We must plan Germany's survival

The sheer aggression and hatefulness exhibited in spades by Brussels over Brexit - including words and actions that would not be inappropriate if directed at an enemy in war - have been borne with remarkable tolerance by the British people. But the impact of this louche, amateur, vulgar and unstatesmanlike behaviour has not been lost on the country. When Germany sent us Ribbentrop, pumped with hubris and vanity and claiming a Waltish 'von', he was dismissed by the British as a champagne salesman. Now we are sent a stumbling comical drunk, an angry little Polish dwarf who can't control his mouth and a sinister German Grand Vizier, every one of them ill-mannered, dishonourable and untrustworthy. Just more champagne salesmen. Is Europe so impoverished of talent that from a population of 430m it cannot produce three persons with any vestige of international class or even basic diplomatic competence?

It is important that we overcome our dislike of this unattractive and boorish shudder of clowns, for it is becoming clear that Germany is increasingly in trouble and it is more and more likely that we must assist in her survival in the months and years to come. Mogenthau was wrong then and any revivalists of his inane retribution are mistaken now. We might need another Marshall Plan, and this time we might have to do it without the USA.

Germany is horribly exposed to Italian debt and risk of default. Two of her largest banks, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, are not only on the ropes but slipping unconscious from the ring. With the Eurozone now slipping inexorably into recession, the fall of these giants will reverberate throughout Europe.

Germany's auto industry is a late 20th century rustpile. The diesel emissions frauds, crash in diesel sales, Brexit and US tariffs will be a hammer blow to Germany's car plants and the EU-Japanese trade treaty will halt and reverse any compensating Japanese direct investment, for the same reasons as Honda closed in the UK.

The globalists have hoodwinked the Germans into taking a million migrants - to become two million once they have established themselves and dependents join them - on the false and spurious grounds of 'demographics' - an ageing population no longer capable of standing on the production line. These same globalists must have known what is now in the public realm - that Germany will see some 37% of jobs going in the next 15 years as the effects of AI bite. The UK's figure from PwC is 30%. Training a million migrants in basic numeracy and literacy is one matter; retraining twenty million Germans in computer skills is another. My resentment of the loathsome Peter Sutherland is renewed each time I read his weasel words to the HoL select committee in 2014. The real reason for these migrants, as he makes clear, is to help destroy German national identity and cultural congruence

"If one looks at the key arguments and issues relating to the need for migration, the demographic is the most fundamental for many countries of destination. The demographic challenges in a number of European Member States, however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states, are absolutely unquestionable. They are vital in terms of a crucial dynamic for economic growth. A declining and ageing population is destructive of prosperity—forgetting entirely about the moral aspect of migration. That is particularly relevant to a number of countries in central Europe—Germany has a major issue—and some southern Member States. So demographics are a key element of the debate, and a key argument for the development of—I hesitate to use the word because people have attacked it—multicultural states. It is impossible to consider that the degree of homogeneity which is implied by the alternative argument can survive, because states have to become more open in terms of the people who inhabit them, as the United Kingdom has demonstrated."

In terms of electric vehicle technology and battery production, Germany is lagging behind the rest of the world. It is unlikely that she will be able to recover her lost lead in auto-technology for the years ahead.

German manufacturing has sunk to a six-year low. Jan von Gerich of Nordea Bank called the German manufacturing economy 'scary'

The bad news is that there are no signs that the weakness in the more cyclical German manufacturing sector would be temporary, and the outlook is frankly scary. In light of these numbers, it is crystal clear that the challenges currently facing the German economy go well beyond the car sector.

All the signs are that Europe's largest economy is sleepwalking into disaster. It may be that a change of Chancellor, a fresh administration and a range of new voices breaking the stranglehold of the old political elites on Germany's various parliaments, national and state, will head-off disaster, but we cannot bank on it. A stable and democratic Germany tied strongly to France is the guarantee of peace and security in Europe - and we must be prepared to step in to assist if Germany, once again, fails to find her own way.

Are we there yet?

No, I can't claim to have a clue to what's happening with Brexit. This is perhaps a 'wisdom of crowds' job, with all your views, from the blissfully optimistic to the darkest gloom of the Cassandras, to help give us an idea of where the median lies.

A. Leave on 29th March with a deal
Something spectacular must happen to make this a reality; the House has made it clear it will not agree a deal with the backstop. Either 'boomer' Cox wrangles a legally binding codicil to change its mind or MPs take fright and act like mice

B. Leave on 29th March with no deal
Dream option for many Leavers, and increasingly the public, who are fed up with Brexit and importantly fed up with Brussels and becoming more hostile. But unlikely. The Deep State hate this option - it weakens them. Consequently the DS and their dags in public life will do all they can to prevent this happening.

C. Ditto options but end of June
Any Brexit delay beyond June will mean EP elections in May in the UK. The EU certainly don't want UK MEPs back in July, and as Farage's BrexitCorp with 100,000 volunteer candidates will probably sweep the board (For Euro elections it would get about 70% of normal Tory votes, I'd guess - but only for the EP election) neither Conservatives or Labour want the humiliation. This is my guess - we'll go at end June. Regretfully with some mashed together deal.

D. Article 50 extended beyond June
This will mean UK MEPs in the new plenum - which no-one wants. Since any extension to Article 50 is entirely in the hands of the EU to grant (other than a total withdrawal - which we can do unilaterally before 29th March, but which would kill the Conservative Party stone dead within 24 hours) it's probably unlikely. 

1848 - When change in the UK led to Revolution in France

On this day ...

