WHERE BLOODY MINDEDNESS RISKS ALL OF OUR FUTURES

EU LEADERS ARE MEETING IN Brussels to discuss the euro crises. No doubt further time will be bought at an ever lavish price (paid of course by the German taxpayer), until another crises looms in a few weeks or months time.

            Despite the single currencies obvious failings; failings that have been there since the theoretical stage of its development; the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso still remains boastfully optimistic about finding a solution, “I'm sure [he opines] we'll find a solution.

            "A good solution for Greece and for all the Euro area members."

            If this is true, and they have such a “solution”, then why was it not tried much earlier - long before €93 billion were handed over to Greece?

            What the euro zone needs is a Gorbachov figure instead of Barroso. In fact someone…anyone, who is prepared to spell it out to those assembled in Brussels.

            Just as a one size of suit will not fit all sizes of human, then the euro could never find success in an economic community whose nations were so far apart economically; and where there was no political union in place.

            Over the weekend, a comparison between the dire financial straits of California on America’s West Coast with that of Greece in southern Europe was made on the BBC: and the point was being made that California would not be allowed to default at any time because it is a state within a broader union. In other words a political union whose centre is Washington.

            But in Europe a political union was never set in motion – probably because of its unpopularity with many of the north European countries: and this being the case, monetary union went ahead anyway despite countless warnings from Eurosceptics who today feel vindicated.

           

THE TROUBLE WITH Europe is that they have an emotional attachment to what they like to boast of as, solidarity. What this means, is that any form of empirical evidence that display any kind of opposition to the progress of the European ideal will not find sanction within the corridors of Brussels, or any other European institution.

            So when the ideal of a single currency was eventually introduced; even before full political union and on an indiscriminate basis; then the train would have sooner or later had to hit the buffers; and there would be tears a plenty. Which brings us to today’s events in Brussels.

            Perhaps the two statesman who have the future of the euro in their hands are President Sarkozy of France and Angela Merkle of Germany.

            Bailing out, what many Germans see as an indolent Greece, while they themselves work their socks off to create the wealth that is supposed to help enhance the lives of their present and future generations, is deeply unpopular and Ms Merkle knows this; plus, with elections due in Germany, she is no hurry to continue to spend her people’s hard earned taxes so freely, as has been done in the past to keep solvent a country that, had hard-headed common sense prevailed at the time, would have been put in the second tier of a two stage single currency.

            Germany does not need Europe and her people know this. Germany has, since the end of the Second World War, flourished. Her people have been industrious and successful in helping their country to become and remain, within the top three of the world’s league of economic success.

             As far as Germany is concerned, the current arrangements are detrimental to the nation’s continued success. Of course at the same time, Germany will have achieved more through her people’s industriousness, than what the country failed to do militarily between 1939-45.

            This is not an anti-German point I am making. I admire modern Germany and its people. I just believe she could have bettered the continent by remaining a trading partner. Her people would have benefited, and what is a national government for if not to promote all advantage to its citizens.

            The German people, perhaps more so than any other European peoples, believed in the European Union because of their country’s 20^th century history. But guilt is no substitute for the hard headedness required to keep your nation’s people prosperous.

            As far as Germany is concerned, in embracing the EU, she has fallen foul of the same romanticism that attracted her to Nazism: and yes, the EU is indeed incomparable to Nazism. My point being, is that idealism comes in many forms, and the European Union is just another variant of the many failings of what is a noble sentiment.

FRANCE IS THE OTHER PILLAR of  what she hope will eventually become a United States of Europe. While the German people seek only partnership with the rest of Europe, both her own as well as France’s political leadership are far more ambitious.

            In France’s case, her leadership’s ambition is to put the whole continent on the same basis as the United States of America - as another superpower; with France hopefully manning the ships compass and directing (in particular) foreign policy.

            If solidarity means anything to a people, then it is to the French that it carries the most weight. For France, above all other European nations, has spent more time bathed in the waters of political idealism. She, for instance, remains proud of being at the centre of 18^th century Enlightenment.

            She administered the guillotine to the ancient regime of monarchy and made France a republic. She gave birth to a leader who also had European ambitions for France - an imperial France, after he elected himself emperor. Napoleon threatened Europe in the 18^th and 19^th centuries as Hitler did in the 20^th century.

