Plus ca change ...

Some things never change; from the Telegraph

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

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

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

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

Power of Recall - Grieve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIne. So be it.   

May betrays Britain for the global corporates

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

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

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

Allister Heath writes in the Telegraph

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

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

Bob in the Telegraph

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cameron and the Mandarins cannot escape blame for this mess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They're Frit!

In the words of the grocer's daughter from Grantham, they're Frit. Oh yes, MPs really want to cancel Brexit, are committed to cancel Brexit and now have the means to cancel Brexit, but just don't quite dare do the deed. Somewhere in their mendacious, fraudulent half-wit hearts is either a residual pang of conscience or a spark of rationality. They are aware at some level that to cancel Brexit will mean their own destruction, savaged at the polls, despised by those they ask to cast ballots for them. Most MPs put one duty before all others - way in front of country, constituency or party - and that is their duty of self-interest, their obligation to themselves and their own wealth and advancement. That's why they're Frit.

So on this day, when we should have been riotous with joy at being free from the malign clutches of the Federasts, these craven narcissists will choose the path of deferring their cancellation of Brexit. A path that keeps us in the clutches of Brussels in a half-way measure. And their pusillanimity will turn around and bite their arses; Farage will storm the EP elections, Cummings will lead us in a crushing second referendum victory and finally we will cull this foetid House of its betrayers, frauds and liars and fill the green benches with those who represent the interests of the people of Britain and not solely those of their own discredited patrician elite.

Bring it on!

Update 14.43
==========
May loses by 58 votes (286 Ayes to 344 Noes)
So get your walking shoes ready, all you knockers for the forthcoming EP elections!

Referendum II - We Will Win Again!

The more astute amongst you may notice an addition to the blogroll in the side column. Dominic Cummings writes today;

Dear Vote Leave activists…

Please get in touch with friends and family who you know are onside. Start rebuilding our network now. The crucial data to collect: name, email, postcode, mobile (full address if possible). If we need to set up a new entity — a campaign, a party — you will be able to plug this straight into new data infrastructure and we will try to grow super-fast. And it looks like we will need to…

Remember: we won last time even though the Establishment had every force with power and money on their side. They screwed it up because they do not have good models of effective action: they literally do not know what they are doing, as they have demonstrated to the world in the farcical negotiations. They are screwing up their attempt to cancel the referendum. Beating them again and by more will be easier than 2016.

Also, don’t worry about the so-called ‘permanent’ commitments this historically abysmal Cabinet are trying to make on our behalf. They are not ‘permanent’ and a serious government — one not cowed by officials and their bullshit ‘legal advice’ with which they have herded ministers like sheep — will dispense with these commitments and any domestic law enforcing them.

And next time we will not close down — we will try to ensure that votes are respected and the malign grip of the parties and civil service is broken, as Vote Leave said should happen in 2016.

Spread the word among those you know…

Now that's a mind I can happily work for!

In contrast I offer you the EU's angry midget, the Pole who can't keep his gob shut. The credulous little fool actually seems to believe that the signatures on the 'revoke' petition are genuine and that the verified 350,000 Waitrose shoppers who strolled about in central London carrying correctly spelt and pithily contrived bijoux placards in a range of Farrow and Ball colours were worth 1m of us normal people - they being so intellectually superior to we dumbass Leave fools, I suppose. In a comment aimed at Hof and his chums - who really don't want Farage littering up their ideologically pure chamber, Tusk said;

Let me make one personal remark to the members of this parliament. Before the European council, I said that we should be open to a long extension if the UK wishes to rethink its Brexit strategy, which would of course mean the UK’s participation in the European parliament elections. And then there were voices saying that this would be harmful or inconvenient to some of you.

Let me be clear: such thinking is unacceptable. You cannot betray the 6 million people who signed the petition to revoke article 50, the 1 million people who marched for a people’s vote, or the increasing majority of people who want to remain in the European Union

I have a feeling Tusk will eat those words.

For anyone in any doubt as to why those revoke clicks don't count, see Brendan O'Neill on Spiked. 

Parliament v. People - the Craven Rabble

The craven rabble of fraudulent representatives in the Commons are today engaged in an exercise of mutual self-preservation. Both main parties having lied outrageously in their 2017 manifestos, the 74% Remainer Commons are running scared of facing voters at the ballot box - what the Hell would they claim this time around about their commitment to deliver Brexit?

All morning a stream of self-interested fake-MPs have followed one another on R4's 'Today' in a united chorus of mutual preservation; the important thing is that the Commons, having decided to oppose the will of voters and to renege on their own manifestos, comes together to unite in the face of voter anger. Yes, today is all about these frauds, these fakes, this craven rabble of narcissists and half-wits, demonstrating that they have more in common with eachother than with the voters they tricked in 2017 into putting them there.

But they can't hide forever from the Hustings. At some stage they must face the voters they tricked and defrauded. And judging from the polls, they will face a voter anger many times greater than when caught with their half-wit snouts in the expenses trough. Parliamentary self-interest and the previous bent Speaker, Gorbals Mick, saved many from prison - and the contrast was not lost on the public of a 2011 rioter banged up for a year for stealing a pack of bottled water worth under a fiver and MPs who had stolen tens of thousands in upscale furnishings, household goods, fraudulent claims and swapping getting away Scot free.

Let them wriggle and squirm in mutual self-pleasure today, safe in their privileged isolation from the reality of their betrayal of Britain's voters. Their reckoning will come.

MPs must face electors over their Brexit Betrayal

Parliament vs. People - Betrayer MPs tighten the noose

The Brexit Betrayers in Parliament who seized control last night moved immediately to tighten the noose and to cancel Brexit. They may succeed in the Commons, where 74% of MPs personally voted Remain despite lying with false manifestos to cheat their way to seats in the 2017 elections. Yes, politicians are consummate liars - quelle surprise. What hope had we that they would act with honour and dignity, these swine whose snouts are still coated in the mire of the expenses troughs? Last night the Commons was not so much the Parliament of Britain as Dante's eighth malbolge  - pimps, seducers, flatterers dipped in human shit, liars, fornicators, barrators, perjurers, corrupt office-holders, half-wit frauds and peculators. They are the lowest scum in our land.

