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“She’s a communist. A real one.”
Some thirty years ago I, then a bookish sixth former, attended a week long “Introduction to Philosophy” course at London University. One of the tutors was a commie. She was quite pleasant, introduced us to philosophy more than adequately, but truly, really was an actual no-kidding self-declared communist. First I had ever met.
I and some of the other kids from various different schools on this course found this even more interesting than Logical Positivism and we all tried to get into debate with her about it. Got nowhere, of course. A woman who had been defending the party line in all its various manifestations for decades was more than capable of disposing of the arguments of a bunch of seventeen year olds.
All of us but one – there was one boy who did, just about, make an impression. The tutor had some particular link with East Germany and this boy simply repeated, politely but insistently, several very basic statements about that state. “Nobody is allowed to leave.” “They have a wall and and barbed wire to stop people escaping.” “If you try to escape they shoot you.” And when he said this he sounded honestly astonished that anyone could be – could allow themselves to have become – the sort of person who would sincerely defend East German communism. It was not just wrong but weird. I mean, what? The wall, the shooting people, and she says she likes that?
I am moved to write about a communist I met thirty years ago because the second referendum in Ireland on the Lisbon Treaty will be held tomorrow. The European Union is not remotely as bad as Communism. But there are some very basic things wrong with it and this referendum has brought them out. The European Union will not accept a vote against it. It will not allow a vote at all, if it can get away with it. If people do vote against something the EU wants it makes them vote again and again, knowing that the donors and volunteers for the opposing side will be exhausted eventually, as will the voters, whereas its side has bottomless coffers and power to keep on pushing till it gets its way. The European Union lies to get what it wants. The Lisbon treaty is the rejected Constitution under another name. The Lisbon Treaty is deliberately written in confusing language so as to hide what it means. That is what con-men do. The Lisbon Treaty is a con.
I think that anyone who has allowed themselves to become the sort of person who would sincerely defend these lies and abuses of democracy should be regarded as a weirdo. Amazing, and not in a good way. Yeah, sure, people might be bribed or bullied or bored into doing what the EU wants – all these I can understand, if not admire. But the “neverendums”, the Constitution written like the small print of a dodgy timeshare agreement – you say you like that? I mean, what?
Of course my view as to how such people should be regarded counts about as much as a “no” vote three referenda ago. What is more to the point is that I am almost sure that in Britain at least, my “should” has become, or is in the process of becoming, an “is”. At some point during the Lisbon treaty saga normal people in Britain became embarrassed to actively like the EU. This does not mean that they cannot be bullied or bribed or bored into going along with it, as the Irish will be tomorrow, if the polls are to be believed. But when did you last meet a person who passionately and proudly supported the EU? And what were they, some sort of weirdo?
I guess this is a good reason as any not to fly on Ryanair.
Imagine a future where you could find yourself arrested for crimes for which you were acquitted nearly twenty years ago… where you can be found guilty and sentenced in your absence and without your knowledge… a future where when you go on holiday abroad you find yourself being arrested for you know not what – and those arresting you do not know either; they just know you are wanted in another foreign country.
This is not the future.
I have added emphasis to this BBC story about Deborah Dark in order to highlight aspects that particularly shocked me but otherwise left it unchanged.
A British grandmother is being pursued by France for a crime she was convicted of in her absence 20 years ago.
Deborah Dark, 45, from London, was acquitted of a drugs offence in 1989 – but found guilty and sentenced to six years on appeal without being told.
France issued a European Arrest Warrant in 2005 but recent extradition attempts have failed in both the UK and Spain.
UK charity Fair Trials International said the warrant system was creating a “blatant injustice” against her.
Ms Dark, from Richmond in south-west London, was arrested in France in 1989 in a car containing several kilos of cannabis.
A French court believed her defence that she been set up by an abusive boyfriend and was acquitted.
But she was unaware the prosecution appealed without telling her after she returned to the UK and she was found guilty and sentenced in 1990.
