The Last Ditch

Again, Wat posts the graph that matters

Burning our money: Pathetic Autistic Castrates.

As everyone and his dog prattles on about the politics of the Conservatives and the EU, Wat Tyler (link above) keeps his head and posts this graph (click for the full misery);

He observes, drily;

UK withdrawal would hurt them a lot more than it would hurt us

Given the graph he posted the other day, by what logic is Britain such a huge net contributor? Why is Poland, doing better in the crisis than most other EU countries, taking so much from the Germans, Brits and Dutch? I lived there 11 years and love the place dearly, but do they think we have some moral obligation to compensate for their years of suffering under Communism? Though they like to blame it on the Russians now, let's not forget the KGB was founded by a Pole. As for the Greeks, really guys! A few millennia is long enough for anyone to rest on their laurels, however magnificent. It might be time to roll up your sleeves and do a bit again.

Britain's glory has long since faded and it's time to face the truth. We are a poor country with a lower standard of life than the other net contributors to the EU budget. Don't blather, please, about our relative GDP. It's what our money can buy us that matters for this purpose. My friends and colleagues in Stuttgart, Paris or Berlin earning less than half what my partners in London earn can live far better on it. Their direct taxes are roughly the same; they have fewer stealth taxes; their public services are actually usable and for what it will cost me to buy my daughters a studio flat in London, I could buy them five in Berlin.

Whatever the (massively undemocratic) politics of the EU may be and regardless of its murky accounting to conceal its shameful corruption, it is an enormous rip-off for the British. The crowing EU-philes* enjoying David Cameron's (well-deserved) embarrassment should instead be doing something about that. Whoever is the next Prime Minister, I suggest Margaret Thatcher sends him her biggest, heaviest handbag and he takes it to Brussels with a house brick in it.

If you want us to love this bastard child of yours, at least get its hands out of our pockets!

* I really object to them stealing the word "europhile." I am a europhile. I holiday in France in my Italian car while wearing my Swiss (or sometimes my German) watch. I drink only French wine and would prefer only ever to eat French food. I speak French and Polish and understand German and Russian. I am no Little Englander, yet I completely detest the EU. I see it as a threat to all European freedoms, not just those of Britain.

The brittleness of cast iron

David Cameron to shed 'cast iron' pledge on Lisbon treaty | Politics | The Guardian.

David Cameron was elected to lead the Conservative Party for his political and presentational skills, not his convictions. It remains to be seen if he has any convictions, but now we must also question his skills.

He has a tendency to give hostages to political fortune. He tried to seize the moral high ground on becoming party leader by pledging to avoid "Punch and Judy politics". He has been persistently prodded with political pitchforks by Mandelson and the lesser demons ever since, but if he responds in kind, they jeer "Punch and Judy" at him. I fear the phrase "cast-iron guarantee" is going to haunt him in a similar fashion.

People don't trust politicians and it's not entirely their fault. It is a defect in democracy itself that if you don't tell people some approximation of what they want to hear, you can't get elected. We all like to believe in the wisdom of crowds, but the truth is that the majority of modern Britons want to hear that the state will solve life's problems, without effort or cost to them. Politicians are torn between over-promising to stay in power and the fear of their lies becoming so obvious as to discredit them. Their corruption is a mirror held up to decadent, economically-ignorant, essentially amoral voters.

Politicians' careers are an assault course, during which they sustain repeated political injuries. For a while they run on bravely, but eventually the damage is too much and they fall. The most typical injuries are failures to deliver on those promises they would have preferred not to give. Gradually, inevitably, they become too discredited to continue.

Margaret Thatcher was the exception. She was principled. She promised nothing she could not deliver and she was utterly relentless in making sure she did. In pursuit of her objectives she fired one minister after another, making enemies within her party faster than outside it. In the end, the pygmies with wounded pride were numerous enough to bring down a political giant. I was at a dinner in the City with Francis Pym, prominent among the pygmies, on the night she fell. As all my hopes for the arrest of Britain's decline died - I bitterly watched him drink in gleeful celebration. There must have been dozens of others doing the same that night.

But Cameron's injuries were never going to be of Thatcher's kind. He is one of the pygmies, lacking her political courage and her moral vision. His was always going to be the routine political failure of one too many broken promises. That's why his "cast-iron" pledge of a referendum over Lisbon was so foolish. He will now suffer more injury from every future broken promise because of one broken before he even took office. A promise he need not have made.

A referendum only made sense if it would prevent the adoption of the EU's constitution-in-all-but-name. Once it had been adopted, any referendum (as the Euro-sceptics baying for it well know) would be on our continued membership. The issue of the EU dangerously divides the Conservative Party. Any Conservative leader must manage the issue constantly and cleverly. Cameron's mistake was not to break the promise. It was to make it in the first place, and to make it - again - in such memorable terms.

