'No Brexit' becomes a choice

At the G20 Mrs May lined up with the various unelected Presidents of the EU behind their comfortable agreement, no doubt much to the satisfaction of the globalist establishment, as they continued their offensive against the People and Parliament of Britain. Yesterday was supposed to have been about international trade, and I was looking forward to someone explaining why remaining chained to the world's most protectionist trade block, which has sclerotic growth, a doomed currency union, and is being outperformed by thrusting, vibrant and free economies across the oceans, would be a good thing for the United Kingdom. It didn't happen, of course.

What did happen was a co-ordinated response between May's team and her EU allies.

First came Liam Fox on Sky, who urged voters to write to ther MPs saying they did not want to see either 'no deal' or 'no Brexit'. Whoaaa there! Where did that come from? Clearly it was not a mistake, for a little later Donald Tusk, an unelected official serving as one of the EU's several Presidents, said MPs will be faced with leaving the European Union without a deal or cancelling Brexit altogether if they reject Theresa May's deal. There it is again. Brexit will be cancelled unless we do as we're told.

So in the past week the Axis forces of May's government and her EU allies have agreed a new attack option. If they don't get their way, they'll cancel the largest and most significant vote ever held in the United Kingdom. 

Breaking
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I've just caught the tail of a news report that Gove has today echoed (in a column in the Remainer rag the Mail) the above - saying if MPs don't accept May's deal, Brexit could be 'called off'. Clearly this now has legs.

The implication is that May is threatening that if she and the EU lose their Commons vote on the 11th, they'll impose another referendum on the UK - and one with 3 options, that splits the Leave vote and is designed to reverse Brexit.

Operation Hysteria - Day 2

Operation Hysteria continued yesterday with a pathetically weak and dithery interview on 'Today' by Ben Wallace, before he left to open the International Handcuff Exhibition. Wallace is a minister who struggles to make his presence felt; he must have endured a multitude of social events with his interlocutor's gaze fixed over his shoulder seeking someone more interesting with whom to talk. 

'Today' managed to tease from him that Brexit would end the EU wide security agreement under which we exchanged information. But surely we do this already under a number of bi-lateral agreements that would continue? Well, yes. And there will be nothing stopping a security official from the UK picking up the phone to his opposite number to warn of a threat? Well, No. And neither we or our security counterparts in Europe will stand idle and keep silent about a terrorist or security situation? Well, No. So there will be little difference? 

It is simply not credible that the UK will leave either itself or other European nations more vulnerable to terrorism by cutting links and co-operation. Brexit or no Brexit, we will share and security and law enforcement professionals in Europe will share with us (except perhaps Germany, which protects herself against the EU by not only having a law that prohibits the export of wealth but also the export of intelligence). What we will escape is the EU laying claim to our formidable strengths in SIS, MI5 and GCHQ, and with a satellite network of our own (the cost of a single year's EU membership) we will stand as a bridge between the US and Five Eyes and the EU. Let us not forget that since the US was enumerated amongst the EU's potential future enemies, we need a fusible link, a filter, that can start to restrict the flow of sensitive defence intel to the EU. 

Meanwhile, the markets have shrugged-off the economic hysteria just as our C@W friends said that they would. It also emerged that Carney's Halloween figures were 'scenarios' rather than 'projections'. The difference is as follows. Projections are an honest assessment of the economic effects of various Brexit options, given the likely behaviours of the parties and alternatives available. The Bank's scenarios are based upon there being no alternative goods, services, trade routes, sources, contracts, deals and markets other than those lost through no longer being part of the single market, upon the UK not having one single entrepreneur who will be flexible enough to react, nor a single business that innovates, invents or substitutes and nary a government but one that continues to be hidebound with pettifogging EU rules. In other words it's not worth the paper it was printed on.    

May & Others - vs - British People & British Parliament

We have moved into an extraordinary position. Mrs May and her cabinet, with the CBI, the FTSE100 and the industrialists of the European Round Table, the EU Commission and all of the UK and Europe's career officials, bureaucrats and unelected functionaries on one side, and facing them in battle the people and Parliament of Britain. We are resisting the most enormous forces pitched into an offensive against us - they have power, wealth, resources and a tame media. What they don't have is democracy, and a Parliament currently showing a bit of spirit. Now she is throwing absolutely everything she's got into a final Blitzkrieg, one last gamble launched in the depths of winter, driving her forces toward Brussels. 

And despite the distortions and falsifications by that grubby little rag the Daily Mail of Survation polling, a Clean Brexit on WTO terms is more popular with the public than the Robbins Treaty by 41% to 35%. Lord Ashcroft will also be carrying out his own polling nearer to the 11th. 

Thanks to a leak, Guido has May's order of battle, and we will be posting rebuttals here of each attack on the truth by Operation Hysteria on the day following - thus today for Economic Hysteria, tomorrow for Security Hysteria and so on ....