A European Arrest Warrant was issued by the French authorities for Ms Dark to be returned to France to serve her jail term.
Ms Dark told the BBC of the effect that still being officially wanted in France had had on her.
She said: “It’s destroyed me, and to see my daughter to go through all that pain again. I just will never forget it.
“I can’t leave the country. If I leave the country I will be arrested because I’m still on the European Arrest Warrant.”
In 2007 she was arrested on a package holiday at a Turkish airport but the authorities were unable to give her a reason.
On her return to the UK the British police could not find any warrants against her.
When Ms Dark travelled to visit her retired father in Spain in 2008 she was arrested and spent one month in custody.
But a Spanish court refused to extradite her on the grounds of unreasonable delay and the significant passage of time.
When she returned to the UK she was arrested by British police at Gatwick airport and released on bail pending an extradition hearing. Magistrates refused extradition in April this year.
Fair Trials International said Ms Dark was effectively being “imprisoned in the UK”.
Chief executive Jago Russell said: “Deborah’s case is a shocking example of the way a system intended to deliver justice has created a blatant injustice.
“The European Arrest Warrant should have been designed with a time-limit built in but it wasn’t.
“The result – a person’s life can be turned upside down for an event alleged to have happened 20 years ago.”
In a comment thread on this posting, the question came up, from the commenter “Laird”, as to why Samizdata has not written about the local UK/European Union elections. Part of the answer, for my part, is that a little bit of me dies whenever words such as “EU elections” come up, but also there has been a lot of commentary and head-scratching analysis, in the press and other blogs, on this issue for the past week or so. What could I say that has not been already said?
Anyway, for our non-UK readers who have not been following it, the ruling UK Labour Party did very badly in both the local UK elections and the European one. In the latter case, Labour came in third place (15 per cent of votes cast), behind the Tories and United Kingdom Independence Party respectively. UKIP is a party that wants the UK to leave the EU. I voted for it – partly because I did not want the Tories to get a larger share of the vote and hence get complacent, partly because I broadly agree with UKIP on things like cutting state spending and the EU. UKIP is not a hardline libertarian party but it is the best of a bad lot, generally. And I happen to know one of its MEP candidates, Tim Worstall – who is a member of the London bloggerati – and I always say it is a good idea to vote for someone you know, trust and like (I also know Syed Kamall, a Tory MEP, but just could not bring myself to vote Tory. Sorry Syed).
As for the aftermath, well, UK PM Gordon Brown has managed, by a mixture of party membership cowardice, shellshock, bullying and flimflam to persuade his colleagues in Parliament to give him another chance in the job. Labour has suffered the lowest share of the vote since the First World War, albeit on a very low turnout of voters. The national socialist British National Party, a party which, let it not be forgotten, holds to fairly hard-left views on economics, has picked up two seats in the European Parliament, and did so by playing fairly hard on the grievances of traditional Labour voters in run-down parts of the UK. There has often been a streak of “sod the foreigner” in the makeup of the UK left, although it has been tempered by a sort of transnational progressivism, at least from the Fabian middle classes who have provided Labour with some of its intellectuals (if that is not too grand a word to describe such people).
So there you have it – Britain is on course, if poll data are accurate, to have a Conservative government by the middle of next year, when a general election must be held. Europe has moved, politically, to the right, with concerns about immigration and economics driving some of that. But the UK Conservatives, while they have benefited from a mortally weakened government, have not convinced me that they have a serious intent to shrink the state. It may be that when or if David Cameron gets the keys to 10 Downing Street and has a chance to read the financial books, that the full horror of what he sees will necessitate spending cuts. We shall see.
And in the meantime, the US has, at least for a moment, moved to the left under Mr Obama, although for how much longer, it is premature to say (bring on the mid-term elections!). Ideologically, the Atlantic may be widening. We live, as they say, in interesting times.