The 1832 Reform Act in the UK (or the English Act and the Irish and Scottish Acts that followed it) was not the end of electoral reform in Britain; it was not, to beg a phrase, even the end of the beginning of Parliamentary reform. But it did do two things - largely abolish the Rotten Boroughs, and increase the electorate to about 20% of the population. I was going to describe this as peaceful change, but of course it was not quite peaceful. There was Peterloo.

And then there was religious fear. In 1829, in response to deep fear of explosive civil strife in Ireland, Roman Catholics were permitted for the first time to stand for election. The non-conformists in their chapels and meeting houses in Birmingham and Manchester were livid; did not they deserve the same rights as the Irish? And so government reluctantly moved in 1832 and enacted the first, slow step to reform that would take a further 96 years to roll out - the final franchise not coming until 1928.

Across the Manche the Kermits also felt outrage. In comparison to our 20% of enfranchised people, barely 1% of the French had the vote. They didn't mess about. In February 1848 they rose up. Forty-two were shot to death by nervous troops and on 23rd February Louis-Philippe abandoned his throne and ran away to England. Thus began the Second Republic (we're now up to the Fifth).

De Tocqueville (a favourite of this blog - I'll give him a post of his own in due course) observed  "We are sleeping together in a volcano. A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon."

Like a forest fire, the events in France in 1848 spread throughout Europe.

What began almost peacefully in the UK (15 died at Peterloo) set the course for change in Europe. That's why they're so worried about Brexit. 

More than ever, voters need a Power of Recall

The first eleven movements in a long-building political reshuffle of bums on green benches are in - but don't imagine that will be the end of it. Like a little clump of cells flobbling under the microscope, our political class will continue to realign themselves into what they imagine are the groupings to which voters will adhere. As Allister Heath puts it in the Telegraph

Logically, we would end up with four groupings: a pro-capitalist, libertarian Eurosceptic party, an economically Left-wing but socially conservative Eurosceptic party, a pro-EU social democratic party and a neo-communist party.

Apart of course from the SNP and the Irish, who have issues of their own right now.

The prime problem for voters, who generally but not always vote for parties and manifestos in general elections, is that they're left with a cuckoo in the nest. However noble and virtuous a shape-changing MP may believe themselves to be, you can be sure that many of their voters think it would be more virtuous if they didn't squat in the constituency on false pretences - and for the current eleven turners, that means squat until 2022.

Labour have already voiced support for a constituency Power of Recall and it's time for the Conservatives to add their support. The motion should be very simple, and universal:- 

"The electors of Broxtowe no longer have confidence that Anne Mary Soubry can adequately represent their interests in Parliament" 

As for the threshold - I have no fixed figure in mind. There must be a precursor trigger, and the hurdle to dismiss an MP should be sufficiently high as to deter vexatious attempts, but not so high that the number who voted for them in the GE cannot later vote them out. 

Let's see a government Bill for this - now.

The Remain Party

The seven  - or possibly now eight - MPs sitting for what, to be honest, we must call the Remain Party, despite having been preparing since last month with company registrations and so forth, were singularly unprepared yesterday for the questions of the press. Chukka on 'Today' was classic. "Do you have any policies other than Remain?" "Brexit is a really important issue and we're committed to rescuing Britain from this foolishness" it went, sort of.

So no. The only policy they have is Remain.

I wish them success in attracting a further 29 rebel MPs from both sides of the House, so they may assume from the SNP the privileges of a third party, together with more Short money and a better quality offices. I also look forward to February 2022 and PMQs

"Mr Ummummumma!"

"Will the Prime Minister recognise that the only way out of this Brexit debacle is to allow a further Referendum, to keep us in Europe where we belong"

"I thank the honourable member for Streatham. He will be aware that since we left the EU in 2019, slashing taxes and opening trade borders, our economy has boomed, defying the global downturn and the car crash of the Eurozone. Foreign Direct Investment is at its highest ever, we have the fourth greatest global GDP, the pound buys €2.20 for our holidaymakers who will again flood Europe this Summer. The Trussel Trust has opened its two-thousandth foodbank in the EU and the incredible generosity of the British people in sending their spare packets and tins across the Channel is keeping many poor Europeans afloat. We fully support IMF aid to the Eurozone, and will do all we can to help the nations of Europe to recover democracy and to stand on their feet again. The government however has no plans to join them"

The Ugly European

Claas Relotius was the darling of the SJW-class in young Germany. For many years his stories captivated the lefty-liberal readers of Der Spiegel with his tales of travels and encounters in America. A Yemeni man tortured at Gitmo, the travels of a death-row groupie, an in-depth piece on the folk of Fergus Falls. Entrancing and engaging tales of American stereotypy. And Der Spiegel enjoyed, up until a year ago, a reputation for truth telling and editorial integrity - qualities I've praised more than once on this blog. There was only one problem. All his stories were bollocks; wholly invented anti-American trash from the bitter recesses of Relotius's own deep hostility and resentment towards the US. Relotius' bile found a welcoming home in Der Spiegel; as The Atlantic commented

Though it is respected abroad as an authoritative news source, Der Spiegel has long peddled crude and sensational anti-Americanism, usually grounded in its brand of knee-jerk German pacifism. Covers over the years have impugned the United States as “The Conceited World Power” (with an image of the White House bestriding the globe), repeated the hoary “Blood for Oil” charge as the rationale for the Iraq War, and, in the run-up to George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, asked, “Will America Be Democratic Again?” When Edward Snowden leaked information detailing U.S. surveillance practices several years ago, Der Spiegel went on a crusade unlike anything in its recent history, railing about U.S. intelligence cooperation with Germany and demanding that Berlin grant Snowden asylum. (The magazine demonstrated none of the same outrage when, two years later, Russia hacked the German parliamentary computer network). Last year, Der Spiegel notoriously featured a cartoon of Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty on its cover. And this May, one of its columnists misappropriated the memory of those who struggled against Nazism by calling for “resistance against America,” quite a demand for a magazine from the country that started World War II.