November 28: Economy
November 29: Security
November 30: International trade
December 1: Digital
December 2: The Brexit deal
December 3: Money
December 4: Immigration
December 5: Transport
December 6: Industrial strategy
December 7: Brexit for the whole U.K.
December 8: Consumers
December 9: May vs Corbyn Debate
December 10: Agriculture and fish

ECONOMIC HYSTERIA

Phil Hammond was the first of May's dags off the block yesterday - together with a quivering whine in support from the Bank. However, they shot their bolt with the lies and distortions of Project Fear at the time of the Referendum and now there are few credulous enough to give their silly projections much credence. One hint at the wider co-operation within May's forces came with the Bank's use of the term 'disorderly exit'. It is a phrase not commonly used in English about Brexit, you may think. And you would be right. It is the direct English translation from the German term* for a Clean Brexit and has been lifted straight from a Bundesbank document, according to one commentator yesterday. 

For a rebuttal of the Hammond hysteria, it would be redundant to repeat some of the most cogent stuff about on the web. I'd recommend giving our friends over at C@W a look for a telling post and knowledgeable comments on this. 

* 'ungeordneter Brexit'

May unlikely to survive Commons defeat

The Prime Minister's appearance in parliament yesterday confirmed as nothing else could that the Robbins Treaty will not get through a Commons vote on 11th December. From every side of the house, in refined parliamentary voices, our MPs said "Pish! We don't believe you" as Mrs May struggled to repeat in slightly different ways the same six lies on which she's depended since giving up on "No deal is better than a bad deal". This itself has gone the same way as "Strong and Stable" and others of Theresa's trite little maxims. She is set to tour the country for the next two weeks repeating those same six lies ad nauseum to anyone holding a microphone, and her supporters and Brandon Lewis' office have been sent off to conquer social media. I suspect they've all been instructed to publish six tweets in support of their doomed leader, but judging by their output, their hearts are not in it. 

Conservative MPs have a finely tuned sense of survival, and by last night they had begun to realise that the game was up. Mrs May is unlikely to survive her coming Commons defeat on 11th December, and her supporters know it. Brandon Lewis, who will fall with Mrs May, has nothing to lose, but others including I suspect James Cleverly, just last week the most prominent of Mrs May's social media warriors, has suddenly gone very quiet. Other MPs have practised for eating-up their Christmas sprouts; some who can't quite bring themselves to repeat Mrs May's six lies have just done their homework by re-tweeting those that can. "What he said". Then running away with proof for the Whips. 

Before that 'meaningful vote' on 11th December we have five days of Commons debate on the Robbins Treaty. The Lords have no vote, but the Commons will consider their views on the 12th. Then those protracted and complex amendments from earlier in the year kick in.  As the Commons Library advises

a Minister of the Crown would be obliged to make a statement under s. 13(4) European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 no later than 21 calendar days thereafter. The Government then has seven sitting days within which to move motions in both Houses on the statement.

The House is due to rise for Christmas on the 20th, returning on 7th January. The Chief Whip already has his timetable sketched out; 

After Christmas things are equally tight. As the guide advises;

If, on 21 January 2019, no political agreement has been reached regarding the Withdrawal Agreement and/or the framework on the future relationship, a Minister of the Crown must make a written statement within five calendar days, as per s. 13(11) European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018.

This means a written statement as to the Government’s intentions must be made by Saturday 26 January at the very latest.

The motion must then be moved within a further five sitting days, meaning Parliament would be asked to debate the Government’s intended course of action no later than Monday 4 February.

Now two matters which are being trailled in the press. The first is the extent of the government's defeat, punted by those who believe that it is possible to be a little bit pregnant. If the majority against May is not over 100, they say, it's an invitation for her to ask the House to vote a second time, after she's made a purely cosmetic visit to Brussels to record some encouraging noises, but no actual changes to the WA, from the Commission. 

The second is what is being billed as the TARP option; between the first and second votes, Hammond and Carney will co-ordinate a crash in Sterling and UK stocks, thus scaring MPs into agreeing the Robbins Treaty in the same way that US Congressmen were frightened into passing TARP on the second go. 

I think both are unlikely. I think by the 12th, the Conservative Party will be looking for a new Leader - the May government will effectively have fallen. The question is whom will Her Majesty invite to form the next government - for Ministers are needed to get those key Brexit actions through.

Thoughts? 

Your fish belong us

The EU's strategy in humiliating and beating down the United Kingdom is becoming clear. Aided by a deluded Mrs May, the first stage is to bind, enchain and tangle the UK in a withdrawal treaty that will leave us unable to escape the jurisdiction of the EU and ECJ unilaterally - a treaty that divides mainland Britain from the province, and allows the EU to keep us dangling waiting for a trade agreement.

The second stage is to make that trade agreement conditional on the UK giving up its international rights to exploit, manage and conserve the resources of our 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone. 