            Both Germany and France are now at the helm of the good ship European Union and are determined to make the single currency work, whatever it takes.

           

WHATEVER IS AGREED TODAY in Brussels you can bet one thing. Any decision will not encompass the withdrawal from the first tier of euro currency membership, of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy.

            The European leaders are on a trajectory that will cause great harm, not only to Europe but to the West as well as other world economies. Faith is one thing, it replenishes the soul during adversity. But blind faith in a political project that, through the recalcitrance of its believers continues on a fateful path to ruin, is beyond all comprehension.

           

           

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH DEAR SON

WELL IT IS BACK TO the hacking scandal, after part of James Murdoch’s evidence to the parliamentary committee has now been brought into question by two News International ex-employees , Colin Myler (ex NoW editor) and Tom Crone (legal manager). Apparently, when James Murdoch told the committee that he was not aware of an email that suggested  the hacking scandal went further than a single rogue reporter, he was (according to Myler and Crone) deliberately lying to the committee.

            James Murdoch has said: “I stand by my testimony to the select committee”. But Myler and Crone have allowed the Murdoch’s many enemies to have another go; and they have wasted no time in trying to bring the hapless tycoon once more to London to  face the will of parliament.

            What shall we call them; a hypocrisy of politicians? I find it repellent that such a group, representing a body of people that have been brought so low in public estimation, should be allowed to investigate the behaviour of anyone, let alone, in Rupert Murdoch’s case, someone who stands (even in his current frail state), far, far above his inquisitors.

            It matters little to me whether celebrities had their mobile’s voice mail hacked into by a an unscrupulous band of red top journalists. After all, it was those very journalists who helped promote their careers in the first place, with very little protest from the celebs about press intrusion when favourable publicity was the result of such impositions.

            First of all hacking was not the sole occupation of News International journalists; other tabloids took advantage of the same technology to do the same thing: just as would have been the case between the 1960s and 1980s, had digital technology made it possible to do so. Human nature being human nature, and ambition being a component of such a nature; who can say that even Woodwood and Bernstein would not have taken full advantage of its services to bring down their equivalent to Rupert Murdoch – Richard Millhouse Nixon.

           

I HAD NOT HEARD OF Labour MP Tom Watson until he sat facing the Murdoch’s. But apparently he had stuck limpet-like to the hull of News International, concentrating, it seems, all of his mental energies upon bringing down this empire. This industriousness was to earn him brownie points from the media, after his interrogation of the father and his son in the Wilson Room.

            When I am confronted with such an obsession, I start to question the motives (in this case) of the parliamentary investigator; but then, apart from whatever personal motives may be involved, Mr Watson is a member of a political party whose back benchers, as well as the party’s rank and file, all have their anti-Murdoch grievances.

            In the Labour Party as with the Mafia, aged resentments are never allowed to whither on the vine, but kept busy. In Murdoch’s case his company’s crimes against Old Labour’s core support within the working class still wrangle with the likes of Tom Watson and Labour’s rank and file. Even New Labour which delivered power to the party from 1997-2010, could not, it now seems, bury this resentment despite Murdoch’s support for the party throughout those years at election times.

            Why Tom Watson is so popular among his fellow MPs and the media generally is because, like him, they want rid of Murdoch, and will beatify any source from wherever it comes that drives the stake into the vampires heart.

IF I WERE JAMES MURDOCH, I would pronounce myself unavailable to once more appear before this parliamentary compilation representing the morally questionable Members of Parliament. The Murdoch’s have little to fear from the Wilson Committee Room, upon any return; even if Myler and Crone are proved right and James is an out and out liar, the Murdoch’s need not fear this body of gentlemen and women.

            If James Murdoch knew more than he told what does it mean? After all, let us remember this. The British public did not object to the invasion of any celebrities’ privacy, no matter how it was managed. But what rankled with them, as well as myself, and set this whole hare running, was when such practices were being deployed against the likes of little Millie Dowler and other ordinary people who sought only privacy for themselves. It was when such people became targets that the British public turned on the journalists.

