Brexit Party - told you so.

Nigel writes in the Telegraph

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Britain's competitive advantage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Europe - Organised crime bosses back the EU

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservative and other political party democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gibraltar was only ever part of Spain for 212 years

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

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

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

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

That's all.

You can smell the fear in Brussels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They're starting to get it

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

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

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

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

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

UK puts Brussels on the back foot

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

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

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

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

Robbing democratic rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Elephant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EUROPA RESURGAM!

The continent faces its biggest challenge since the 1930s. We urge European patriots to resist the globalist onslaught

The idea of Europe is born again.

'We've had enough of cultural heritage, enough of the value of place and national self-worth!' The wreckers cry. 'Let us destroy the burden of the past and the traditions of Europe's diverse peoples and create instead the secure blandness of an homogeneous empire, a celebration of mediocrity, a joyless characterless technocracy!'

Europe is being destroyed by bureaucratic socially-progressive corporatists, an elite of patrician managerialists, who would destroy every vestige of democratic self-government, and who would destroy the principles of Westphalian Sovereignty for which Europe's nation-states have striven since the seventeenth century.

This is the noxious climate in which Europe's elections will take place in May. Europe's globalists want to dismantle the historic Europe of Westphalian states and to replace them with an unelected, unaccountable and anti-democratic cabal of permanent and self-replicating officials, law-makers sans Justice, rule-makers sans Right, who wish to degrade our rich diversity into a grey, amorphous, dead culture of compliance and pettifogging risk-aversity.

Those who believe in the legacy of Burke, Hobbs, de Toqueville or Nijaz Ibrulj also believe in our ability to raise ourselves above the corrupt and power-hungry machinations of Brussels, will have faith in our ability to defend our peoples and cultures against this new and barbarous totalitarianism, three-fourths of a century after shedding the last fascist burden, and a generation after we razed the Berlin Wall to a stump.

The nations of Europe have given us Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Voltaire, Verlaine, Mann and Dante. The technocrats have given us the Animal Waste Directive. They have banished love and joy on the Precautionary Principle - such emotions detract from technocratic rationalism. Love of the little platoons, for the local, for institutions within our compass are scoured from our earth in their unforgiving and relentless managerial trampling on the nations and peoples of Europe.

The greed of these unprincipled dullards for power and status will take our souls. So eagerly do they strive for the complete eradication of cultural identity that they will level the graves of our forbears, desecrate sacred memories and totems with the foulness of their touch. We must fight their depredations; we must speak our poems, recite our fables to our children, fire our micro-distilleries, thrill in our dance and our music, take pride in our raiment and costume, preserve the skills of the hearth and the oven and teach them to our sons and daughters in defiance of  the poisonous homogeneity of their multinational globalist factory-fertig foodstuffs.

From Tallin to Vienna, Porto to Budapest, we must fight these globalist managerialists, fight to preserve our nations, our cultural identity, our rich diversity, our local institutions and our allegiances. We are our soil, we are the heart of our lands, we are a Europe of nations and we must strive against the aggression and hate of these soulless monsters for our very existence. 

[written in response to a bunch of obscure 'intellectuals' of little wit and less wisdom who have signed a chain letter in favour of the global corporatists destroying our continent - see The Guardian]

==================
UPDATE

How could I forget - Happy Australia Day to all the 'Strines in the UK; sink one for me

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

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

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

They write about 'State Capture' - the process by which the Patrician elite have progressively taken over the State -

"Here are different kinds of political ice cream for sale, but when licked they all turn out to have roughly the same unpalatable taste: a bland, socially progressive, anti-traditionalist, globalist, corporatist flavour."

"... At the same time a technocratic political elite has arisen that is willing to contract out decision-making to supranational organisations like the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and United Nations on just about everything from finance, the law, border security, and the environment."

"With the rise of the new political classes, a different political dynamic is emerging. Drawn from similar backgrounds (often middle-class, university educated, with little prior career experience outside politics itself), members of parliament increasingly sound alike, think alike and act alike. The evolution of a monochrome political establishment is producing a radical disconnect, which the Brexit denouement is throwing into stark relief. What we appear to be witnessing is the corrupt mutation of the notion of the representation of the people in parliament, into the substitution of the will of the people by the interests of the political class. We are entering the realms, no less, of state capture."