Unless MPs reject the poisonous treaty on December 12th, our nation will be crippled by political uncertainty, corrosive in-fighting, bitterness and resentment within the realm that will continue for at least two years, as like a drowning man we flail desperately to stay alive as a nation while 27 hands are holding our head under the water. 

Our nation. Our waters. Our rights. 

God bless you, Gibraltar

I cannot express too warmly my admiration for the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo's reaction to May's docile surrender to the hysterical Spaniards. The Spanish government, with an election in the offing, resorted to crude overwrought rabble-rousing, demanding rights over Gibraltar. May of course was happy to give way to them; after all, having surrendered Northern Ireland to the EU, giving Gibraltar away would be peanuts. Luckily, the Withdrawal Agreement was 'locked', so no legally binding changes could be made. She changed instead the waffle-document, 26 pages of supine abasement by the United Kingdom to the EU.   

The reaction of the Gibraltarians could have been angry, disappointed, frustrated, or filled with bitter recrimination against May's signal incompetence. It was none of these. It is instead a reminder of the dignity and magnitude of the Rock; geographically it is small, but in the grace and decency of her official response, she towers above the moral pygmies of the EU. God bless you, Gibraltar.

Putting lipstick on a pig

Mrs May is now engaged for the next two weeks in, as our American cousins would put it, putting lipstick on a pig. Rather than heavyweight media interviews, she will be going for Mumsnet, Radio 5Live, Take-a-Break, pap TV sort of shows to try to win over in particular women voters, perhaps in the hope that her ratings will increase. She will repeat endlessly that the Robbins Treaty is the best deal for Britain, despite the CBI, the serious media, all intelligent commentators, Parliament, economists and assorted wise persons having decided conclusively that the opposite is true. The Parliamentary vote is expected in two to three weeks, and during this time May's cabal will use extraordinary methods to push her nationally destructive deal through.  

She is unfortunately a stubborn woman who will not listen. This doesn't help her. Even after having been told many times that sovereignty, freedom, independence and democratic control were the key drivers of Brexit, she continues to focus on the most prominent symptom - limiting the numbers of EU workers in the UK. It really isn't that big an issue for most people. With the £ at €1.12 it isn't even an issue, as coming to the UK to work is scarcely financially attractive to minimum-pay EU workers. Indeed as the numbers of EU workers in the UK have dropped dramatically and shortages bite, wages have increased - quelle surprise! - and employers are even offering permanent jobs in place of zero hours contracts. 

In the face of this, May proposes bringing in wholly pointless additional controls on EU carers, catering workers, fruit pickers and veg packers. I can hear the howls of frustration from 'Farming Today' already, with forty minutes still to the programme going on-air. Astonishing.  

The comments de jour are from Andrea Hosso in the Telegraph (£).

This “Great Game” seems to have been leading us here all along, to this impasse characterised by the Italian business paper Il Sole 24 Ore as “a deal which… represents a resounding victory of the EU over the subjects of Her Majesty”.

He writes. The EU's aims, he says, are not to conclude a Brexit agreement, but to tie the UK in an unworkable, impossible tangle of stasis, inaction and imprisonment, with neither the ability to free ourselves or to change the terms. And because

A weakened UK in the permanent limbo of an undefined transitional period would be susceptible to the impact of eurozone-centred regulation and policies.

Sterling and our financial strength won't be able to prevent us being dragged down in the imminent collapse of the Eurozone - like a latter-day Götterdämmerung, they are determined to drag all around them into the maelstrom of flames and destruction. 

The most effective action we can take right now is writing, talking and countering May's relentless media onslaught - social media warriors. Unfortunately, the planned UKIP event in London on (I think) 9th December is unhelpful. It will attract few non-member followers, and given the attendees, many UKIP members will decline to come. The press will present the tiny huddle of 'swivel-eyed' 'kippers in the freezing wet weather as being the nation's voice in support of Brexit. It really does 'Leave' no favours. If it comes before the Commons vote on May's deal, it will help her. If it comes after, it will bring nothing but derision on UKIP. Ladies and gentlemen of UKIP, I urge you to lobby your party leaders to cancel it.  

And now a new Brexit plan ... and it just may work

It is often the way with seemingly intractable negotiations that novel solutions frequently pop-up late in the day. So with Brexit. Now it is becoming clear that the Robbins Treaty will not clear the Commons - a fact which, for those who watched it, even became clear to Mrs May yesterday. Her Commons announcement and the questions following was another Duracell moment, but a quiver in the metallic voice, a slight tic and shivering of the Kevlar exomembrane, indicated that she faced six hundred MPs only one of whom offered her any comfort, and that this lack of Parliamentary confidence in the Robbins Treaty was sinking in. 