The magazine has one of the largest and most professional fact-checking departments in Europe, yet Relotius' lies and invention got past all the checks. When he confessed to his editor "I'm sick and I need to get help" you may think, as I do, that the fault was not all on the part of the rogue journo - what about all those smug self-satisfied German readers who lapped it up, who never evinced a single doubt at the crude anti-American lies? They didn't baulk because the articles fed their own anti-American prejudices. As the newly-appointed US Ambassador pointed out

It's not just Germany, but in many of the EU27 that this anti-Americanism has taken hold. And worryingly, not just anti-Americanism; Europe is seeing a disturbing rise in anti-Semitism of a kind not common since the 1930s, also widespread amongst the Left in the UK. Those dangerous passions that cost the European mainland so much blood, so much destruction in the last century are rearing again their ugly heads.

Yet move beyond the heart of Europe and the US, even Trump's US, is held in high regard; Vietnam loves the US just as much as Americans themselves, and the Philippines, South Korea, Poland, Nigeria, Italy, Ghana and Hungary only slightly less so. Spain, Germany and the Netherlands love the US least - along with Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and Serbia. European anti-Americanism is more than just jejune spitefulness but is founded, I believe, in resentment - what Gregorio Marañón termed 'the painful slavery of gratitude'.

Those of us who grew up during the Cold War are generally grateful that the US and NATO stood together against the threat of nuclear annihilation that faced us. However, more intelligent UK attitudes towards our alliance with the US are tinged with caution. Our having to develop the nuclear bomb twice - once for the US and once for ourselves from 1947, taught the UK an important lesson - as did Suez, when the US rightly refused to back this particular piece of Anglo-French stupidity. 'Yo Blair' in his over-tight ball-strangling cord jeans was played like a patsy over Iraq, and Obama showed us what a president with an unfriendly face looks like. Yet the US with our three Commonwealth allies forms the heart of the world's most efficient and secret intelligence gathering and sharing partnership in Five Eyes, and the UK's military capabilities are valued above all other NATO allies.

Under Obama, and continuing under Trump, the US is adjusting to a multi-polar world, one in which the US is not alone in holding superpower advantages. As the US modifies its global sheriff role, refuses to carry the EU free-riders of NATO and even anticipates the Yuan joining the dollar as a global reserve currency, America still exercises the influences of a Normative Power. The values it espouses and the power it projects to secure those norms continues to reach throughout Europe, but the EU may be in the process of cutting its own throat.

Donald Tusk (one of the EU's five unelected 'Presidents') wrote to member nations on the eve of the Malta summit

"The first threat, an external one, is related to the new geopolitical situation in the world and around Europe. An increasingly, let us call it, assertive China, especially on the seas, Russia's aggressive policy towards Ukraine and its neighbours, wars, terror and anarchy in the Middle East and in Africa, with radical Islam playing a major role, as well as worrying declarations by the new American administration all make our future highly unpredictable. For the first time in our history, in an increasingly multipolar external world, so many are becoming openly anti-European, or Eurosceptic at best. Particularly the change in Washington puts the European Union in a difficult situation; with the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy.

....... But today we must stand up very clearly for our dignity, the dignity of a united Europe - regardless of whether we are talking to Russia, China, the US or Turkey."

I repeat what Tusk ignores - that the US retreat from a 70-year old post war global role is not a Trump initiative; it began under Obama, and will continue under Trump's successor. I can detect a sort of petulant resentment in the tone of many from Brussels that the EU will cease to benefit from devoting its GDP to butter leaving the US to beggar its own development whilst doing the guns.

Couple this high-level stand-offishness and resentment with a growing EU and Left-wing anti-Semitism and with a low-level puerile jealousy prevalent amongst the EU's lumpen atavistics of America's normative character - Yes, the US is a nation that imprisons and executes more of its citizens than Europe finds comfortable, yet remains a shining beacon of freedom, hope and justice for much of the world, and a magnet for the world's poor - and future relations between the EU27 and the US do not look positive. For how much longer can an EU that openly abrogates the role of NATO, openly signals US exclusion from future defence procurement and openly fails to meet even the minimum NATO obligations, continue to rely on US goodwill?

To end, I pose again the question I first asked back in 2017

Which brings me to an interesting footnote - shared Nukes. The US, to help little countries without the bomb to feel included, has distributed 180 B61 air-launched nukes to Turkey, Germany (?), Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. These 'dial-a-yield' devices can be set on loading to yield from 0.3 to 170 kilotons (Hiroshima was 15) and they can be launched from a variety of national NATO aircraft - but need US consent to 'unlock' them. Will Mr Trump now ask for them back?

 Update
========
Spiked carries a piece on another German writer mired in mendacity and facing opprobrium - Robert Menasse, formerly hailed as the Alfred Rosenberg of the European Union

The Post-globalist Capitalist revolution is coming

Back in 1910, I'm quite sure, the equivalent of the political adviser was penning essays on the ways in which London could deal with the disposal of horse-dung; no doubt special rail sidings, dung-trains and dung-mountains beyond the suburbs were involved in options to clear the stables and streets of horseapples, designed so that by 1940 London would remain clear of millions of tons of equine product. So mired were they in a world of exponentially increasing horse-traffic in London they became deaf to the noise of the motor-car, blind to the cinema and the early aircraft in the skies. 

