee it. Do the globalizers envisage a global government to enforce global laws with a global police force? Or do we, to avoid really big government, follow the privatization and deregulation model all the way, letting the military evolve into private Pinkerton guards hired by each global corporation to protect its property and enforce its contracts? Global corporate feudalism?

I know that we have not arrived at this point yet. But make no mistake about the fact that globalization is being pushed hard by powerful transnational corporations, and that the weakening of the nation is part of the agenda. Conversion of the national military into a corporate police force is consistent with such an agenda. Maybe globalization will stop before it completely disintegrates nations. But who or what will stop it? Might the nationalism, or even patriotism, of the military provide a barrier? So far it has not.

These issues are all now in the balance. The push-back against globalism by the grown-ups  has started and I am happy to count myself amongst the resistance. Anti-globalism is no longer a naive excuse for youthful agit-prop and overturning rubbish bins in central London, but a fight for national survival.

Globalism is dead - the future is Local

Belgium faces a snap general election in January as the country's Prime Minister, Charles Michel, was forced to resign for signing up to the UN's Migration Pact. The UK's signing-up to the pact has been lost in the noise of Brexit, but the US, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Australia have rejected it which means it has now become just an empty gesture, a crumbling pillar barely sustaining the globalist entablature. Peter Sutherland, the Godfather of Globalisation, died earlier this year having already seen his dream of a world without borders, in which benign global corporates reduced the world (except for the elite 1%, natch) to an equality of semi-poverty, shattered. Sutherland happily accepted that the price for raising billions out of absolute poverty would be the pauperisation of Europe, the US and the old Commonwealth, the hollowing out of the old middle classes. When he appeared before a House of Lords select committee in 2014 he was quite explicit - the EU had a mission to undermine the cultural identity, the congruence, of nation states, and millions of migrants was the way to achieve it.*

My loathing, resentment and anger is reserved for Peter Sutherland and those of his kind, and so should yours be. Sutherland, ex-Chairman of Goldman Sachs, ex-EU Commissioner, ex-Irish government minister, typified the symbiotic links of a corporatist-governmental complex working to impose globalism on unwilling peoples.  

It's important to understand that the antonym of globalist isn't nationalist but internationalist. 

Macron and his fellow globalists make silly speeches in which they denounce nationalism as an impractical sole alternative to globalism. It's a false comparison. The practical alternative to globalism is internationalism - independent, sovereign nations trading with eachother, exchanging knowledge and skills, agreeing common standards where these offer common advantage, maintaining flows between universities and research institutes, and above all acting in restraint of sovereign or territorial aggrandisement of a sort that causes war. 

Churchill was aware that neither France nor Germany were capable in the long term of being responsible internationalists. Both had cursed Europe with war for two hundred years, and neither can still be trusted alone to act in the common interest. Tying them together in a political-economic compact is a very effective way of protecting the world from their malign tendencies - even it it means for them a sclerotic economy, reduced growth and potential. For seventy years this has largely worked - bar a few war-fomenting behavioural lapses in the Balkans and Ukraine. The mistake, the error that should never have been allowed, was to tie the UK into this harness. 

Macron is terrified that a France and a Germany independent of eachother will revert to their old ways. His fears are justified. This is why he's so terrified of nationalism - and so uncertain about the EU's ability to be an internationalist player. For Macron it's globalism or chaos. 

So let us be aware that just as we are at last rectifying the mistake and resuming our place in the world as an international player, we must work equally hard to preserve an EU that keeps France and Germany shackled to eachother - for Britain's long term national security lies in keeping these beasts chained. 

The Elephant - Peter Sutherland's godchild

* https://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-committees/eu-sub-com-f/GAMM/EvidencevolumegmmFINAL.pdf Page 263

Politicians must either be Globalists or democratic representatives

Those who imagine a tax strike is the most effective way to combat a government in thrall to the CBI, the FTSE100 and the industrialists of the ERT haven't thought things through. Politicians haven't sold their souls so that soldiers and sailors might be paid, warships fuelled and repaired or motorway bridges built. They couldn't care less about a tax strike - because their benefits come from their close relationship with global business, facilitated through a corrupt network of government officials across Europe. The PM's own husband represents a multi-billion dollar global hedge fund, and globalist dags such as that creature Blair are mired in faecal lucre from the parasitic firms that dominate the planet. 

Any effective action to persuade politicians to forgo material self-interest by aligning themselves with the globalists must therefore be prompted by the actions of millions of consumers against globalist 'Remainer' firms - the members of the CBI. ERT and so on. Given that many of them have established themselves as Oligopolies or even Monopolies this is not easy - but either we break them now, or they break us forever, serfs sans a national or cultural identity, without a congruent morality, subject to a supernational unelected tyranny. 