It doesn't mean she's giving up. She is said to be banking on big business and the Daily Mail to secure a tsunami of public support in favour of the deal, which she can then use to pressurise MPs. Unfortunately, a series of emails from the CBI saying essentially "May's deal is crap - but she made us clap her" has leaked, and the Daily Mail's change under Geordie Grieg to a Remoaner rag has unfortunately cost it a spectacular drop in sales and online readership. It is unclear what else Mr Robbins can do at this stage to keep his flawed and damaging plan afloat. 

The trick of a doable deal is that all sides know quickly that it is a good fit. The suggestion now being made is that a way forward to which we can all sign-up is emerging. Fraser Nelson sets it out in the Telegraph. If Parliament rejects the Robbins Treaty by a large enough margin, which looks more likely by the day, we can go for the Clean Brexit for which May has signally failed to prepare, but postpone it for a year to allow both us and the EU to get ready.  

No-one now believes that the Irish border is a 'thing'. It is a non-problem that was weaponised by Brussels to screw Robbins, and it worked. 

Well, I can buy into a Clean Brexit in March 2020. We'll be out of the EU next March, but just won't implement the change for a year. The EU will get another £10bn, which they need, and we will be gone before their fake elections next May - which could produce a populist EP with no power sniping at a Federast Commission that holds all the cards. If Italy hasn't brought it all down. 

Robbins has to go of course. People say he's bloody clever and I reckon that's true - after all, he's managed to draft a treaty which is unacceptable both to the people of Britain and our Parliament. You have to be bright to do that.

Clean Brexit could depend on Corbyn

Like the Duracell bunny, Mrs May just keeps going. I'm beginning to think it's my fault. Back at the time of her Lancaster House speech, and knowing her reputation for dithering and indecision at the Home Office, I prayed hard for the Lord to give her a backbone of steel. I fear my prayers were answered. Be careful what you wish for, as they say.

The number of Conservative MPs in favour of voting to realise a Clean Brexit on WTO terms (yes, I like those words too - many thanks) is reckoned on Twitter to be over 80, and by the Telegraph to be over 60. Someone has also leaked the Cabinet minutes to the Telegraph - with a number of Cabinet Ministers keen to confirm to the paper that though they haven't resigned, the minutes prove they objected to aspects of the Robbins Treaty.

The Spanish and French are also helping by blackmailing Brussels into enhancing their claims to Gibraltar and British fish respectively. Germany wants to ensure the UK continues to shoulder her defence and security costs, so they don't have to spend their own money. All help in making the Robbins Treaty even less attractive to MPs - for it's our MPs on whom we must now rely.

Make no mistake - this is an international treaty. Once we've agreed it, we're bound by it. Hence Mrs May's indecent haste is forcing it through before the nation realizes the trap to which she is committing us.

AEP has the best tunes this morning;

There is no doubt that the EU weaponised the Irish border to shoehorn the UK into the customs territory, but I strongly suspect that the Cabinet Office, the Treasury, and the Prime Minister were complicit. It enabled the switch from a constitutional Brexit that respected core demand of democratic self-rule to a supply-chain Brexit that serves chiefly the interests of CBI multinationals, the foreign car industry, and EU-linked parts of the traded goods sector. It is not even a workable customs union.
..............................
Theresa May told MPs today that they "risk no Brexit at all" if they reject her deal. That is a risk that I am willing to take, for nothing can be worse than foreign legal writ in perpetuity, with no veto. Obviously it would be better to remain in the EU. My preference at this juncture is a no-deal on WTO terms, mindful that Mrs May’s failure to prepare has made this very hard. Global Britain’s report this week is right to argue that the costs of trading on this basis (until free trade deals are negotiated) have been systematically exaggerated by the Treasury and commercial interests talking their own book.
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Needless to say, Parliament has set its face against any such action. It will impose a deal that ends its own legislative supremacy. My working assumption is that a bloc of Labour MPs will support Theresa May’s package and push it over the top in December. Britain will then be a legal prisoner until the EU sees fit to release us.

AEP is not necessarily right on this last point. With the DUP and 60 - 80 Conservative MPs voting against the deal, it will be up to Labour whether it get through the Commons or not. Corbyn (rightly) hates the EU. Will he now lead sufficient of his MPs in voting against May's poisonous deal, a deal that would prevent Labour from its manifesto State Aid commitments for decades to come?

Brexit on the brink

The most optimistic rumours about the ERG's efforts to defenestrate May is that the plotters have 46 of the required 48 signatures. The bad news is that consensus is that she will win the vote of confidence and we'll be stuck with her for the next year. The better news is that her actions to get Brexit through the next stage may destroy her. 

The DUP have become semi-coalition partners. With only half of their £1bn so far secured, they're keen to maintain just enough ambiguity over their status to get the balance. What's not in doubt is that they won't support the government on a Commons vote on May's renegade deal. Neither will some 52 Conservative MPs who have so far signed up to a 'save Brexit' declaration.