I was reminded of these early dung-managers when reading a piece on Conservative Home by Nick Hargrave, former Number 10 SPAD who made policy for both David Cameron and Theresa May. More State, more Spending, more Spin and more Tax are Hargrave's recommendations - thus exhibiting an almost wilful blindness to the reality of the world today, taking refuge in the comfortable horse-dung of an imagination limited to the past. Hargrave is unaware that without radical change there will be by 2040 neither a Welfare State nor an NHS in the UK.

From 1971 onwards, when the effects of Bretton Woods in managing national competitive advantage by regulating national capital flows were removed, globalism in place of international trade became possible. During the past twenty years globalism has been in the ascendant, as Daly wrote in 1999

The classical economists like Ricardo, were nationalists, and that is why they were so devoted to comparative advantage. We are presumably beyond that now. We are cosmopolitan individualists on a global scale, interested in maximizing global product. Comparative advantage, because of its premised constraint on capital mobility, does not maximize global product. But absolute advantage, by relaxing that constraint, does. We are simply not interested in the national distribution of gains and losses from global trade.

That neglect of the distributional effects has given us the Elephant - global gainers including the people of India, Vietnam and particularly China, and global losers including a vast mass of middle and working class citizens in the developed world, who have lost income, status and job security in a period of rapid change in which the balance towards fairness and social cohesion built by a century or more of painfully-wrought agreements on the relationship between Labour and Capital have been junked, skipped and disregarded. The real gainers are the global 1%, whose wealth and income has increased exponentially.

The biggest myth is perhaps that global markets are free markets. They are not. The global corporates use market power, intellectual property and trademark rights, data power and the de facto granting of 'knowledge' monopolies by state actors. Supranational authority that imposes systems of regulation and over-regulation that favour the oligopolistic globals - whether the EU or the UN - at the expense of non-global competition is an ally of globalistic advantage.

The harmonisation of standards through bodies such as the EU and UN is also paradoxically of national disbenefit to the developed world, as Daly explains

When different national markets with different rules for the internalization of external costs merge into a single market, then the different rules of cost accounting present a big problem. Under globalization the market left to itself will resolve the difficulty by standards-lowering competition -- the way of counting costs that results in the cheapest product will prevail......

Under the traditional comparative advantage (internationalist as opposed to globalist) regime, each country could indeed adopt its own separate rules of cost-accounting, reflecting its own values and traditions, and not worry about harmonization. As long as capital must stay at home countries are not forced into a standards-lowering competition to attract and keep capital. Goods and services can be produced and freely traded according to comparative advantage even when trading partners have totally different ways of measuring costs.

I don't want to get mired in theory about globalism. The reality is that if we have not as yet reached Peak Globalism then we are fast approaching it; Trump, Brexit, the Gilets jaunes, Italy and the fast-approaching Eurozone recession are already with us. The reactions and anticipation of outcomes will increasingly define political alignments - I can detect a coalescing of opinion around several divergent standards

Progressives 
Those looking to help design the successor to globalism; Internationalists, Localists, committed to democratic outcomes and social equity. Radical reform of tax and welfare systems, renewal of political identities, utilising capitalism to generate wealth but in control of its effects, recognition of the deep and fundamental changes that AI and technology will bring, committed to achieving a Durkheimian social integrity and coherence in contrast to a globalist anomie

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

Philistines 
Those of all political colours in denial that massive change is underway; the managers of horse-dung, political nostalgics, the patrician elite and the dags of globalism, neo-liberals, the political class and the old fourth estate, all those threatened by what they term 'populism', the 1% and the winners from globalism who just want everything to stay the same. Plus the naive zealots - those who believe that anthropogenicmorphic global warming / Moslem immigrants / 12 foot alien lizards / secret Zionist conspiracies / American hegemony and suchlike are actually responsible for what's happening.

Change is coming. We need people of vision and ability, not managers of yesterdays horse dung.

All change!

For an inspired series of graphics of the Brexit alignments and realignments in Parliament, visit the Guardian - one of the captures below.

Like an amoeba undergoing mitosis, our Parliament is resolving into four distinct factions. Brexit has split both Labour and Conservative parties, and the papers are just beginning to pick up on the fallout.

The Guardian reports on talks to form a new Lab/Con centrist party, a sort of Son of Blair I suppose whilst the Telegraph reports on 25 Remainer MPs including Dominic Grieve who face deselection by the end of March. Further 'Party Split' pieces by John Longworth and Tobias Ellwood, for the sake of balance I guess, feature in the Telegraph, whilst the Express gives us a 'JRM for new ERG Party' piece.

None of which is at all surprising for a system that has a Leave party led by a Remainer pretending to believe in Leave and a Remain party led by a Leaver pretending to believe in Remain.

All of which makes me cheerful. I loathe the privileged complacency and sense of entitlement of our politics more than anything - it's time to give the bag a shake.

Shamima Begum - No free pardon

There really is a load of gumph around about this woman. 'Family plea for Shamima to be allowed home' says the Times, echoed by others of the appeaser ilk. All that's missing so far is an appeal from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The fact is - a fact ignored by the more hysterical ladies of the press, including the Times - that no-one in government has determined that this woman Begum should be prevented from returning to the UK. She is a British citizen, and does not have dual nationality. She is quite free to return home and face the law - the consequences of having treacherously abused her nation, having aided and comforted the nation's enemies and having been complicit in the barbarous murder of other British citizens. 

Her family, pictured by the Times with a huge Teddy Bear in Islamic robes suitable for a four-year-old, are free to go to Syria and bring her back, or send her the money to book a flight home. The Times is probably even willing to arrange her repatriation itself, in exchange for an exclusive story.