Both Labour and Conservative parties have benefited from an over-close support of the globalists. For the unions, a fat wedge and decent conditions for members working in the public sector or for large multinational corporations is an utterly selfish strategy; they don't fight for the millions on zero-hours contracts, striving within SMEs or fighting against unemployment. We have a two-tier labour market, and the unions represent the fat, privileged beneficiaries of global corporations; they support big government, over-regulation that throttles SMEs and innovation, not British working people, not jobless youths in the rust-belt. And the Conservative party is just as culpable - under Cameron the Party actually imagined that donations from the global firms could replace real members - that the Party could do away with a troublesome membership and just stitch things up with old school chums on the boards of their sponsors. 

A fight against the globalists is therefore a fight that unites left and right in a democratic alliance against the antidemocratic tyranny of globalism. Our Parliamentary system of allowing personal and financial interests that could dominate a member's judgement also needs re-appraisal; here are the holdings of one wealthy Remainer, whose devotion to the EU and the globalists is doubtless from unsullied personal conviction and has nothing at all to do with the value of his portfolio:-

The following shareholdings are held jointly with my wife, and were controlled by a blind management trust whilst I was a member of the government:
LVMH
Air Liquide
Royal Dutch Shell
Rio Tinto
Rolls Royce
RPC group
Babcock
Experian
Diageo
Smith and Nephew
Reckitt Benckiser Group
Burberry
Astra Zeneca
Smith and Nephew
Until 6 April 2018, Glaxo Smith Kline (Updated 08 May 2018)
RELX Group plc (formerly Reed Elsevier)
Schroders
United Technologies
Anglo American Platinum Ltd
BHP Billiton
Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing NPV
(Registered 06 October 2014)

Pfizer Inc. (Registered 05 July 2016)

Primary Health Properties (Registered 05 July 2016)

Dr Pepper Snapple Group (Registered 05 July 2016)

General Accident (Registered 20 February 2017)

RSA Insurance Group plc (Registered 20 February 2017)

Aberdeen Asian Smaller Co Inv Trust (Registered 20 February 2017)

Until 6 April 2018, F and C Global Smaller Cos. (Registered 20 February 2017; updated 08 May 2018)

Until 6 April 2018, Pearson plc. (Registered 20 February 2017; updated 08 May 2018)

Until 6 April 2018, Standard Chartered (Registered 20 February 2017; updated 08 May 2018)

Schroder Asian (Registered 20 February 2017)

From 6 April 2018, Land Securities Group (Registered 08 May 2018)

From 6 April 2018, Croda International (Registered 08 May 2018)

From 6 April 2018, Biotech Growth Trust (Registered 08 May 2018)

From 6 April 2018, Worldwide Healthcare Trust (Registered 08 May 2018)

From 6 April 2018, Henderson Far East Income Ltd (Registered 08 May 2018)

From 6 April 2018, HG Capital Trusts plc (Registered 08 May 2018)

Corporate globalists aren't capitalists - they're parasites and predators, growing and expanding by mergers and takeovers, with tangled webs of their DNA inserted into the very nucleii of other global corporates and uniting them in a dark web of greed and corruption. They are our enemy. 

Chlorine chicken, GM soya, Cheez Wizz and 32oz steaks

Any UK visitor returning from a first trip to the USA came back with food stories. These used to be about quantity - 'All you can eat for $1', regular steaks at 16oz and large at 32oz, piles of pancakes, syrup and bacon strips for breakfast and so on. We were simply astounded at the cheapness and largeness of portions. Then there is the novelty of a manufactured ersatz cheese in an aerosol, and a slight 'Ergh!' at Americans forced to eat GM Frankenstein food and chlorinated chicken. And there you have the British stereotype of American food. Fried chlorine chicken and GM white gravy in the South, hormone and antibiotic saturated factory beef in the North. And each meal triple the entire daily calorie count. 

Friends came home from a US road trip last week, reprising a trip they made seventeen years ago. They were not happy. Everything - food, accommodation, car hire - was no longer cheap. Portions were no longer huge. The $1 breakfast had gone. Cars were smaller and more ... European. And while poor blacks still consumed vast quantities of fried chlorine chicken, the rest of the US had moved upscale. Above all, the real US was absolutely nothing like the box-set US they had expected from watching seventeen years of US serials and soaps. Everything in reality was somehow less American and more global.  

Well, that's trade and globalism. I have no fears that a UK - US trade deal will impose on Britain the stereotype foods of two decades ago. For sure, if our own blacks want fried chicken at £1 for two pieces, imported chlorine chicken is the way to go, but unless it's also Halal it won't crowd out the supermarket shelves. And Waitrose won't stock it. That's consumer choice.