Mrs May has sent her troops off with threats. James Cleverly, a new boy, is proving a star anilinguist, thrusting himself across social media proclaiming how entranced and supportive are anyone he meets of the Robbins Plan, how perspicacious and how gifted is our wonderful Prime Minister. He's not so much laying it on with a trowel as pressure blasting it from a five-tonne silo. The threats that May is making seem to come down to three -

1. If Parliament doesn't pass her treaty, she'll cause markets to be rigged to trigger spectacular falls in Sterling and share prices, to teach us a lesson 

2. She'll make a deal with pro-EU labour MPs to use their votes to get it through

3. If everything else fails, she'll suspend the Brexit process until Parliament complies

If she does any of these, she may get the Robbins Treaty through, but she is finished. Not even my deeply flawed party could sustain her as Leader after this. 

The vote is scheduled for next month, but many voices are urging her to bring it forward. She won't. She'll push every single resource, every dag, arselicker, placeman and everyone and everything that can be bought, bribed, blackmailed or commanded into an intense campaign to rubbish our NO DEAL position, so be ready. 

There is only one option and we must fight for it as we've never fought before - NO DEAL

  

Throw out May's poisonous renegade deal

If you have not done so already, I urge you to read the Speccie's '40 horrors' - unacceptable terms lurking in the poisonous treaty that May sought to bounce her government into accepting, after giving them fifteen minutes to skim-read the 500+ page document in a small room with the heating turned off*. A sample;

3. The European Court of Justice is decreed to be our highest court, governing the entire Agreement – Art. 4. stipulates that both citizens and resident companies can use it. Art 4.2 orders our courts to recognise this. “If the European Commission considers that the United Kingdom has failed to fulfil an obligation under the Treaties or under Part Four of this Agreement before the end of the transition period, the European Commission may, within 4 years after the end of the transition period, bring the matter before the Court of Justice of the European Union”. (Art. 87)

4. The jurisdiction of the ECJ will last until eight years after the end of the transition period. (Article 158).

5. The UK will still be bound by any future changes to EU law in which it will have no say, not to mention having to comply with current law. (Article 6(2))

Even more tellingly, then read the government's rebuttals, rushed out to the Speccie over the weekend. They are feeble. So feeble, and rebutting so little, that rather than lessening the impact of the Speccie's fatal analysis, they actually underline its accuracy. Downing Street's own defence of the renegade deal is itself damning. 

It is also being reported in the Sun that Martin Selmayr has delighted in the humiliation the poisonous deal would impose on the United Kingdom - the loss of Northern Ireland was the price the UK would pay for leaving, they report him saying.   

For those who say this is not a war, pray tell me the difference? 

And our Prime Minister is a Petain, an appeaser, waving the white flag and offering the enemy our abject surrender. 

No, there is no way our nation and peoples can ever live with this treacherous treaty. Rejecting it, throwing it back at Selmayr and his corrupt cabal, will hurt our GDP but we must reject the idea that Brexit is just an economic process. It is not. It is about our nation, our freedom, our constitution (unwritten) our laws and our way of life. And I'm not about to surrender ANY of those. 

* This may only be partially true

We need to leave May in office until .....

When the Conservatives fight the next election, we need to do so under a new Leader. That much is absolutely clear; Mrs May is finished. 

We also need to ensure we either leave the EU next March either with no deal, or a deal very different to the May-Robbins capitulation. So the first job is to ensure May's travesty is defeated in Parliament.

The Win situation would be the Neutron Bomb option - defeating the Robbins Treaty but keeping May in office to sort out the chaos and disruption that could have been avoided had she prepared contingency plans in time or sought a deal that the people of Britain could accept.  Since May has been responsible for the screw-up, it's only right she should be in office when it all goes down.

But as events of the last week have proven, outcomes are impossible to predict. Even in Brussels where they were discreetly chilling the champagne yesterday to celebrate Britain's humiliation, they're not now so sure. 

There are few Conservative party members and fewer Conservative MPs that have confidence in Mrs May, but don't discount the Doenitz Vanity*. Even as the Third Reich was collapsing in ruin and defeat, just days before her unconditional surrender, ambitious functionaries were still seeking appointment to government and ministerial posts. Better to have been a minister for 48 hours, they reckoned, then never to have been a minister at all.

You can be sure that there are enough Conservative MPs who think the same way to ensure she can fill her Cabinet table.  

*With the Daily Mail taking the role of the Völkischer Beobachter if this morning's edition is a guide ...

It's got to be NO DEAL

Oliver Burkeman presented a neat little 15 minute programme on radio 4 yesterday - available on podcast - that really is worth a listen. It explains why pushing for a No Deal outcome that sends Europe into chaos and forces each side to take an economic hit may not only be the rational choice, but the beneficial choice. The answer is faith, hope and charity. 

