Send in the clowns

I really must try to set aside some time to further develop an idea I have for a ‘Lefty Street Demo Reality Conversion Chart’. I have in mind a handy reference source can be used to translate ludicrously inflated attendance figures for lefty protests into actual numbers that the rest of us would recognise. For example, whenever you read of ‘hundreds of people’ at some lefty demo, simply look up the this figure on your handy conversion chart which will give the real figure of ’50’. Similarly, ‘thousands of people’ converts as ‘150’, ‘tens of thousands’ means ‘500’ and so on.

I better get a move on with this project in order to answer the urgent market need because the buggers have been at it again this weekend:

Thousands of campaigners across the UK are taking part in a marathon lobby of MPs and a series of protests this weekend to call for a shake-up of global trade rules.

The mass demonstration Scale Up for Justice is calling on the government to put pressure on the World Trade Organisation to rewrite its laws in favour of poor countries.

Any idea what they mean, precisely? Well, the organisation behind this latest round of muddle-headed, sandalista squawking is something called the Trade Justice Movement and, if their website is anything to go by, they appear to be long on rhetoric but remarkably short on details.

According to the TJM:

Together, we are campaigning for trade justice – not free trade – with the rules weighted to benefit poor people and the environment.

No mention of what constitutes ‘justice’ nor what ‘rules’ they have in mind. But they are calling on world leaders to:

stop forcing poor countries to open their markets; and champion their right to manage their own economies

In other words, keep our pet wogs in poverty.

regulate big business and their investments to ensure people and the environment come before profits

Employ fictional rubrics in order to stamp out wealth creation.

stop rich countries promoting the interests of big business through trade interventions that harm the poor and the environment

If they really wanted to help the poor they would campaign against trade interventions altogether.

ensure trade policy is made in a fair, transparent and democratic way

Complete political control over the all the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Reluctant as I am to say anything in their favour, they do seem to have the dead needle to organisations like the World Bank and the IMF which is fine by me. However, they see them as engines of global capitalism and people like me see them as facilitators of kleptocracy, corruption and fiscal mismanagement. Thus the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend.

I do believe that this is the latest incarnation of the ex-anti-globo movement and I use the prefix ‘ex’ because they have clearly decided that they cannot stop global trade so they might as well campaign for the right to control it. Doubtless the penny has dropped that deploying a small army of teenage maoist droolcretins to trash the local Starbucks is not the best way of getting their message across and that they need a more respectable front in order to be taken seriously.

But their real problem lies not with the tactics or the appearance but in the agenda because behind all the circa.1860 marxoid rhetoric and lofty monbiotic nostrums, what they really want is global socialism, a world-wide soviet, Cuba writ large. If I was given a choice, I’d stick the banker-crats of the IMF.

This is why they have to remain so silent on detail because the details are truly scarey. There is no way that a few eye-catching gimmicks and roped-in celebrities are going to make their bitter pills any easier to swallow.