There will be a reckoning to come. 17.4 million votes will be heard - the clear majority of the nation gave their instruction to this noisome cabal of betrayers. It will prevail, either now through Parliament or later by other means with a new government prepared to use its prerogative powers.

If they imagine the People are blind to their perfidy they are mistaken - as this ComRes poll from the Telegraph shows. It also reinforces that which is the will of the people who decided to Leave the EU - that we now we want to go NOW, on WTO terms.

Pompey's patrician MPs, these bloated, privileged elitist fartbubbles, will have their beliefs prick'd.*

It's worth one again quoting constitutional expert Dr David Starkey -

The People voted 52 to 48 per cent to leave; an estimated 74 per cent of MPs voted to remain.

No representative assembly can sustain such a gulf. Either People or Parliament must give way.

And so it has proved as, in its profound lack of wisdom and in its disregard for the central thread of its own history, Parliament has decided it is the People who should change. Or, rather, be changed.

This is not the first time such a thing has happened. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Communist states were ruled by similarly pampered, out-of-touch and privileged elites who, against all the evidence, claimed to represent the People.

*"Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon" - Walter Lippmann

How can we replace May?

With another momentous week for Brexit and voices even louder for May to go, the immediate question is not so much who can replace her as how she can be replaced. To get a Brexiteer in Number Ten, the vote needs to come to us - party members. For that we need several weeks, and for the Parliamentary Party to offer us two candidates. They will not dare exclude a Brexiteer. It can't be done before 12th April, but could be done before 22nd May if Parliament agrees the Selmayr-Robbins Treaty. However, what Brexiteer wants to inherit a party that has betrayed Brexit?

The Remainers around Hammond and Lidington have botched their attempted coup over the weekend, their offer of Govey as Leader having been the equivalent of Hitler having offered to put the Duke of Windsor on the British throne after a successful invasion and having shot the real sovereign. Govey is unique in having even fewer interpersonal skills than May, and the inflamed little haemorrhoid, who would actually make a decent fist of No.11, a post that doesn't require popularity or clubbability, would do nothing but inflict a grievous pain in the arse on the British people.

Boris is on the campaign trail in the Telegraph, and offers a glimpse of the way through. Theresa May is a chicken who's bottled Brexit, screams the strapline. Boris goes on to say the betrayal of Brexit is not the fault of MPs at all, oh no. He knows it doesn't pay to blame the electorate. Nope. He puts the blame firmly with his boss;

We have blinked. We have baulked. We have bottled it completely. We have now undergone the humiliation of allowing the EU to decide the date on which we may make our own departure. It is the EU that is now insisting that parliament must vote – for a third time! –  on its Carthaginian terms, if we are to be permitted to leave on May 22. If we fail to vote the deal through, then the PM has until April 12 to present fresh plans.

His solution seems to be to vote down MV3 and go for a long extension to article 50. That leaves time for either the shoe-in of a Leaver Leader or his insistence that May remains as caretaker whilst the contest goes out to the Party for a full contest. The problem is the local government elections on 2nd May. Conservative councillors are facing slaughter. However, Boris is not explicit - his final paragraph is impossibly confusing, there being no 'implementation period' without an agreed WA but hints that if he were Leader during the extended period, he would bundle up a Trade Deal in an Article 50 extension.

Extend the implementation period to the end of 2021 if necessary; use it to negotiate a free trade deal; pay the fee; but come out of the EU now – without the backstop. It is time for the PM to channel the spirit of Moses in Exodus, and say to Pharaoh in Brussels – LET MY PEOPLE GO.

Boris, it appears, might be ready to see Farage's Brexit Party in the EP and the potential decimation of Conservatives in local government in order to preserve the present Parliament to the end of its life.

MPs are 'Enemies of the People' - Betrayal latest

Charles Moore in the Telegraph is a voice of wisdom and reason. For him to write, as he does today, in terms such as these means that Parliament has shattered the faith and trust we grant to our democratic representatives.

On Thursday, I was interviewed by a mainstream Swiss newspaper. Switzerland, of course, is not a member of the EU. The reporter’s first question went something like this: "My country is a democratic country. We always enact the result of our referendums. We greatly admire your country, especially your House of Commons. Please can you explain why it is refusing to enact what the people decided? Your MPs who do this seem to us to be enemies of the people."

I try to avoid that phrase "enemies of the people", because it has the ring of Communist denunciations of anyone who opposes them, but what other words fit?

We need to go back to fundamentals to understand the magnitude of the breach. Parliament, government, the Crown have no natural right to impose their will on individuals - the divine rights of the sovereign having been out of fashion since the Enlightenments. No, we have a Social Contract, under which we permanently suspend certain of our individual natural rights to collective authority. That deal works two ways - as individuals we accept the rights of those to whom we have granted our authority to govern, necessarily at times acting contrarily to our individual wishes. As a parliament and government, they are obliged to comply with our collective democratic will, be this in the form of an election that produces a government or a Referendum that mandates a clear solution.

If Parliament breach this Social Contract, if Parliament truly becomes the 'Enemy of the People' as that Swiss correspondent suggests, then how can they expect we individuals to continue to grant Westminster our authority? Their behaviour breaches principles of democratic accountability for which our forbears have shed blood. Jefferson captured exactly the mood;

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

I pray the ninnies, unicorn-chasers, naive credulous fools, babblers, mirror-gazers and assorted half-wits on the green benches recall their duties next week. 

People v. Parliament - the chasm widens

It seems Brussels voted yesterday to kick the can a little further down the road, with political stasis until 12th April likely to mandate a further long extension, and the Brexit Party storming the Euro elections on 23rd May, with the UK pissing away £1bn a month into the bribe fund of the crooked Federasts for the foreseeable future.

The petition figure of 2m is impressive but meaningless. Even if it reached 17.4m it would still be meaningless; it is open to fraud, abuse, hacking and manipulation. The map is instructive. The greatest proportion of clicks are from Oxford, Cambridge, Brighton and Edinburgh. In contrast, London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle, Belfast, Cardiff are hardly to be seen. And this is the important message, for should (God forbid) the nation descend into civil strife over Brexit, these are the battle lines.