“The readiness of politicians to relinquish power amazes me…..Take the European constitution, now rebranded as the Lisbon treaty. I read all the drafts of that document, spoke to lawyers and became convinced that its calculated opacity was a charter for the creeping takeover of national policy by bureaucrats and judges. There were brilliant MPs who could debate every inch of the detail – David Miliband, Gisela Stuart, David Heathcoat-Amory, Chris Huhne. But I met others who hadn’t even read the document and looked incredulous that I had. When the annual EU membership fee is £6.5 billion, when EU directives have driven almost half of the regulations passed here since 1998, and when implementing those regulations has cost £106 billion (according to a recent study by Open Europe), it is not surprising that people ask what MPs are doing.”
Camilla Cavendish.
As she points out in an excellent Times column, the contempt many of us feel for MPs is not just driven by their corruption. It is far more serious than that. It is that a group of people, either through apathy, venality, EU fanaticism or blind cowardice, have decided that they need to transfer powers away from the traditional cockpit of British politics. MPs are admitting they have little point other than to vote on minor, parish-pump matters. In which case, there is little case for paying them more than a local town councillor, or paying them anything at all.
The Times has a pretty good editorial on reforms that are needed. I have my quibbles, but it is generally on the right track. My main point of disagreement, however, is that none of the changes will significantly alter the balance between the state and the individual until the former is drastically reduced in size.
Norman – now Lord – Tebbit, famously the scourge of trade union militants and who also survived a murder attempt by the IRA in the mid-1980s (an ex-RAF fighter pilot by the way), is urging voters not to vote for the main political parties in the European elections. Instead, the implication is that folk should vote for UKIP. Well, that is Guido’s take on the matter.
Suddenly, the Tory Party does not look in quite such bouncy shape this morning. I guess when you have MPs trousering taxpayers’ money on a fairly impressive scale, it dents the brand somewhat. Like I said yesterday, though, the central problem of UK political life is not fiddling expenses. No, the problem is a continuing failure to push for a major rollback of the state, including removal of this nation from the clutches of an European federal state. Compared with how much money is wasted on quangos, or ID cards, or the rest of it, an MP’s claim for swimming pool maintenance is small beer.
Meanwhile, in the Strasbourg Village, it is being called a “huge scandal”, but Der Spiegel describes this huge scandal somewhat strangely:
The economic crisis has hit countless retirement funds, including that of members of the European parliament. They may take the controversial step this week to use taxpayers’ money to top up the pension fund.
I am sure that Der Spiegel did not mean to suggest that this will be the first splurge of taxpayers’ money ever to arrive in this pension fund. But, they rather do, don’t they? My guess is that the original pension fund is a pretty big scandal to start with.
And indeed it is:
The scheme was already in disrepute because MEPs’ contributions are taken automatically from their office expense allowance of €4,202 (£3,700) a month rather than their salary. MEPs are supposed to reimburse this account but there are no checks and it is accepted widely that many do not repay the money, potentially making the pension an entirely taxpayer-funded perk.
That was from the Times, last Friday. The same piece goes on:
Senior MEPs are proposing several changes to the second pension to reduce the deficit, such as increasing the retirement age from 60 to 63 and stopping early retirement at 50. But these are likely to be blocked after the fund chairman, the Conservative former MEP Richard Balfe – who now acts as David Cameron’s envoy to the trade unions – warned that such moves were “not permissible under European law”, in effect leaving the taxpayer with the entire bill.
So, who is this Richard Balfe? There’s been no mention of him here until now. It seems that in 2002 he stopped being a Labour MEP, in disgust, after having a fight with some other Labour people, and became a Conservative MEP instead.
Further googling got me to this Balfe-ism:
“You have got a situation now where the Conservative and Labour parties have overlapped so significantly that the ideological collapse of both parties must be mirrored in a new relationship with the unions, just as it is mirrored in a new relationship with business.”
Well, that is one way of looking at things. Balfe didn’t change. There is just so much ideological overlap between the big parties these days that Balfe could switch parties without himself moving his position. Another way of looking at it is to say that Balfe was a member of the politicians party, and that his allegiances are unchanged.