If she turns up at the UK border, she cannot be denied entry. So this is not the issue. It's all about whether she should escape scot-free with no reckoning for her actions. She must not. She must answer to Justice, and if she continues to pose a threat to the UK she must be subject to those restrictions available to protect the nation against dangerous Islamists. Her child - if it lives - will be taken for fostering or adoption, unless her family can establish they are suitable for the task.

Morally, many will argue she has forfeited her right to the care of the State. Well, that has to be established in law. But the one thing she doesn't deserve is a free pardon before she's even crossed the border.

EU over-regulation #94

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

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

The factory cafe terrace

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

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

The illegal pasta label

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

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

Where is the gold?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CUTTER!

On board HM Cutter Vexatious somewhere in the Med ..

The tannoy crackles into life

"Now hear this! We have been ordered back to the UK to patrol Channel waters to intercept up a new wave of migrants crossing from France. We will make cautious passage via a number of ports, combining our passage home with a number of courtesy visits. Number 4 working rig under way with Whites in port until Gib. That's all."

In the wheelhouse the 1st Lt shifted against the chart table. "How long do you think we can string it out, sir?"

"Our orders say 'dawdle'. So I reckon we can take six weeks or so. Maybe develop an engine fault - that could give us another four weeks if needed. The last thing they want is us working the box in the Channel and actually picking up migrants"

"But I don't understand why we've been ordered home, sir? We were doing perfectly well not picking up migrants from Libya, so why go back home to not pick up migrants from France?"

"Politics, Futtock, politics. We have to be there to prove that the government is compassionate and humanitarian, but without actually rescuing anyone who would embarrass the Home Secretary. He's still reeling from putting that twelve year old with a full henna beard and three wives into Knob Hill Secondary. And right now not rescuing Channel migrants has greater priority than not rescuing African migrants"

"Some of the lads were talking about the old days, when they used to board yachts looking for hooky fags and baccy, sir. Or maybe catching some Rupert with a K of skunk. Now they say it's just lying in port with a maintenance watch and sunbathing"

"What's wrong with that? You've never been stuck in a frozen muddy creek near Hull, Futtock, waiting for a non-existent landing of Superkings and missing the final of X-factor. Thank God we had those TV satellite domes fitted before we sailed"

"Oh. And do get back into men's clothes before we reach the Western Approaches, Number One. Those sarong wraps really won't do for Pompey."

HMC Seeker - ordered home 31/12/18, as at 0700hrs GMT 13/2/19 berthed at Gibraltar

Nervous Hague can't hear the approaching tumbrils

Poor William Hague, a deluded and deeply confused Patrician unable to comprehend the events unfolding around him, exposes his deficient cognition in the Telegraph again this morning. Deselecting Remainer Tory MPs is mistaken, he avers. This is the man who gave us both the Patrician Party constitution that robbed local associations of much of their authority and institutionalised control in a weak and narrow metropolitan elite, and who more recently urged Tory MPs to put this same undemocratic and factionalist Party elite before either country or constituency. He still thinks it's all about Brexit.

Dear William, our party is splitting, as is Labour. Politics is re-aligning, Pompey against Caesar. On your side the pompous Patrician elite, the political class, half-a-Parliament of privilege and an immense sense of entitlement, a sort of Social Democrat cross-party consensus defending your grasp on power. On the other, the Gilets jaunes, Caesar's horny handed legions, ready to take back control, to shoulder responsibility, to reform, renew and democratise. Our MPs also sit on both sides of the House.

And because our Party is splitting, and because 70% of party members out in the shires and suburbs support the Leave insurgency, of course they will use whatever little power you have left them to ensure they have as many MPs in the Commons as possible come the next election. Which will not be fought under your current Leader.

Their actions in deselecting Remainers are very much in the interests of our country, wholly in the interests of those constituencies, and greatly to the advantage of our Party, which, purged, renewed and democratised, will once again lead One Nation in the interests of all our people, not only your own narrow privileged elite.

So I'm afraid you must just suck it up.  

UK's Copper Cage is a national disgrace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of our local phone masts

Brexit Party - told you so.

Nigel writes in the Telegraph

In contrast, the Brexit Party will have a leader who then appoints a board of their choosing, and the party will ultimately succeed and fail on the judgement and personality of that leader.

This will be a disciplined machine and will run more like a company. Dissenters can go elsewhere

Well, the entire nation owes Nigel a huge debt for getting to the 2016 referendum in the first place. It was an outstanding effort and one which cannot be regarded too highly. And the model that he's chosen for this new political corporation - an autocratic and authoritarian organisation almost certainly funded by a very small number of very wealthy donors who will be in effect Nigel's 'shareholders' - may well reach its objectives.

I look forward to a future democratised Conservative Party, a political party that will be run by its members and funded from the grass roots, working constructively with Nigel's BrexitCorp.

Personally, I would have written 'succeed or fail' but perhaps his chosen phrase is deliberate. 

The EU can never succeed as a rival to the US - in any field

The most naked ambition of the EU and its supporters is to develop itself as a credible rival on the world stage to the US. Their constant yardstick of comparison, like a teenage boy's penis ruler, is with the US; population, GDP, outputs and so on. Such ambitions are little more than naive and jejune aspiration. To reach parity, the EU must develop all three facets that would make the federation a world power; civilian, military and normative. We'll look first at military capacity.

(2012-2016 figures)	EU	USA	UK
Overall
Active military personnel ('000s)	1,345	1,347	206
Total expenditure (bn$)	169	780	50
Expenditure as % of GDP	1.2%	3.6%	2.3%
Naval forces
Capital ships	27	129	9
Destroyers, frigates, corvettes	153	113	19
Other vessels	260	38	19
Submarines	49	70	11
Land forces
Armour – MBTs & AFVs	20,909	44,706	5,705
Artillery	9,159	2,942	658
Attack helicopters	773	973	190
Air forces
Fighter and ground attack aircraft	1,821	4,792	222
Transport & refuelling aircraft	381	5,248	54

The figures above are as good and accurate I can get without spending hours in research, and I believe are good enough to paint the picture. Happy to take corrections and addenda from our many more expert readers in the comments.