Of greater interest is the latest poll from ComRes - worth quoting in full below

• Approaching half of British adults agree that if the UK left the EU without a deal on 29 March it would briefly cause some uncertainty but then ultimately work out ok (46%); four in five 2016 Leavers agree (78%), as do one quarter of Remainers (23%).
• Approaching nine in ten 2016 Leave voters agree that it has felt as if the EU has been trying to punish the UK over the Brexit negotiations (85%), as do nearly half of Remain voters (46%).
• British adults are split over whether Theresa May is right to try a third time to get the EU Withdrawal Agreement through Parliament (38% agree vs 39% disagree).
• Only one in ten British adults say they trust MPs to do the right thing by the country over Brexit (11%), while seven in ten disagree (68%).
• Overall, Theresa May is the most favourable politician with over one quarter of voters saying so (27%).
• Overall, Jeremy Corbyn is the most unfavourable politician with most adults saying so (56%).
• One in four 2016 Remain voters agree that it would have caused fewer problems had the UK left the EU without a deal as quickly as possible in 2016, rather than spending the past two and a half years trying to negotiate a deal (23%), compared to approaching four in five Leave voters (77%).

Although you wouldn't think so from reading this blog, or indeed any of the political press, May quite astonishingly retains the confidence of a significant part of the public. What she said about Parliament on Wednesday resonated widely - so widely that MPs are whining today that she 'endangered' them (as if many weren't due anyway to be pitched from their cozy sinecures at the next election). 68% of voters don't trust Parliament to carry out their democratic mandate. Brexit remains, as it has been, the people of Britain vs Parliament. The ComRes poll confirms it.

Even M.Macron recognises the chasm between People and Parliament; leaving the EU conference yesterday evening he said

The EU in a very clear manner has today responded to a British political crisis. The British politicians are incapable to put in place what their people have demanded. Their people voted for Brexit.

Will no one rid us of this bloody woman?

Can Crazy May not get it into her thick, stubborn head that the Commons WILL NOT agree the Selmayr-Robbins treaty, that the EU WILL NOT change the Selmayr-Robbins Treaty and that her options now are solely to leave without a deal or to revoke Article 50.

May has been an absolute disaster for this nation.

She's still idiotic enough to think she can play games with democracy - one delay to get us past the EP elections, then a plea for a further extension once the danger of Nigel swamping the EP with 73 Brexit MEPs is past. Does she imagine we're all stupid?

The bloody woman must go and go now. Every minute she remains in office takes us closer to an irreparable disaster. 

My own plea to the EU27 - which I shall make to Herr Tusk - is to reject May's request and allow 29th March to stand as our leaving date. Contact Form Here if you wish to do the same.

The Fourth Estate

The position of our national print and broadcast media on Brexit is telling. Here is my somewhat subjective snapshot

Telegraph - The only pro-Brexit broadsheet left, indeed the only pro-Brexit print national left. But gamely features columns by arch Remainiacs Blair, Hague et al from time to time just to draw a thousand angry negative comments for each

Daily Express - Was a staunch Leaver, but I suspect the advertisers have got to it. It can't afford to lose it's reader demographic so now punts for the Selmayr-Robbins Treaty

Sun - Likewise, a soft Leaver with a shouty voice

Daily Remain - Was a staunch Leaver until its owners changed editor from Dacre to Greggs. Remain Online maintains its success for an internet audience that will skip a Brexit story for a long page of photos of Megan. Actually a soft remainer that features just enough Leave columns to breathe - with comments filled with angry, betrayed Leavers

All the Rest - Remain and always have been. Mirror, Times, Guardian, FT, i online and of course the broadcast media BBC and Sky. And the free lifestyle adsheet in London the 'Evening Standard' which used to be a newspaper and whose lifestyle wallpaper and chic nik-naks columns are now managed by failed Remain Chancellor George Osborne (Osborne and Little Paints and Papers Ltd).

So. One paper and not a single national broadcaster. That's the power of the global corporates' stock market power and advertising budgets for you.

The Sanctimonious Dwarf

There's something about little men with little hands that makes them a pain in the arse. Bercow. That NZ mass murderer. Yaxley-Lemon. All little men with little hands. The rest of us just get on with life but these littluns can't leave it alone; unless they're poking, aggravating, baiting, trolling and seeking attention they can't stay still.

It doesn't actually matter that on this issue the sanctimonious little Bercow may have been right. It was the way the revolting little narcissist rolled in his moment of global notoriety like a pig in a pool of fresh shit. He's simply such an objectionable arse that nothing good can come out of the speaker's chair whilst his undersized buttock cheeks perch on the edge of it.

Like the bent Gorbals Mick he will live in infamy as one of the worst speakers in modern history.

I've been listening on the radio to Parliament for many years, since Margaret Thatcher flung that challenge to Callaghan "He's frit! He's frit!", at that time with George Thomas in the Chair, a voice of authenticity and passion. Then came Bernard Wetherhill, the exquisitely polite ex-tailor, and after him Betty Boothroyd, who brought a touch of gaiety to the Chair that never detracted from her authority. Then it went downhill. For the past eighteen years we've been served by a bent blunderer and a narcissistic destroyer. Please God the next Parliament will bring us a speaker worthy of the Chair.

(The title is not original; as the DT reports:- Bercow’s love affair with the use of his larynx has always been warmly received, of course. In 2010, one interruption provoked health minister Simon Burns to call the diminutive speaker a “stupid, sanctimonious dwarf”.)

It's official ... as long as the EU agree. Er, have agreed.

It seems Mrs May doesn't have a great deal of confidence that Parliament will go for MV3 this week after all - hardly surprising; knowing that not only MV4 but, erm, the decision of the EC27 on Britain's future is to come. But does May already know the answer? The Electoral Commission has just published on its website guidance for parties, candidates and non-party campaigners for the 2019 European Parliament elections. You might recall Parliament decided to ask for an extension to Article 50 on 14th March - but three days previous to this, a remarkably prescient official on behalf of the Electoral Commission, Steven Huntingdon, had already authored the election guidance;

 "On 23 May 2019 voters in the United Kingdom will cast their ballot to elect 73 members of the European Parliament". It really couldn't be clearer. And there was me thinking we were due to Leave on the 29th March.