Margaret Thatcher will go down in history as the Iron Lady. This farce means that Cameron will be remembered, if at all, as "Cast Iron Dave".

"It's not your business..."

I think it may be time we made it so.

EU Fudge

From the Taxpayers' Alliance;

h/t Samizdata

We are all "criminals" now (but then, somewhere, we already were)

Raedwald: Integrated EU blacklist of 'criminals' is here.

It is hard to know where to begin with Raedwald's sobering post. Did you ever hear of a more sinister concept than for "insult of the State, Nation or State symbols" to be a crime? Yet Raedwald and other bloggers who have picked this up are under a misapprehension. The EU Council Decision of 20th January creates no new offences. All of the ludicrous examples he cites are existing crimes in one or more EU jurisdictions. The innovation is for the EU's national police forces to share the data. Libertarian as I am, I can't say I have a problem wtih that. The story simply makes me wonder, yet again, whether I want to be in an ever-closer union with people who think calling Nicholas Sarkozy a conceited little plonker should be a crime. To be fair, they probably also wonder about union with a country which fines people for not sorting their garbage and then piles it all back into an unsorted heap.

Pessimists will fear that this is a first step to unifying the criminal code across the EU. What a disaster that would be. The overlapping Venn diagrams of European criminality would be coloured in to make a single mass. Almost everything would be unlawful. Wouldn't it be wonderful however, if we could unify European criminal law by adopting a different approach? What if only the "overlapping area" (i.e. only those actions which are criminal everywhere in the EU) were to be crimes? It would be a new European dawn of liberalism. A vain idea but - I am sure you will agree - a beautiful one.

Old Holborn's response, meanwhile, is characteristically robust. He has filmed himself burning the Marian flag of treachery and posted the video to his blog, urging all men and women of goodwill to do likewise. I am tempted, but in Russia I think it might just make me popular.

EU accounts not signed off for the 14th consecutive year

Link: EU accounts not signed off - News Story - Conservative Party.

The management of my firm would not survive one second if our auditors refused to sign off the accounts just once. Why should the incompetent leadership of the EU be in any better position? Did they steal the money that cannot be accounted for? Did they lose it? Did they stand by while others stole it? Whatever the facts (and if the auditors can't tell you, I certainly can't) they were responsible for it and they should answer for their failures. How can anyone take this institution seriously, when it cannot account for the money it takes from us, the taxpayers of Europe?

Not undemocratic; anti-democratic

When pro-EU friends smile ruefully or shrug their shoulders at the democratic deficit and blame it on a lack of engagement by the European electorate, show them this video. The leaders of the EU do not merely lack any sense of democratic accountability, they despise it.

The Commissioners and their lickspittles in this film stand in the same psychological relationship to the peoples of Europe as did our Norman masters to the English after the Conquest. They brim with lordly confidence in the superiority of their wisdom. They believe without question in their entitlement to power and privilege. The best of them see us as children to be nurtured. The worst of them see us as cattle. Their comments recorded here reek of feudal condescension.

By the way, did no-one tell the gentleman who took the non-sequitur to new heights when he spoke of...

Those on the Right who speak badly of Europe because they fear it. But social decline and fear always lead to fascism...

That using the reductio ad Hitlerum to damn his opponents by association is a tactic quite likely to backfire on him?

h/t England Expects via Old Holborn

"The noble Lord would say that, wouldn’t he?"

Link: Mr Eugenides: "The noble Lord would say that, wouldn’t he?".

If it is true that the holders of EU pensions

"... can lose them if they fail to uphold the EU’s interests or bring the EU into disrepute"

the interesting question is "why?" What on Earth goes on in the EU that it needs to put its pensioners under such pressure? Can you imagine any other body rendering former employees destitute because they drew attention to its defects or errors? I wonder if this intriguing fact is in any way connected to the EU's  auditors having been unable to sign off its accounts for 12 years?

Another interesting question is how you could "bring into disrepute" an organisation with the democratic values of Ghengis Khan and the morals of Madame de Pompadour.

How lame is this?

Lipdub Europe United par les Jeunes Européens - France
Uploaded by JeunesEuropeensFrance

If this is the sales pitch for a federal EU, what on earth would the reality be like? The video is every bit as lame as their case. It is so cringe worthy that it takes a strong will to see it through to the end. Something tells me these are future leaders of Europe though; it's the fact that - according to the credits - it took eight of them to have the "original idea" for the video. But let's be fair here. Can any reader point us to an equally dire anti-federalist film?

(A tip of the titfer to A Very British Dude.)

Democracy?

Link: MPs reject referendum on EU treaty - Telegraph.

Apparently not.