The picture this paints for me is an EU with a last-generation military, heavy on unskilled conscripts, with little state of the art kit and virtually no force projection capacity. Towed artillery, for example, is essentially Great War technology - and without GPS (Russia / US / China would restrict use of their own systems and quickly disable Gallilleo in the event of conflict) simply does not have the vast reserves of shells needed for random and inaccurate wide-area bombardment in Great War style. The conflict in Ukraine has shown how easily GPS can be blocked locally, and new, ad-hoc low tech such as the use of cheap civilian drones to spot targets and correct fall-of-shot can be used, how home-made EW can easily block digital and satellite radio comms and how forces have gone back to last gen HF radio comms.

Even where the figures look to have some equivalence it is illusory. Only France has a military worth anything at all. Low skills and low expenditure mean much EU kit is unserviceable and only a small fraction can take to the field in short order.

The EU is low on both military transport aircraft and on naval vessels other than littoral patrol vessels. This lack of force projection capability in turn undermines the EU's aspirations to be a normative power.

Without NATO, without the USA and the United Kingdom, the EU does not have even the most basic capacity to resist an attack from Russia, a nation with the GDP of France. For a considerable time to come, the EU must rely on the goodwill of other, 'third party' nations for the Federation's fundamental security. This at a time when the EU has been at least encouraging, if not fomenting anti-American sentiment that campaigns for US bases in the EU to go. It is an incredibly risky strategy. 

If we are to ask British servicemen and women to put their lives on the line in eastern Europe for the EU, if we are to share the most sensitive products of our well-developed intelligence capabilities and alliances such as 'five eyes' with the EU, if we are to look out for the EU's security whilst the EU avoids this most fundamental responsibility of defending itself whilst at the same time refusing to buy UK or US made aircraft, military kit or technology and after explicitly naming us both as 'potential enemies', one really has to wonder how much longer the people of Britain are prepared to cover their backs.

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.

Europe - Organised crime bosses back the EU

Europe's organised crims and mafiosi clearly believe that contrary to EUphile scare stories, they would be better off under the EU than under the security regimes of individual states. Sinn Fein's Remainer stance comes not only from legitimate political concerns but, one suspects, a certain sympathy for IRA members now deply involved in organised crime. Before the referendum, Irish courts seized €28m from ex-PIRA organised crime bosses, much of which, it is thought, originated from EU grant scams which are funded in part by UK taxpayers. The amount seized is only the tip of the iceburg - perhaps only 5% of the proceeds of ex-terrorist organised crime in Ireland.

We have posted before on the murder of journalists working on organised crime stories throughout Europe, many of which involved serious fraud and corruption of EU funds. From Veronica Guerin in 1996 to Daphne Caruana Galizia, blown apart by a mafia car bomb in Malta in 2017, dirty EU money attracts the worst and most vile criminal elements in our society. Unused airports and motorways going nowhere in the Mezzogiorno to the fouling of Loch Corrib in Galway with raw sewage from crooked developers snouting the EU grant trough all bear the hand of organised crime. And it's unstoppable by EU-wide security and police action.

Indeed, some professional UK police officers have deep suspicions as to the integrity of many of those working for both Europol and Frontex, and there have been persistent rumours of deep and embedded organised crime representation in both organisations. These suspicions also extend to the EU itself. Despite the most committed efforts of the governments of many member states, and of individual MEPs, the EU has failed over many years to introduce an effective set of measures to counter organised crime in Europe. Both in terms of a concerted pursuit of organised crime, and an agreed framework for confiscation of the proceeds of crime, the EU has failed to act. In a 2017 EU Observer article entitled "Mafia money pollutes the EU economy", the authors conclude

On 7 October 2016, the EU parliament approved the report on the fight against corruption, prepared by an Italian MEP, Laura Ferrara, which partially adopts the work of Alfano's special committee. The report's 35 pages echoes the same wish-list to the EU commission, that the offence of "criminal association regardless of consummation of criminal ends" should be punishable.

And yet, there has still been very little progress. It's like a broken record.

In the light of the evidence it seems that there is an almost symbiotic relationship between the capos of the EU and Europe's crime bosses. Make no mistake, the UK's fight against crime will be more effective, safer and more secure from criminal infiltration after Brexit than now - and that may also be part of the reason why some Irish factions are exhibiting such sustained opposition to Brexit.

Conservative and other political party democracy

The eagle-eyed amongst you may notice a newcomer to the daily blogroll list to the right - the Campaign for Conservative Democracy. John Strafford has been striving ever since Hague imposed his elitist and centralist constitution on the Party in 1998 to reform and democratise the party. He makes a most persuasive case for we, the members of the Party, reclaiming ownership from the Patrician elite and their globalist backers. I won't dwell on the details, which are of little interest to UKIP readers.

However, this fundamental requirement for a party to operate democratically goes to the heart of many issues now assuming importance. My previous tongue-in-cheek reaction to the formation of the 'Brexit' Party was primarily due to a broadly signalled tight central control that would deny its new members effective governance. Its founder is caught in a Catch-22 situation. She wants a new party that can field 'professional, highly competent' candidates and can exclude the Muslim-baiters and the swivel-eyed-loon tendency of UKIP (of whom it must be said there are remarkably few in my experience) and thus is terrified of allowing a one-member-one-vote system. But a party founded without real member democracy must fail; individuals won't donate to a body in which they have no say (the current Tory dilemma) and the party will be dependent on large donations and therefore be vulnerable to corruption and anti-democratic governance.