Just two quotes to finish with - the first from Rod Liddle in the Times

So long, Brexit, you bright star. You did not stand a chance

Brexit is, if not actually dead, wired up to drips in a hospice, with its relatives dropping round, one by one, to say goodbye. Our MPs have dropped even the pretence that they have any intention of respecting the democratic mandate they were charged with implementing.

Bizarrely, some Brexiteers still think no deal is not merely possible, but probable. What drugs are they on: horse tranquillisers? It will not be allowed to happen. How can they not see this, after the past two years? The best possible option is the hapless Maybot’s travesty of a Brexit. It’s that or nothing.

Next, the EU will insist upon a second referendum and we will have one. But we will not have a third referendum unless the next one fails to go the way that the EU and our establishment want. My suspicion is that if a second referendum were a simple binary choice, like the first one, and fought from the Brexiteer side simply on the issue of the need to abide by the original vote, “leave” would win handsomely. This is hardly a scientific survey, but of my scores of remainer friends, the overwhelming majority nobly attest they would vote leave simply on democratic principle.

But we won’t have a binary choice. The second referendum will be gerrymandered, as the whole process has been gerrymandered by a government, House of Commons, House of Lords, broadcast media and big business, which never wanted it and thinks the rest of us are all uneducated and stupid. Pop into the hospice and say your goodbyes. Remind the patient of that glad bright morning in June 2016 — you might bring a wry smile to its face. They were never going to let it happen. 

The second from David Starkey

The People voted 52 to 48 per cent to leave; an estimated 74 per cent of MPs voted to remain.

No representative assembly can sustain such a gulf. Either People or Parliament must give way.

And so it has proved as, in its profound lack of wisdom and in its disregard for the central thread of its own history, Parliament has decided it is the People who should change. Or, rather, be changed.

This is not the first time such a thing has happened. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Communist states were ruled by similarly pampered, out-of-touch and privileged elites who, against all the evidence, claimed to represent the People.

Perfidious MPs will be running scared of the ballot box

Not all our MPs will betray the promises their parties made at the 2017 election, when their lies induced 86% of electors to vote for their solemn pledges to Leave. Not all MPs will betray their previous votes to trigger Article 50 and to Leave the EU. Not all MPs will betray their moral obligation to enact in Parliament the nation's democratic will. But most will.

For some, those who lied openly and brazenly, their hearts dark with duplicity and treachery, for whom the rewards of place or office were too greatly loved to be foregone, no words are foul enough to condemn their betrayal. For others, the ninnies, unicorn-chasers, naive credulous fools, babblers, mirror-gazers and assorted half-wits, carried up in the vain delusion that their own opinions counted for more than the Referendum, their fate may shock and surprise them.

MPs may not be clever, but most of them are cunning. And many know what the ballot box is likely to bring. Away from the fairyland of Westminster even the deepest self-deceptions and delusions fall away, and their abject failure to enact Brexit will stand them stark bollock naked before the scrutiny of their electors. Even now they feel the fear.

So don't expect an election any time soon. They will delay it - all of them, each and every perfidious arse on those green benches - for as long as possible. In the hope that the anger of electors at their failure will fade. In the hope that something will turn up. In the hope that another three years sitting as frauds and liars, their public regard prone in the gutter and feculent with filth, will lessen the reckoning they will face.

It will not. 

I despair of our dullard Parliament

The 2010 and 2015 intakes of MPs are possibly the most pathetic collection of witless dullards in the history of the House. I suspect that following the exposure of Parliamentary thievery, venality, fraud and crookedness with the Expenses Scandal under the second most corrupt Speaker this century, party managers paid more than cursory attention to the criminal inclinations of PPCs - and as a result we have benches of dreary mediocre imbeciles hardly capable of tying their own shoes but at least also lacking the nous to charge the cost of their crystal grapefruit bowls to the taxpayer. Perhaps if the parties allowed Constituency Associations to select their representatives ... but no, we're governed by a wunch of guileless morons.

Yesterday they gave up taxing their limited collective intelligences and handed Brexit over to the governments of the remaining 27 Federast members. Now these guys know the reality of the EU - that it's run by the unelected officials of the Commission, and as a consequence only two of its five unelected Presidents are worth a spit. They know the European Parliament is just for show, a fake democratic forum in which everything is decided before it hits the chamber and most MEPs are concerned more with maxing the capacity of their personal troughs than with democracy, so the Council don't care whether Nigel pitches up with 73 Brexit Party MEPs in July to create havoc - to them it's utterly irrelevant. Hof, of course, is incandescent with rage at the prospect that his personal theatrical stage set (his party has all of two MEPs but he heads the ALDE grouping of nonentities from elsewhere) may continue to be polluted by those with less than anilingual reverence for his camp caparisons.

May, beyond all reason, is going for MV3 prior to the meeting of the EC on the 21st, and MV4 after it. On the basis that the majority rejecting the Selmayr-Robbins Treaty is shrinking. It may be down to double figures for MV3 - what larks!

I just want a chance now to show my displeasure at the ballot box. I suspect tens of millions of fellow electors of whatever stripe do also. So a long Article 50 extension would be slightly cathartic at least - allowing us to vote in May, and give the tedious dolts in Parliament a taste of what's to come.

The Day the Political Class declared war on democracy

I really can't improve on Allister Heath in the Telegraph this morning.

He believes, as I do, that the Remainer political and patrician elites are ready to overturn democracy itself to get their own way. His opening and final paragraphs -

At moments like this, when democracy is being traduced, it is easy to be angry, to rage or to fulminate. I’ve been prone to such emotions myself over the past few years. Today, I’m merely grief-stricken: sad, but no longer furious....

Yet today, this wonderful political tradition is in jeopardy. Thanks to the sabotage of Brexit by the Remainers entrusted to deliver it, the majority of the political class is declaring war on all Brexiteers and all democrats. I can think of no greater tragedy.

It's all falling apart quite quickly now. May doesn't even enjoy control of her own cabinet any more - ministers, and Hammond, can simply defy her as they wish. I doubt the EU Council on the 21st will grant or require a long extension - they want to isolate the infection, not encourage an epidemic of democracy. Nor I think will they now grant even a short extension - 29th March will be the day.