Well, we won't have it. We want our Parliament back, our democracy back, our public administration back, our schools and universities back and an independent unshackled media free to speak. But just what will it take? Will we spawn a domestic Gilets jaunes movement? And this is where I have difficulties. I deprecate violence and disorder. I hate riots. I can never advocate such action except in the case of foreign invasion, for the preservation of our realm. And yes, I can anticipate your responses. The profs go on to say

"Cumulatively, over the past three decades, then, the empirically demonstrable lesson is that violence and threats work. Crudely, there is simply no arguing with the fact that violence is the deus ex machina for changing the way people think and act. Physical force is a method of political communication, and when it is sustained it invariably succeeds in changing minds and changing policies.

Under the threat of violence, it is often easier for governments to knuckle under for the sake of maintaining a semblance of peace, to wax piously about societal cohesion and resilience, and to climb onwards as though the status quo ante were not crumbling beneath them. The progressive factions of academia, culture, and media cheer them for it. So, if the populace don't really react in the face of such threats and actual violence, and merely light candles and hug teddy bears, then the bet of the political classes is sustained. They have gambled correctly."

And here in intense self-examination I ask whether writing this blog is on the candle-lighting and teddy bear-hugging side of the spectrum, or on the side on which thirteen Gilets jaunues have already been blinded by State munitions? But then this blog is utterly irrelevant in the face of the tsunami about to engulf Britain, a crashing mass of reform that will sweep away the deep ordure from the Augean stables our nation has become. Betz and Smith write

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

Should Parliament betray Brexit, that limit could be passed next week.

Please be very careful in the comments.

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

Britain's New Patrician Establishment

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UKIP spawns a fourth love child

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ignore the roar of the public at your risk

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

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

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

Boris in his Monday telegraph column is firm in his view that "These feeble plots won't stop Brexit". More tellingly he observes

Did you see Question Time on Thursday, and hear the roar of audience approval for the suggestion that no deal might now be the best option? There is a sense in which the public are braver – and wiser – than their MPs.

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

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

EUphiles - The three responses to Brexit

Dan Hannan writing in the Telegraph his morning, describes a situation in Brussels with which many readers of this blog will be familiar;

In Brussels, there are only three correct responses to Brexit: denial (“they’ll come to their senses”); fury (“they were lied to, the vote was stolen”); and contempt (“the arrogant fools deserve what’s coming to them”). The thing no one is allowed to do is to ask why Britain voted Leave, or whether Eurocrats might have behaved differently to make the EU more popular.

I think we've seen just about every spurious, fallacious, fatuous, illogical, mendacious and downright silly variation of those responses. That we hadn't included the votes of babies and infants, that a simple majority was too low a bar, that some voters in 2016 are now dead and others enfranchised, invalidating the poll, that Russians / dark financiers / Martians rigged the vote, the voters were too stupid to understand the issues, that every word of the Leave campaigns was a lie whilst the Remain campaign was a model of veracity and virtue, that opinion polls (which have somehow miraculously become more accurate since the manifold polls prior to the vote) prove people have changed their minds.

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

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

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

A General Election may be the best way out of the impasse

As 'Politico' reasons, A General Election may now be the best way out of the political impasse that has paralysed British politics. John Redwood does the maths that demonstrates the impasse. Mandarins have been put on alert for a snap election, and cabinet ministers have already secretly warned their constituency chairs. A rapid Brexit election would kill calls for a second referendum - which would take many months to arrange, if agreed, and would also - with luck - break the stalemate in the Commons.

The key question for the Conservatives is who will lead us in an election? Certainly not Mrs May. She has the emotional intelligence of a robot with Asperger's, and is simply unable to connect with voters. She appears insincere even when she's being sincere. And for me, will I as a member get a chance to vote for a new leader, or will this be another Parliamentary Party stitch-up?

For I give a helpful and constructive warning now, that unless a candidate favoured by the Party as a whole is dropped into the vacancy, there will no longer be a Conservative Party. A new Conservative Party in which Nigel Farage could find a home, a reforming and forward looking party, would emerge - and would garner members, backers and support rapidly. I am loyal to the Conservative Party, but that loyalty must be reciprocal. If the Parliamentary Party continues to ignore, frustrate and oppose the will of the vast majority of Party members, it will be crushed.

For now, look to your constituencies and prepare for a Brexit election - with one candidate to stand, and one only, in each constituency as the Pro-Brexit candidate, be they Conservative, UKIP or Independent. A liaison group must be effected rapidly to ensure this is done - we cannot afford to have the Brexit vote split.