If we accept May's humiliating deal it will leave only the members of the CBI, the FTSE100 and the global corporatists of the European Round Table happy. If GDP hardly changes, she can claim it as a victory. But this will be short lived. And it is a victory for international money, not for the United Kingdom. Both Leavers and Remainers will become even more angry, even more negative, even more disillusioned with politics and the political process. The nation will become polarised, divided and discourse will become violent, vituperative and schismatic. The smug grins on the faces of Barnier and his corrupt cabal at Britain's grovelling humiliation will become unbearable. The EU will try to keep the UK in this permanent state of internal division and rock-bottom morale until the nation is too exhausted to resist further.

A No Deal exit next March on the other hand will cause short-term chaos. The big matters will be swiftly sorted and both the UK and EU will get back to almost normal service on key movements and facilities. A host of lesser matters will remain unresolved, and both we and the EU will take a hit to GDP. Unemployment will increase and manufacturing production will decrease. Most of all it will allow us as a nation to come together and focus on the future - we have shared goals of peace and prosperity, we want cordial and mutually helpful relations with the 27 nations of Europe that are members of the EU, we have great strengths. Most of all we will work together for a new future, a future of hope. It will give us a chance to make changes that allow greater intergenerational equity, deeper local democracy, a more trusted politics, a bigger stake in housing, secure in national defence and with the aid and encouragement of our anglophone cousins from the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and, yes, India. But only the shock, the disruption, the hiatus of a sudden exit and the challenges it brings will achieve this.

So it has to be No Deal. But not a No Deal of hatred, anger and nihilism but a No Deal that is the only way to heal this fractured nation and secure a future for all in the British Isles. 

 

Crunch time

There's a Cabinet meeting to come, and none of us have seen May's draft agreement, and more importantly Parliament hasn't seen it. So I'm not going to join in a chorus of hysterical skirt-waving until there's something to shriek about. 

Of more import this morning is Merkel's call for an integrated European Internal Security Force - see John Vasc's comment to the piece below for an overview.

Herr Tusk - psychologists call it 'Projection'

In 1943, the tide of war had turned and Goebbels realised that Germany faced defeat. His propaganda ministry daily pumped out news of victories as German armies retreated everywhere, and allied bombing reduced German cities to ruins. He said in a speech;

"It is clear that the enemy does not hesitate to tell the most outrageous lies, even when we possess irrefutable and persuasive numerical evidence. They clearly are not trying to impress us with their figures any longer. The sole goal is a more or less short-term impact on world opinion. They no longer have the courage to tell the whole truth, since they begin to realise that it could be a shock to domestic public opinion that could not be controlled."

It's what the psychologists call 'Projection' - ascribing to an enemy or adversary our own worst fears of our own faults.  

So When Donald Tusk - one of the EU's several unelected 'Presidents' - said in an interview;

"In this Parliament, it is possible to have two movements represented: one becoming more and more “brown shirt” nationalist and anti-European, the second wanting to push integrating with the EU as much as possible"

What he really meant was;

"In this Parliament, it is possible to have two movements represented: one becoming more and more "brown shirt" in seeking to force Europe's nations and peoples to surrender their sovereignty to the EU, the second patriotic and determined to preserve their freedom"

And when he said;

"This doesn’t apply to MPs just yet, but these forces are gaining strength right in front of our eyes. Forces that create conflict rather than cooperation and work for disintegration rather that integration"

What he really meant was;

"This doesn't apply to MPs just yet, but these forces are gaining strength right in front of our eyes. Forces that resist national disintegration, ready to oppose losing sovereignty to the EU, working against their nations being integrated into the Federation"

It's a clear warning, a warning that an authoritarian EU is preparing to deploy social and political controls to counter internal dissent.

Be afraid.  

Macron pitches for globalism and world government

At the Arc de Triomphe yesterday, with the Place Charles de Gaulle and Champs-Élysées smothered in French tricolours and nary a different flag in sight, President Macron pitched for the benefits of world government. 

The papers are pitching the speech as an attack on President Trump, with Macron saying 'Patriotism good, Nationalism bad' but it was really a little more nuanced than that. It was an explicit plea for the UN, the EU and for collective globalist government. It declared that nations which sacrificed their own interests to the collective good were 'moral' whilst those that did not were a threat to peace. It was as much an attack upon Brexit as Trump. 

So eager is the press to portray this speech as a public rebuke for Trump, few have managed to recall what Trump actually said to provoke it. On 22nd October, Trump said "A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about our country so much, and you know what, we can’t have that. I’m a nationalist. OK? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Use that word."

Trump went on to say "We’re giving all of our wealth, all of our money, to other countries and then they don’t treat us properly. For many years other countries that are allies of ours... they have not treated our country fairly. So in that sense, I am absolutely a nationalist and I’m proud of it."