So my view remains as yesterday's post - the anti-democrats can now only either revoke Article 50 altogether, which I give a 50/50 chance, or between the 22nd and 28th they swallow the Selmayr-Robbins treaty. 

Brexit - the road narrows

At each stage of this protracted Brexit process, the closer we get to the end of the month, the number of remaining options decreases and the choices available to those holding power become more stark. Parliament may today vote against no deal, and may tomorrow vote to ask for an extension of Article 50, but as far as I can see neither vote matters very much. The only meaningful vote that Parliament could now take would be to withdraw Article 50 completely - and this would almost certainly mean a General Election to follow which few now in the House would welcome; voters in most constituencies would slaughter them.

It's now all in the hands of the EU - and this time, not just the unelected officials. If Parliament asks for an extension, it will be up to the individual EU governments whether to agree. There is talk of a year's extension but I don't give this much credence. They've already redistributed the UK seats, will be voting from May and won't want Farage's Brexit Party back in July, crowding the UK seats as they will have annihilated Conservative and Labour MEPs. As far as they're concerned, we've left. So they may agree a few weeks delay - perhaps until the end of April.

So MPs, it appears, can only choose either to cancel the Referendum, or choose to swallow the Selmayr-Robbins Treaty, or choose neither which allows us to Leave by default in either two or six weeks. What other options are there? 

And now for something completely different ...
==================================
It was 25 years ago that I first downloaded Netscape Navigator via a noisy and slow modem. It took more than half an hour to download, and transformed my life. The 'Edit' button I think allowed one to compose and save HTML pages, which could be uploaded by FTP. I once spent an entire day hand-coding nested tables, with reams of 'cellpadding' and 'cellspacing' commands. Now one can do the same in about 20 seconds.

 

This straw may not be worth grasping

How quickly things move. Back in January, in the cold and dark with the fire leaping in the stove, I was inclined, even knowing the manifest traps and pitfalls of the Selmayr-Robbins Treaty apart from the backstop, to accept in my mind Parliament agreeing the document if a binding solution to the most egregious effects of the backstop was found.

We await today two opinions. One is that of the Attorney-General, the second the group of eight lawyers in the House, both of whom will scrutinise the scrap of paper that Mrs May clutched in her hand as she descended from her aircraft.

But quite apart from these assurances, things have changed since January. The EU's malign intentions, and the effects of their scabrous Treaty, have become better understood. Even if May's changes are green-lighted by the legal experts, we have somehow become used to the idea of a Clean Break with no WA at all, keeping most of our £39bn; business has geared for such an outcome, the people have prepared themselves, we were bracing for the end of the month. What seemed acceptable in January is now less so. This straw may not be worth grasping.

The stumbling comical drunk, one of the EU's five unelected presidents, could not resist a few last unstatesmanlike words, to underline the pitiably amateur lack of Statecraft and diplomacy that the cabal of crooked thugs in Brussels has displayed throughout Brexit. Vulgar old shit.

Well, we must wait and see how things play out today, but as I write I anticipate that I will be greatly disappointed should MPs accept the Selmayr-Robbins Treaty today.

For the EU, law is a weapon

Wittgenstein was onto something about language. You can tell an awful lot about a society and culture by the vocabulary it has. These thoughts came to me last year as I and one of the Munich lads struggled with an obsolete solid fuel central heating stove; 300kg of quite unnecessary 3mm and 4mm steel and the size of a washing machine. "Bloody German over-engineering!" I cursed as we struggled to launch the thing over the lip of a skip. And as we rested, for these are also times in which I improve my German, I asked "What's the German for over-engineering?". He thought. He consulted his device for several minutes, then announced gravely "There is no term in the German language for over-engineering".

Wednesbury (1948) will be as much in the mind of every Englishman who has ever studied law as Carlill and the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company. The concept of 'Wednesbury unreasonableness' was the start of a chain of precedents in Common Law that exactly defined whether the behaviour of a public body was excessively bumptious. Whilst Federasts in France and Germany came out of hiding, crawled from their cellars and bunkers and started planning a new Federast Empire amidst the rubble of the last one, the folie de grandeur rising in their breasts, Jurists in England were refining the definition of reasonable behaviour first enshrined in 1903 in the person of the man on the Clapham omnibus. Being reasonable is very important if you're English. Less so if you're a Federast; as Boris writes in the Telegraph

Last week the Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, valiantly tried to take things forward. He proposed that the test of “reasonableness” – well known to English common law – could be legally applied to any EU attempt to keep us locked in the backstop. It wasn’t much to ask. Merely asking the other side to be reasonable – it seems a very frail protection by comparison with a proper time limit.

Brussels was having none of it. The EU’s formidable negotiator, Sabine Weyand, observed, with perhaps unconscious irony, that the concept of “reasonableness” was unknown to EU law. The talks collapsed. Michel Barnier then tweeted his supercilious and repetitive offer. Great Britain could, of course, leave the backstop, but Northern Ireland would have to remain behind. He thereby summed up, again, the constitutional humiliation that Brussels wishes to impose.

For Brussels the law and their corrupt political court the ECJ are not there to dispense justice, nor to defend and protect, but as Panzer divisions, to thrust away and crush all opposition in the path of the Federasts. For the EU, law is a weapon, one even more effective in subjugating the peoples and nations of Europe than the steel and cordite of military power. Equity and reasonableness, those essentially British concepts, are shredded under the churning tracks of the EU's King Panzers.

Law, as Boris writes, is just the means by which they wish to impose upon us a humiliation as deep as the Treaty of Versailles - but they can only succeed if Parliament assists them. If we reject and repudiate their poison treaty in its entirety, if we spring free at the end of this month, all their spite and all their malice, all their vindictive hate, cannot reach us.

If Parliament destroys Brexit, I fear for Britain

If Parliament destroys Brexit, I fear for Britain. 

As the Telegraph reports today

The explosive memo advising the cabinet as Theresa May battles to win Tuesday’s second meaningful vote - warns that supporting any amendment re-tabled by Labour’s Yvette Cooper and Tories Oliver Letwin and Nick Boles could pave the way for a bill to change the day of our EU exit and bind the Government into a permanent customs union.

May's moronic 2017 election left her too weak to sack the saboteurs within her government who now seek, with a cross-party cabal of anti-democrats led by Yvette Cooper and Nick Boles, to destroy what vestige of control May has left of the Brexit process.