Does anybody know where the words of this can be copied and pasted? I would hate to have to type it all out – or maybe that should be ‘in’ – myself, but somebody definitely should, and if I or any commenter does find it, I will maybe add it to the bottom of this posting. As Peter Hoskin of the Spectator’s Coffee House blog says, Dan Hannan “absolutely skewers” the PM. (Can you kick someone with a skewer? Never mind.) Guido also piles in.
As my fellow scribes here say from time to time: I love the internet. In fact I love it even more than I hate Gordon Brown, and that’s saying something.
ADDENDUM Monday morning: Here it is. Thank you commenter Simon Collis, and blogger Stuart Sharpe.
Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of this Parliament – that being to say one thing in this chamber, and a very different thing to your home electorate. You’ve spoken here about free trade, and amen to that; who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, and that you have subsidised – where you have not nationalised outright – swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks.
Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words. Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.
The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.
Now once again today you tried to spread the blame around, you spoke about an international recession; an international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squall – but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear up their rigging – in other words, to pay off debt – but you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line, under the accumulated weight of your debt. We are now running a deficit that touches almost 10% of GDP – an unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary – countries where the IMF has already been called in.
Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising – like everyone else, I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things these things – it’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening the situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year, in the last twelve months, 125,000 private sector jobs have been lost – and yet you’ve created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister you cannot go on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorging of the unproductive bit.
You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well place to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era Apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is the worst placed to go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by 30% – and soon the voters, too, will get their chance to say so.
They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are a devalued Prime Minister, of a devalued Government.
It will be interesting to see what Britain’s mainstream media make of this. My guess is that the blogosphere will be all over this speech not just today but for a longish time, with constant links back, and that many newspapers will also refer to it during the next day or two. But how will the BBC respond? They are in a lose-lose situation, I think. Mention it, eventually, they lose. Ignore it, they look like Soviet-era buffoons, just as Hannan said Brown is. A bit like the US MSM and those tea parties.
Presumably, by the time the BBC do mention it, the story will be that the Conservatives are divided. Divided, that is to say, in that some of them think the Prime Minister is mad and evil and believe in saying so, while others merely think it.
The wonderful world of web provides us with a way to check what happens to the CAP aptly described by a European leader:
… a programme which uses inefficient transfers of taxpayers money to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa, which we then fail to solve through inefficient but expensive aid programmes. The most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take Communism.
via Charles Crawford
IKEA customers across the world are led to believe, naively, that the world is composed of simple elements that we can understand, interlink, and repair if necessary. Populist politicians throughout the world exploit similar social engineering… I respond critically to this European hypocrisy with an IKEA flat pack in the shape of the Swedish kingdom, which conceals an inconvenient truth.
– ‘Sonja Aaberg’, the Swedish sculptress, quoted by Mark Steyn in Euro-artists Speak
First financial, then economic, finally political. The smaller countries will be followed by the larger. In one of his op-eds, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes an overview of Europe in which he opines that the outer rim: the post-communist states and Club Med are entering a 30s style depression due to the unwillingness of the European Commission or Central Bank to alleviate their woes.
Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic States are now facing a ‘spring of discontent’ as austerity measures result in rioting and instability. Evans-Pritchard has noted that the European institutions are compunding the problem:
Leaked documents reveal – despite a blizzard of lies by EU and Latvian officials – that the International Monetary Fund called for devaluation as part of a €7.5bn joint rescue for Latvia. Such adjustments are crucial in IMF deals. They allow countries to claw their way back to health without suffering perma-slump.
This was blocked by Brussels – purportedly because mortgage debt in euros and Swiss francs precluded that option. IMF documents dispute this. A society is being sacrificed on the altar of the EMU project.
The political consequences of the credit crunch are coming to the fore in the fragile periphery of the European Union: how long before we begin to see the political expression of this discontent respond to the monopoly of the European class, a challenge that will arise outside the mainstream from the extremes.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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