Macron raised the spectre of nationalism fomenting war, and praised the role of the EU and UN in the past 70 years in maintaining peace. The same old tripe, in other words, with nary a mention of NATO, or of the costs to nations such as Britain of maintaining an army on the Rhine for forty-three years. Europe's failure to pay for its own defence, and its 'leaching' of US money and goodwill, have also angered President Trump.

I couldn't help but conclude that Macron's whole speech was no more than a chauvinist plea for everyone else to make sacrifices to help France. Without British taxpayers subsidising French farmers, American taxpayers subsidising French defence commitments and German taxpayers paying for France's economic inefficiency, France would return to being the poor, rural, open dungheap and Gites nation of our youth, with squat toilets and tap water unsafe to drink. 

Do you know, I actually preferred that France - the crumbly, pavé, Gitanes-tinted formica skintness of her. Better than the global sponger. 

Surrounded by a sea of Tricolours, Macron criticises Nationalism

Thankyou.

There is really nothing I can add to the words, the verse, the painting, sculpture and music of the men who have seen our nation in War. Or to their silence and inward turning. So to all those men, and today women, quick or dead, I say simply thankyou.

And for my father. A bigger man than I will ever be. 

We will remember you.

The Christmas market goes up on Adolf-Hitler-Platz

A pane of window glass is an odd thing. Just 4mm thick, and so fragile that a child's ball may shatter it, in our minds it is as much of a bulwark against the elements, against the chaos of the street, against the bad outside as nine inches of brick and mortar. Anyone who has had a broken front window pane will know the sudden vulnerability, the sense of unprotectedness, the anxiety and the naked exposure of that void. Until mended, we can't sleep. We imagine dark forms, of burglars, deviants and suchlike attracted like moths to the boarded gape - blind to the reason that the piece of plywood covering the hole is many times stronger than the thin, weak pane it replaces. 

Eighty years ago today tens of thousands of our German cousins had their windows deliberately smashed, windows of not only their homes but their businesses. Synagogues were smashed and burned. Kristallnacht marked the change from social, economic and political discrimination to physical attack. Kristallnacht marked the start of the Holocaust. 

The boundary, the constraint, the separation between discriminatory treatment, between scowls and insults flung in the street and on the trams to physical battery, to rape and murder, to violence and robbery and to organised genocide was just as thin and fragile as a sheet of glass. Eighty years ago it was smashed and the first thirty thousand of Germany's Jews were rounded up for the concentration camps, to be killed in an ad-hoc, haphazard fashion, from starvation, lack of care, overwork and shooting. It was to be another thirty-eight months before the Germans agreed the designer death factories at Wannsee - Vorsprung durch Technik - but already the fate of Europe's Jews was effectively decided. 

NEVER AGAIN

I was in Villach yesterday, enjoying a beer on the broad, elongated space that stretches up the hill from the Drau to the church, paved in the same red catshead cobbles as a century ago, and called Adolf-Hitler-Platz until the British occupation force changed its name in 1946. The Christmas tree was already up, the size of the tree in Trafalgar Square, and carpenters were building the Christmas village, sturdy huts and braziers soon to be filled with the scent of burning pine, Glühwein and hot Leberkäse. As I write I can't actually remember what the space is called today - after having seen all the photos from March 1938, such as that below, it is forever Adolf-Hitler-Platz in my mind. Among this crowd, I wonder, were the Jews of Villach watching the procession? Still at that time with faith in the strength of their windows to protect them from rape, brutality and death?

The house that screams 'Arsehole'

If ever I saw a house that tells me it was built by an Arsehole, this is it. Predictably its FTW approach has put it on the shortlist for the 2018 RIBA prize. This piece of crap is exactly why appointing Roger Scruton to chair the new building quality commission is exactly the right decision.  

Where to start. A terrace of Edwardian houses is an architectural whole; typically the two corner houses, the bookends, are slightly quirky, possibly slightly larger than the rest, often with dual facades. Somewhere along the terrace will be one or more passages to the rear gardens, narrow and inconspicuous, sometimes only 2'9" wide, often gated. Door and window openings in the facade are enhanced by composite stone or terracotta detailing, robust enough to allow even plastic replacement doors and windows to be less visible. The design is in fact strong enough to allow considerable variation in roof covering, fenestration, door and window paint colours all to be accommodated without compromising the essential integrity of the terrace.   

The traditional terrace reflects quite well both British culture and society, with plenty of room for individuality but within constraints of a unifying commonality. They afford privacy while allowing communal security, bay windows in particular allowing mutual monitoring of the entire street outside. London terraced housing is far less susceptible to burglary than wonky, cranky little modern developments pushed like crooked teeth into small building parcels. 

The terrace also affords the illusion of a sort of egalitarianism that serves to bond residents to a locality as limited as a particular road, despite disparities in income, education, culture and class that would rarely bring them together outside of the street. 