It is little consolation now that Boles, Letwin, Hammond, Rudd, Gauke, Clarke and Hancock will have no future in the Conservative party - over 70% of whose members are committed to Brexit.

If a Remainer Parliament robs government of the ability to govern, with the complicity of the poisonous narcissist in the Speaker's Chair, I fear a rapid spiral into the situation described by the academics Betz and Smith

The system works because everyone behaves by the rules. On either side of the bargain—the governed and the government—mutual obligations are observed in service of the common interest, which is the stable continuance of a non-tyrannical political order. Here we come to the disquieting part of the continuing Remain campaign, a campaign that seemingly supersedes party loyalty, not to mention national loyalty, which is its willingness to throw away the rulebook. Only a brazenly confidant, or foolishly out-of-touch, political class would chance this. The bet on the future is doubled.

The object of all these machinations has been to corral the British population into a Hobson's choice between Brexit-In-Name-Only and no-Brexit. It is no secret now. The plotters, finally, so close to the bell calling time on Britain's membership of the EU with a deal or without one, have declared it openly that they will not permit to occur what is the current legally mandated outcome of events. They will instead tie the government in knots, prevent its preparations for No Deal Brexit, and if necessary, crash it.

The consequences of this sabotage of the most significant vote in British history by 17.4m electors is likely to be dire

Historical parallels are inexact at the best to times but one doesn't have to look too far back to see where the corrosion of democratic legitimacy can and probably will lead. It leads to extreme societal polarisation, and a miasmic concoction of fear, radicalisation and violence. We can see this in the condition that is currently afflicting France and its yellow jacket uprisings. We saw it in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s when the country slid into the anni di piombo – the years of the bullet. And, most insidiously, we saw it in the actions of the Latin American governments and their so-called dirty wars, in which sections of the population fought each other openly and covertly.

We have for decades studied why things fall apart, how a stable, essentially self-policing, productive society can turn into an ungovernable tumult roiling with rage. We know that this happens at first very slowly, a creep-creep-creeping to the limit; and then very fast indeed after the limit has been passed. We also know that no amount of free beer and pizza parties will swiftly return a society deranged by the shattering of the social contract by its own elite back to normality.

One can imagine how the nightmare could unfold. It could possibly start slowly enough; bricks through the windows of government offices around the country, through the windows of MPs offices, then Molotov cocktails. Remain MPs from Leave constituencies who have been complicit in this undermining of the democratic process may need police or army protection to visit their own constituencies, and then, as the powers over-react in a crackdown, as always seems to happen, a cathartic explosion of anger and violence that will roil and sweep across many parts of Britain.

Sir Bernard Jenkin also warns from whence a breakdown of order will come

The Government is expected to speak with one voice. Parliament’s role is to scrutinise the work of Government, pass laws and control money. These democratic principles have retained the confidence of voters through two world wars, the general strike, hyperinflation, Mrs Thatcher and Mr Blair. They are being carelessly trashed by a weak government, which is willingly being held to ransom by those determined to stop Brexit. The final step will be this government choosing to allow MPs to undo the vote of June 2016 altogether.

And when that moment comes, we mustn’t forget that it wasn’t Leavers, Remainers or even a divisive referendum that brought us there: it was our elected representatives thwarting democracy.

I loathe and hate rioting and disorder, and I deprecate more deeply than I can describe the deep and painful divisions in our land that Brexit has caused. But a betrayal of democracy by a British Parliament next week in the manner feared will be the grossest insult to the people, and one I fear, if Betz and Smith are right in their analysis, that won't be borne. 

London - more children slaughtered

Bridget Prentice, who used to be my MP, left the Commons when scandals about her expenses mis-spending began to emerge. I was about to present evidence of her using Parliamentary expenses to subsidise the running of a constituency Labour Party office when she threw in the towel. She ligged a job as an electoral commissioner which came to an end in September 2018 - putting her well within the frame of the 'Corrupt Commission' that acted so partially against Brexit bodies that it was condemned as 'not fit for purpose' by leading politicians. Anyway, back in 2008 I wrote to her over the mismanagement of the Met Police - a mismanagement that has got far worse since.

Here in the borough of Lewisham we pay the salaries of around a thousand Metropolitan police officers - our share of the 32,000 strong force. Yet where are they? Our homes can be burgled, fouled and violated, the possessions of a lifetime stolen and trashed, and we are told it's no longer a concern of the police - we're invited to leave our details on an answerphone. This year nearly thirty teenage boys have been knifed to death in London, yet on the buses and in Lewisham market at the end of the school day are scores of knife-carrying teens terrifying each other and causing public fear.

She replied

I do not believe that life in Lewisham is as grim, unappealing and crime ridden as you portray in your letter. If you feel that 'knife-carrying teens' are terrorising 'the buses' and 'Lewisham market' I suggest then that you raise the matter with the police.

The arrogance and contempt of her response was quite typical - Bridget was never a clever woman, and I doubt she had ridden on a bus or visited Lewisham Market since being elected. It is exactly her brand of purblind ignorance that has seen the numbers of dead children in London multiply in just ten years - the young corpses no longer confined to black-on-black violence but claiming victims who really did stand chances of becoming architects or doctors. Yet there is something surprising about this - take a look at the Met's stats

Boris served as Mayor from 2008 to 2016. His first term was dominated by the Olympics - but in his second term, he concentrated his efforts on knife crime, with some success. Then two things happened. From 2015, Theresa May, as Home Secretary, prevented police from carrying out stop and search - and in 2016 Sadiq Khan took post as Mayor of London.

London is now stuck with exactly the same brand of asinine, purblind social democrat stupidity that we had before 2008; there is little to choose between Bridget Prentice and Theresa May in terms of (in)ability, and Khan is as robust and effective as a feather in the wind. May is even now defending her appalling tenure as Home Secretary, and the vain, preening little Khan has only an eye for photo opportunities rather than dead teens.

For whatever reason, the number of fatal stabbings is increasing - counter intuitively, for if the volume of knife crime is what it was in 2008 with thirty dead, one would expect a learning curve in trauma medicine and response to have lowered lethality.