One of the reforms that I support most strongly is the limiting of individual political donations to somewhere around £50,000. This is vehemently opposed by both Labour and Conservatives; the former relies on Trade Union bungs, the latter on sometimes shady globalist finance. In the absence of large bungs, each party becomes greatly more dependent on its members for both direct funding and fundraising - and each party must in return allow members a real say in the important things.

These matters have been simmering for some years, but have, like so many other issues, now come to the fore because of Brexit. Charles Moore writes in the Telegraph in a manner in which no-one five years ago could ever have imagined; he advocates the firm but fair deselection of all Conservative Remainer MPs, starting with Dominic Grieve. He writes much as many readers write in the blog comments - 

Recently I attended a country funeral. The people in the pew behind me were pointing out the war memorial on the wall. “People shouldn’t forget what those men did,” said one, “They made sure this was a free country”. “It’s not a free country while we’re in this EU,” said another, “We want to go, and now these MPs are trying to stop us”. Some MPs seem slow to pick up this point, and not to realise that they are moving themselves into uncharted territory.

It seems that ensuring party democracy won't wait even for the 29th March. Thus for my party at least, I support fully Mr Strafford's proposals. 

Gibraltar was only ever part of Spain for 212 years

Spanish governments are always out of favour with their voters. With a quarter of the nation's young people out of work due to the disastrous economic management of the EU, raising spurious claims over the sovereignty of Gibraltar has been a perennial favourite, usually combined with some rather jejune and silly naval provocations. Brexit has brought it out again, with a puerile Spanish addendum to post-Brexit travel arrangements.

However, the British Overseas Territory, which has been under British sovereign protection now for 306 years and has voted twice to reject Spanish claims, was only ever a part of the Spanish realm for 212 years - the shortest epoch of sovereignty in the Rock's history. Following the fall of the Western Empire, Gibraltar has experienced the sovereignty of

Visigoths       414 to 711       -  297 years
Moors           711 to 1462     -  751 years
Spain          1501 to 1713     -  212 years
UK             1713 to 2019     -  306 years

The Rock has its own unique ethnic mix, language and customs. Under international principles of self-determination, the people of Gibraltar are very clear, and have asserted their wishes democratically with overwhelming clarity, that they wish to remain under the Union flag.

That's all.

You can smell the fear in Brussels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They're starting to get it

I suspect every primary school child in Colchester leaves with a firm knowledge of just two periods in the ancient town's history - the Roman occupation and the Civil War. The town has any number of scars from the latter; the Siege House, with the musket balls still embedded in its timbers ringed in red, or the new (well, 17th century) brick top to a medieval church tower, blown up with its gunner and supply of gunpowder during the siege. Parties of small children are taken proudly to the rear castle wall, against which Lucas and Lisle were shot to death. The bias was, I recall, still tinged with the Royalist hubris that held the town against Parliamentary forces (and the wishes of the townspeople) for some time. The town has a school named for one of the executed siege commanders, but none for the Roundhead commander who won.

That such traces of ancient difference still subside in our breasts became clearer many years ago with the first acquaintance of a lifelong friend I met at university. He is a Cavalier from Worcester - I a Roundhead from Suffolk. It is not a conscious self-definition and we have rarely even spoken of it, but it remains ingrained nonetheless.  There is a strong trace of 17th century East Anglian Puritan in me that rejects all corruption, asserts the responsibility of privilege, loves Justice over Law and above all strives for an equitable (but not equal) Realm. My great friend is a scofflaw, a shameless abuser of privilege and position, a serial breaker of road traffic regulations and an unembarrassed wielder of sharp elbows, not above undetectable petty theft. We are, as the Irish say, fierce friends.

For those who imagine our common past allegiances are so distant as to be diluted to homeopathic proportions in our blood, don't be so sure. Allister Heath in the Telegraph also finds echoes of the 17th century in the divisions I have also described so comprehensively in previous posts. Against the hubristic decadence of the New Elite are

 ... the New Radicals: a heterodox bunch who are often uncomfortable revolutionaries. They look on, aghast, at our elites’s fin-de-siecle delusions, at their breathtaking self-satisfaction, and dream of the day that they can put them back in their place. Many New Radicals used to trust our institutions and were once small-c conservatives themselves; today, they believe the “system” to be broken, controlled by a selfish, morally-corrupt establishment committed to lining its own pockets.

The next stage of course is for our political allegiances to align with the nation's new bipartisan divisions - Roundhead or Cavalier, Caesarian plebeian or Pompeian patrician. Our Commons chamber is made for it, and every atom of DNA in our being is hard wired for a two party political system. Heath fears some form of destructive Corbynism, but, Puritan leveller that I am, I see in Corbyn a potential ally to the New Radical cause. I find myself nearer in many things to Jeremy Corbyn than to Boris Johnson. And if that surprises you, you still don't get it.  

UK puts Brussels on the back foot

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

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

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

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

Robbing democratic rights

There is a circular letter going the rounds which I reproduce below:

SIR – A “Citizens’ Assembly” can break the current impasse on Brexit, and recreate trust in representative democracy.
On Brexit, public debates too often reflect two unreconciled blocs of opinion. We urgently need a more diverse range of views to be weighed, taken seriously, and debated to a conclusion. A Citizens’ Assembly does that. Experience shows it works in reaching conclusions which carry public confidence, and in reconciling division.
Many feel a disconnection between Parliament and the public. The answer is not to weaponise the idea of “the people” against their elected representatives. It is to involve the electorate in a debate which influences and shapes a final parliamentary decision, without removing the decision from it.
It is not too late. The process could be completed in three months. There would need to be an extension of the Article 50 notice.
Lasting cynicism about national politics will be a likely outcome of 
how Brexit was done. It is in our 
hands to avoid that. Referring Brexit 
to a Citizens’ Assembly would reconnect with the public and revitalise the parliamentary process. We urge our political leaders to make this happen now.