Farage, Hoey - "The Great Betrayal has begun"

Both Nigel Farage and Kate Hoey have now spoken authoritatively confirming that the destruction of Brexit by the Patrician establishment is under way. The destroyers have an end game in sight, and will ensure that the biggest ever democratic vote in British history is overturned.

However, if anyone seriously imagines that after a brief spell of upset, everything will go back to normal they are deluded. Britain is now changed for ever - we are a different nation to that which went to the polls in 2016. The EU too is much changed; their naked ambition for an army now clear, as for a central ministry of finance, for all the laggards that are not yet in the Eurozone to be forced to switch to the Reichsmark, and for an even greater power-grab from the nations of Europe than ever before.

If Brexit is finished, the EU with which we are being forced to conjoin, like a slave forced in concubinage to the Master's son, is not the one we voted to leave. Many Remainers will be shocked and appalled at the result - but they will have done the deed.

I have no doubt that this shotgun second-wedding would be short lived. Within a year or two, when the chains of serfdom have bitten, if the EU had not then collapsed from internal dissent, we will decide overwhelmingly, for the second time, to leave. And next time there will be no mistake.

But the economic, social and international damage to Britain will have been done. We will have lost years of opportunity, even more of our institutions will have been destroyed or corrupted. We will look across Britain and see the barren, hungry, cursed and divided land that blighted Europe following the Thirty Years War. That will be the result of destroying the first Brexit.

Weep, Britons.

Parliament and government turn their backs on the people

With revelations in the Telegraph of Hammond's conference call with the global corporates just two hours after Parliament's rejection of the Robbins-Selmayr Treaty, assuring them that the government would continue to scupper and sabotage Brexit, comes confirmation that not only a Remainer Parliament but a fifth-column Remainer government have turned their backs on the people of Britain.

This is a fight for liberty not only from the Imperial zealots from Brussels but from our own corrupt and anti-democratic establishment.

However, Hammond and those of his ilk may be dissappointed by the masters they yearn to serve so slavishly in Brussels. It's emerging that they don't want us back. Not only do they not want Nigel Farage back in the EP in July, at a time when they will be contending with a surge of grass-roots democracy throughout Europe challenging the cozy and corrupt chumocracy, but they don't want a divided and disruptive UK in which more than 20 million voters now regard the EU as more lowly than a snake's belly.

While Hammond has provoked the question of whether he is in government for the good of the people or as the tool of the globalist corporates that would no doubt reward him well when he has outlived his use, he cannot be so sure that the EU will actually accept the extension of Article 50. And this could end Brexit. For if the EU reject a request for an extension May could be forced both by Parliament and the grey men of the deep State to cancel Article 50 altogether - Britain's unilateral right. A second referendum to reverse the first would then doubtless be ordered, this time with all sources of funding for 'Leave' neutered and an even greater official bias and advantage for 'Remain' engineered .

And after that, I fear that Britain would collapse into anarchy. Feelings are too high. The just anger of the 17.4m would spill, and we would all lose from it. Gisela Stuart writes that a General Election may be the only way to resolve the stalemate - a Brexit election, with Brexit allegiance rather than party defining the candidates. As she writes

(Dominic Grieve) is far from alone and the arguments used more than a century ago to deny the working class the franchise have returned to disenfranchise them over Brexit. Instead, Parliament is changing procedure in order to get an outcome that MPs feel they can’t get in any other way. But rules exist for a reason. In times of crisis they define the known parameters to resolve disputes and reach consensus. Starting to tear up the rule book is the path to anarchy.

THE TIDE IS TURNING
The Raedwald blog looks as if it increasingly represents public opinion in the UK. A bang up to date COMRES poll finds -

- 50% say NO to a second referendum, only 40% say YES
- 42% OPPOSE the Robbins-Selmayr treaty, 26% support it
- 74% think politicians are out of touch with the mood of the country, only 10% think otherwise

However, the poll also finds one incredibly strong common view -

The country is split down the middle over almost every aspect of Brexit, with one notable exception: two thirds of voters say that when Brexit is complete, “the UK should try to become the lowest tax, business-friendliest country in Europe, focused on building strong international trade links”. This is also the majority-held view across all age groups (18-34 56%, 35-54 60%, 55+ 77%) and political affiliations (including 54% of Labour voters).

And that's the future. Internationalist not globalist. Hammond is the past, and is backing a dying horse. Don't let him throw the nation's wealth away backing a loser.