Perhaps now that normal middle-class grammar school kids are bleeding to death in the gutter, London's Labour mafia and their tame Prime Minister might take notice.

The greatest failure of Statecraft since Suez

If was some forty years before Suez, and not in the heat of the Egyptian desert but in the cold dark of the North Sea that Admiral Beatty commented, as two of his prized battlecruisers blew up at Jutland, "There's something wrong with our bloody ships today". The nation, schooled in an invincible navy, in a formidable fleet, found the losses hard to swallow. Likewise, in a Britain schooled in the notion of a Rolls-Royce civil service, in which the best and brightest in the land devote lives to the nation, and  as highly competent mandarins steer the great ship of state with skill and dedication, we are faced with the abject failure of Whitehall.

There's something wrong with the bastards today. Despite May's manifest stubborn stupidity, despite her lunacy in treating Brexit, as Nick Timothy described, as a damage limitation exercise, they should never have permitted her ignorance and idiocy to plunge the United Kingdom into the greatest failure of Statecraft since Suez, as Allister Heath phrases it.

'Boomer' Cox is a caricature, a character from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera or one of the supporting cast of Mortimer's Rumpole. Skilled neither in this specialist area of the law or in statesmanship, his mission has quite predictably failed. The Commons team of eight legal experts have nothing to scrutinise.

The EU will not move a millimetre because it is their sole aim to damage, hurt and humiliate Britain, a repeat Versailles. In this they are assisted by May's scabrous government and a Parliament that still refuses to accept that a majority of voters, 17.4m electors, sealed a mandate to Leave.

Well, sooner or later they must face the ballot box. Any notion they may have that the public anger at her capitulation, at the failure of my party to prevent it, will be forgotten is naive. We have not forgiven Blair for 2003, nor will we. Our memories are long and we carry a grudge deeply. They will not, they cannot succeed in preventing our exit from a failed EU - we only question how much suffering and humiliation will they inflict on Britain before they realise this. The more they prolong it, the greater the force with which they will be thrown from office.

Macron's puerile SimEU

The extraordinary document that emerged from the Élysée on Monday night was at first glance in-credible. I thought it was a clever spoof. But no. It seems that M.Macron had kissed his grannie good morning, scoffed his croissant and sat himself down at the big gold desk in his Palace and built his own fantasy SimEU.

Here is the barracks with the SimEU army, here the detention prison of the SimEU Office of Internal Security; here is the SimEU Central Bank and the SimEU Ministry of Finance. And the whole thing populated by busy and happy little SimEU citizens on SimEU minimum wage playing safely on social media regulated by the SimEU Prefecture for Internet Safety, after a hard day's work inventing innovative new Euro things at the SimEU Creative Foundation.

Really, I'm hardly joking. The whole document, of which he is inordinately proud, reads just like a teenage boy's fantasy world. The document even has the Heroes of SimEU, the French and German Leaders, waving graciously from the balconies of their SimEU palaces at crowds of adoring SimEU citizens.

He even addressed it to the "Citoyens d’Europe" despite the Federacy having only 61% of the continent's population under its flag. This degree of self-delusion was not lost on Henry Newman, who replied to Macron via his Telegraph column

I was struck that your letter largely conflates Europe with the EU, eliding the distinction between a political union of 27 members and the broader concerns of our continent which includes proud nations such as Switzerland, Norway and - soon - the UK, which are friends and allies of the EU but outside of that political bloc. Your letter has various suggestions for improving the EU. Some may be welcome, others less so. But each proposal involves the EU gaining further powers and greater influence over people’s lives, at the expense of sovereign states, when we both know that right across the bloc a strong majority want the EU to do the precise opposite. For you, it seems the answer to every question is always more Brussels.

Had this letter been written and published in the late 1990s, at the heights of EU hubris, before the foundations of the Federacy started to show cracks, it might, just might, have been hailed as a visionary manifesto for an ideal EU Central State, authoritarian but benign. But we're now in the second decade of the following century, the UK has left and the remaining 27 are split on everything from migration to finance, the currency is tanking, the economy is sclerotic and the streets are filled with tear gas and blinded Gilets jaunes.

That the President of France is so deluded, so out of touch with the reality of political possibility, so unrealistic about his expectations is of deep concern. Our teenage fantasist really believes he can secure a date with Jennifer Aniston.

Maths 101 for EU zealots

As annoying as greengrocers' apostrophes (though I doubt anyone much under 50 who doesn't live in Chelsea or some equally expensive Chiltern market town will ever have seen one) is the habit of EU zealots in referring to the EU as 'Europe'. It isn't.

Manfred Weber, one of the EU's rising bureaucrats, with reference to EP elections in the UK if Brexit is delayed beyond June, is quoted as saying "That means for me for the future of the continent, for the future of the European Union, Great Britain cannot have any more say. That means for me, in the next European elections, Great Britain cannot participate."

His English puts my German to shame, and is marked as authentic German English by his use of 'that' when he means 'this'. All good German English speakers make the same mistake. But that's not the point. This is;

Population of Europe ... 726m
Population of EU27 ......446m (61%)
Population of UK ......66m (9%)

Manfred might like to put his English textbooks away and brush the dust off his maths primer. The EU only has 61% of the people of the continent of Europe, of which the UK is a populous part with 9% of its inhabitants. We therefore very much have a say in the future of the continent. Just not in the play elections for a play 'Parliament' in which all is decided in advance and MEPs mired in greed care more about signing in for ten minutes for their per diem than in democracy.

Update
=====
This is the same Manfred Weber who was found in 2017 to be claiming €4,342 a month (tax free) for an office in his home country (Bavaria) to allow citizens to easily access they MEP. Only Manfred is paying the money to himself - and his ghost 'office' sits in an annex to Manfred's luxury house, far away from population and transport hubs in an exclusive and wealthy neighbourhood. 

Treaty of Versailles 2019

One hundred years ago Germany was humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles.

The German delegation was summoned to Versailles and presented with the terms of the Treaty - massive reparations to be paid, a land-grab, onerous restrictions on Germany's future freedoms, continuing interference by the allies in Germany's affairs. The German delegation was told negotiation of the terms was not possible - it was take it or leave it.