All of which of course is well known to Dr Scruton;

In Chapter Seven of The Classical Vernacular, Dr. Scruton dares to enumerate a number of propositions, which lovers of beauty may adopt, as “Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism.” For example, there is the fifth proposition: “Architecture must respect the constraints imposed on it by human nature.”

This means that vertical windows and doors, mirroring the human form, are more appropriate than horizontal shapes that run in the opposite orientation for no other reason than a desire to deliberately transgress the quaint notion of mirroring nature. Dr. Scruton observes, “As animals, we orient ourselves visually, move and live in an upright position, and are vulnerable to injury.”

The importance of the visual analogy cannot be underestimated. If we do not take our bearings by anatomical nature in architectural design, our constructed habitat will hardly condition us to seek harmony with nature in other spheres. “As persons we live and fulfil ourselves through morality, law, religion, learning, commerce and politics,” writes Dr. Scruton. And yet how can we build a world worth inhabiting in those larger domains, if we cannot build homes for our bodies that are no more beautiful than sheds?

Consider his twentieth proposition, which attends to an apparently small point: “it is necessary to use mouldings.” And yet do not great errors result from a careless attention to something that seemed negligible in the beginning? Sir Roger argues, “Without mouldings, no space is articulate. Edges become blades; buildings lose their crowns; and walls their direction”.

The example illustrates a more general principle, which Dr. Scruton usually expresses as an aesthetic paradox: It is the useless that makes something truly useful. Mouldings may be considered “useless” from a utilitarian design point of view, and yet, as Dr. Scruton observes, without mouldings, “Windows and doors cease to be aedicules and become mere holes in the wall.”

The red excrescence at the end of this charming little terrace does itself no favours. The arsehole who built it will only ever be able to sell it to another arsehole; it will be liable to burglary, those sheer windows that can't open will fry the inhabitants in Summer, the flat roof will leak and rot, the hidden internal gutters and downpipes will block with leaves and soak masonry, that fashionable Farringdon brown-grey (almost indistinguishable from the grey-brown which is the only other powder coating colour in these people's palette) will chalk-up and fade and that blank flank wall of pretty London stocks will be defaced with graffiti in no time. In short, in fifty years when the rest of the terrace is still thriving, this decrepit wreck will be ripe for demolition.  

But the utter pretentious arseholeness of its creator is in terming it 'Red House' - as if this ugly hubristic stain on our urban fabric could offer even a simulacrum of comparison to the genuine house of that name, by Webb and Morris, whose genius produced a dwelling entirely antithetical to the jejune delusions of this nasty carbuncle.  

Journalists murdered working on EU / mafia corruption investigations

June 1996, when Veronica Guerin was murdered by Ireland's drug barons, seems an age ago, but it shows just how long-lived have been the links between official corruption, EU money, organised crime and drugs.  

More recently, in February this year, Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak, 27, together with his innocent partner, were gunned down in his home. At the time he was working on a story on the links between EU money, bent Slovak businessmen, and the Prime Minister's assistant's links to corruption and a mafia crime figure. 

And last month in Bulgaria Victoria Marinova ws found murdered in Ruse. She had been working on a story about corruption involving EU funds. The second Bulgarian journalist murdered in a decade, the gunning down in Sofia of radio presenter Bobi Tsankov in 2010 being a grisly precursor.

In 2010 Investigative journalist Sokratis Giolias was gunned down in Athens. And just over a year ago, in October 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia was blown apart by a mafia car bomb in Malta. A 53 year old mother of three, her investigations into political and EU corruption on the island and the links between EU funding and crime figures offended scores of bent Maltese politicians. In Poland in 2015 Investigative journalist Łukasz Masiak was beaten to death in Mlawa.

Dead journalists make the news. But it's reasonable to suppose that for every stubborn and tenacious reporter who refused to be intimidated, a score or more will have been cowed into silence by a bullet in the post, a beating, their family or children approached, their windows broken, their cars dripping in bloody paint.

The EU uses money taken from Europe's taxpayers to buy political loyalty and to corrupt politicians across Europe, under the pretence of aid and development. But building up a cabal of loyal bent politicians comes at a price - they frequently come attached to organised crime gangs. And although the EU would rather play down the links between EU favour and funding and the mafias, at times the links are so blatant, the passage of cash from EU taxpayer purses to mafia pockets so conspicuous, that even the EU are forced to act;

In an unprecedented move, the EU has withheld funds from new member Bulgaria because the ineffective measures it’s taken against organized crime. Killings, frauds and corruption all seem to go unprosecuted and unpunished. The European Union’s (EU) dramatic action in suspending aid to Bulgaria came after ample warnings that mere commitment to judicial reform was not enough.

But of course the EU can't act too harshly; the foul and noisome compact between the EU, Europe's criminal mobs and her bent politicians is vital to Berlaymont's interests. And a carpet of journalists' corpses is the cost.