Yes. We mentioned this sort of thing in our series of pieces on renewing democracy over Christmas:

Deliberative Democracy
This is the favourite of the Remain side, who think that voters in their natural state are not fit to make important decisions. The schemes on offer vary, but all involve some sort of 'sortition' - the use of a voters' panel, a bit like Blair's focus groups, to make decisions on behalf of the rest of us. But only of course after being lectured by experts on the right choice to make. The experts would be neutral in the same way that the BBC is neutral.

To me, this all sounds too much like the pointless design Charettes I have encountered. The architect generally conducts them to convince planners / clients that his or her ideas have community support. They involve the architect talking to a room of people for a very long time with tons of slides and display boards and then asking them at the end which shade of Farringdon Grey, of the three offered, they would like as a finish to the front door?

The fact that the signatories that one knows - Rowan Williams, Dan Snow, Matthew Taylor - are all prominent Remainers tells you all you need to know. The real purpose of their 'Citizens Assembly' is to reverse the most significant vote in British history - 17.4m citizens under universal suffrage voting to Leave the EU in a secret ballot. And with the usual unashamed mendacity of the Remain side they have the front to claim that a panel of 250 people selected by them to determine the nation's future (with suitable 'expert' advice, of course) will 'recreate trust in representative democracy'.

It's a bit like asking some street spiv doing the three cup trick 'Is it fair?' and believing the answer 'Course it's fair guv'.

They really are desperate if they're bringing forward their longer term plans to undermine the fundamental defences of our democracy - universal suffrage, the secret ballot, the right to associate - so rapidly, before the BBC and the MSM have laid a thick mat of propaganda.

The Elephant

It wasn't long after the wall came down in 1989 that I went exploring in eastern Europe. Trains for the most part - they allow you to see things up close, people, infrastructure, traffic, industry, residences. Hotels were still soviet-era, with scorching steam heating in uninsulated tired rooms decorated in politburo formica 1950s style. City centres that had been fought over still bore the scars of shell, shrapnel and small arms fire in the ashlar and brickwork, but around the back and above first floor level on the facades. The easily visible damage was patched.

It must have been twenty years on when I went back for the first time and the change was stupendous. The cars on the streets were new - or newish, mostly under ten years old. Bright shopfronts and consumer goods and services had swamped the historic city centres and everywhere, everywhere, were the same concrete, glass and steel shopping malls filled with exactly the same outlets. Prosperity, of a sort, had arrived. The youngsters wore a simulacrum of what they were wearing in Paris or Munich, at least in the individual parts. The ensemble effect was still a little experimental, not quite as finessed. Boots for the snow, not trainers, for example.

Some old traces remained. On the sidings outside Budapest station small mountains of coal and logs to feed the station's heating covered a two hectare plot. British stations heated, if you were lucky, a waiting room and the staff side of the ticket office. European stations heated everything - the whole station complex other than the platforms. Restaurant, barbers, newsagents, offices and counters. In Budapest the waiting room was large, with solid oak benches in rows like a church seating perhaps 200 - and it was full, in the harsh winter in which I returned, with the poor and elderly. As I watched, a railway official pointed to several persons, alone and in couples, and made the 'out' gesture. They picked up their bags and left, to be replaced by others who drifted in quietly. It reminded me of the children's boating pond in Colchester castle park and 'come in number 14!' Clearly there was a free warmth rationing system in place, understood by the rail officials and the elderly poor. Max parking 2 hours, no return within 1 hour or something.

These were the people who had not been lifted onto the elephant's back, at least not then. For the youngsters, their enthusiasm for the new Europe was understandable. It was an H&M, McDonalds, Starbucks, Costa Coffee, Svarovski, Adidas, Burger King, C&A, Converse, Hervis, KFC, Levis, Nike, Pizza Hut, Schwarzkopf, Sony, Superdry, Swatch, TGI Fridays, Body Shop, Tommy Hilfiger, Zara paradise of post-soviet consumer choice; the same lines, the same stores in the same chrome and glass malls in every city in Europe.

The success of the global corporates in creating new markets for their cars, white goods, phones and consumer goods not only in eastern Europe but throughout what we used to call the second world has been remarkable. They have created a new middle class, hungry for the manna of the factories and plants throughout the globe. Billions have been lifted out of absolute poverty and enough wealth created to allow them to buy 3g phones even in the meanest favelas and barrios.

This has come at a cost. It has been the older, less skilled, less 'agile' in the new terminology, who have paid. Non-metropolitan. C1,C2,D,E in the UK - rural drivers in France. Those who have never seen an upswing since the 2008 crisis, those who have little to lose. From the elephant's forehead to the valley floor of his trunk, these are the losers from globalisation. The corporates have moved their factories from Japan to Wales, then from Wales to Bulgaria, and will soon move again from Bulgaria to Ecuador or Kenya. At each move leaving in their wake broken communities, debt and worklessness, upheaval and disconnection. Coupled with 'State capture' - the takeover of democratic structures by a new privileged, patrician establishment - it is inevitable that social and economic stresses and tensions will roil.

We have a duty, all of us who can still think and write and hold dialogue between us, to resolve this. There MUST come a system of reform and renewal that re-balances power, a change that includes the currently excluded. Those that have captured the State must learn to share - to devolve, decentralise, empower. But above all to recognise that we are One Nation.