Germany's first democratically elected PM, Philipp Scheidemann, resigned rather than sign such a treaty. In an impassioned speech he said

Which hand, trying to put us in chains like these, would not wither? The treaty is unacceptable.

But after Scheidemann, Ebert, as we know, did sign. It later cost him his life. The humiliation of the treaty was so unbearable for Germany it barely lasted fourteen years before conditions allowed Hitler to take power.

It is said that if we fail to learn from the errors of history we are forced to repeat them. As I see Selmayr's smug Moonface smiling superciliously as Britain is forced to accept the Robbins-Selmayr Treaty, a cursed document every bit as humiliating for Britain as Versailles was for Germany, my only surprise is that he is not forcing May to sign it in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiegne.

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.

Chlorine chicken

The UK has some of the highest food and farming standards in Europe. The US is committed to scientific, high-intensity farming using growth hormones for beef cattle and novel GM food ingredients. They wash their chickens in Chlorine, we wash our ready-to-eat salads in the same Chlorine. These differences, we are told, make a trade deal between us that includes food impossible.

Forgive me, but I simply don't see this. If we Brexit (which is in doubt) we will be in charge of our own food labelling regulations. Why should we not simply require beef from hormone cattle, GM foods and Chlorine washed products to be clearly labelled as such and allow consumers to make the choice?

No-one has produced any evidence that these American foodstuffs are dangerous - and as the US is one of the most litigious nations on Earth, one would have expected any actionable dangers to have been exposed long ago. Surely in an age of food banks we cannot quibble at allowing British citizens ($40k per capita GDP at PPP) to buy the same food as American citizens ($60k per capita GDP at PPP)?

I wouldn't choose to buy hormone beef or GM soya for myself. But then again I'm a food quality snob who wouldn't drink the flouridated ex human urine that Londoners call tap water ("It's very pure - it's been filtered through seven pairs of kidneys by the time it gets here") for twenty years. It's a matter of personal preference, surely?

Chlorine washed lettuce

Theresa May's legacy will be the destruction of the Conservative Party

Prime Ministers are famously focused on their legacy. The illusions of control they enjoy in office inevitably blind them to the reality that all political careers end in failure, and that their legacy is one factor not under their command. Bloody Blair is remembered now only for duping the nation into his dodgy war in Iraq, the dilettante Cameron for losing the referendum, clumsy Gordon for his fiscal incompetence, the sordid Major (and Slugger Prescott both) for improper coitus. Though Prescott has a punch to offset his lustful coupling and Major the Cones Hotline.

I've no idea what Theresa May imagined her political legacy would be, but it's now looking almost certain that she'll be remembered as the PM that destroyed the Conservative Party.

More than 70% of ordinary party members such as myself are Leave supporters. And actually much more than supporters - most of us are Leave activists. If May, as now looks increasingly likely, fails to deliver a Real Brexit, too many of us will be unable to support the party at the next election. There is no other party for us; Batten's Muslim-baiters are unconscionable and Farage, though a sterling chap, values Brexit above Democracy - and I can't help. 

The next General Election after May's Brexit failure will finish the Conservative Party. She will have gone, clutching at the flotsam of an undistinguished career, and remembered only for her betrayal of her nation's democratic traditions and of her party. 

With that failure will come Corby's Marxists. Trident will be decommissioned, our UN seat surrendered to the EU and England's hills covered in windmills. Defence spending will he halved and what remains of the economy devastated. It's about time the youngsters had a taste of what we've fought to hold at bay - perhaps each generation needs to see Socialism in action to believe its malignity.

Edit - Update
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At last - something about which almost everyone can agree. Those who think the government are crap over Brexit is up about 80%, whilst those who think the government aren't crap are down to about 15%, with about 5% 'don't knows'.  

Karfreitag

A cautionary tale.

For as long as anyone can remember, Good Friday or Karfreitag has always been the same. Easter is a big deal here - after the chill snows and dark valleys of Winter, Spring bursts out with a fecundity unknown in Britain; nature is like a teenager pumped with hormones and just explodes into life. Spring flowers push through the last of the snow, and the first of the year's butterflies spread jewelled wings over still-brown herbage.

For Catholics here in the alpine Land, the deal is work until late lunchtime and then home early for the weekend. Protestants, for reasons I can't quite fathom, have always had the whole of Good Friday as a holiday, by custom going back to the 17th century. Paid. Like a Feiertag. Not taken from their annual leave.

Until of course some idiot claimed the arrangement was unlawful and discriminatory and started a legal action. Now the state government has introduced a new law - everyone gets a half-day on Good Friday. Work ends at 14.00.

Of course, both Catholics and Protestants are up in arms. Protestants have lost half a day's holiday, and Catholics used to slink-off home at 2pm anyway so have gained nothing.

The politicians responsible have called it "einen guten, tragfähigen Kompromiss" - a good, sustainable compromise. Everyone else has predicted it won't last the week.

Fury Unbound

The airwaves are filled with Remainer ploys, asinine suggestions, has-been political relics such as Bloody Blair and the deeply sordid John Major all engaged in a final all-out assault against Brexit. Heseltine, dusty and dried as a mummy is wheeled into the studio to wheeze, croak and crumble. Corbyn desperately clutches at a potential referendum to stop the tearing of his party asunder, to the rage of vast numbers of Labour voters who only voted Labour in 2017 because of the Party's manifesto promises. Fifth-column cabinet ministers who lied to voters and to their colleagues and cast false votes in our Parliament now reveal themselves as saboteurs and turncoats, too greedy to forego the privileges of office but too desperate to disguise their base treachery any longer.

But whilst Remainers have the State media and all but three of our national papers (the Daily Remain having already deserted) and any number of tricksy, crooked, dishonest and contrived ploys, those who support Brexit have righteous passion and the furious indignation of 17.4m voters watching British democracy being destroyed.

That anger is palpable. The intensity of that indignation if Brexit is frustrated will raise a storm of fury never before seen in Britain, an anger unbound by restraint at our democracy trampled. The mood I detect is implacable, and is as willing to see Britain destroyed from within by bitterness and violent schism as it is to face the hardships from a Clean Brexit.

Unless Remain withdraws from the brink, concedes that they lost, and abandons these plots to frustrate Brexit, I fear most deeply for our future. 

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.