            Until such ordinary people were targeted, the public cared little about the privacy of celebrities; and the likes of Tom Watson found little support for his campaign against News International.

            If I have one criticism of News International, it is that Rupert Murdoch closed down the News of the World to appease his critics, in order to help in his takeover of BSkyB. The NoW had a current total readership of some five million people. As a paper with a 168 year history, it was a staple of many a working class Sunday; and it was George Orwell who essayed its importance to the British working class. But it never appealed to the leadership of the Labour Party who saw it as an incumbent upon its attempts to “lift” the working class out of such lowly allegiances.

           

           

           

           

           

           

           

           

                       

            

CECIL COLEY, 72, AND READY TO DEFEND HIMSELF

EARLIER THIS YEAR the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, said that if victims of burglary found themselves in serious danger from a thief, they would not have to face prosecution if, in the process of defending themselves, it resulted in the intruder’s death.

            Well an elderly, retired shopkeeper, Cecil Coley, 72, is about to put the justice secretary’s reassurance to the test . Mr Coley, in defending himself and his friend from a gang of gun-wielding robbers who had entered his shop and demanded cash, challenged one of the gang who stumbled from the shop fatally wounded.

            The gang member had suffered a critical knife wound to his chest. Mr Coley and his friend, who had earlier been pistol whipped by members of the gang, have been arrested on suspicion of murder.

            This is not of course the first act of heroism of its type. In June Peter Flanagan, 59, was also arrested on suspicion of murder, after also fatally stabbing a burglar, not far from Mr Coley’s store in Old Trafford Manchester.

            The law has always set a limit upon what a homeowner or businessman can do when both they and their property are put under such a threat. In the past the advice, in the first instance, was to provide the thief with whatever he or she asks for; after all, property can be replaced: then, in the second instance, it was made clear to any potential victim that the criminal also had rights under the law, and the use of too much force used in the process of restraining  the culprit, could lead to the prosecution of the victim; which has led to the total submission and frustration towards our legal system.

            Time after time the victims have had to take it on the chin and let the law take its course. But when the law had finished its itinerary and the criminal was found guilty; sentencing was a meagre gruel for victims to digest – fines, ASBOS, and, in extremis, prison.

            But fines never got paid, and ASBOS became a badge of honour; while prison became the greatest joke of all. When sentencing a guilty party to a period behind bars; the judge’s term of sentence was and is just a headline figure used to assuage the public mood.

            Whatever sentence a judge passes, it can and will be cut, depending upon the seriousness of the crime; from between a third and a half. The headline figure is meaningless. Whenever a sentence is given and reported in the media, the first thing the law abiding, but cynical public do, is make a simple mathematical calculation involving subtraction: four years (two); ten years (five); a life sentence, 20 years (10 or 15).

            A justice system depends on just that – justice. Not on reducing the prison population in order to economise; not on re-characterising rape into major and minor; either in order to keep some such people out of prison altogether, or reduce the sentences of others; leaving only the worst offenders to serve a full term in prison; thus once more contributing to a lowering of the prison population.

KEN CLARKE HAD to retreat over his comments on the subject of rape. Mr Clarke is not a callous man and we live in straightened times where economies have to be made to keep the country solvent: and if the justice secretary had been open with the electorate and said he had to find 20% cuts within his budget, and this meant unpopular decisions. Then the public, rightly, would have torn him to pieces!

            There are two major concerns that, in poll after poll, the public feels the politicians are not only not doing enough about, but working against them and treating them like empty headed philistines who need to be led, if only by their ear.

            Crime and immigration are at the heart of people’s concerns. Those people who live beyond the boundaries of London, and may as well be savages as far as the chattering classes of the capital metropolis is concerned, are daily becoming frustrated, angered and ready to align themselves with whatever political party of the far right who hears their concerns.

            Since the 1960s (yes, that again) the accomplishments of liberalism have infestated every aspect of British culture; and no more so than when it comes to crime and the criminal justice system. From the sixties onward, excuse after liberal excuse was dreamt up by academics to, if not justify criminal behaviour, then at least to understand it; and with such an understanding enlightenment was meant to follow – yea, right.

            We, the law abiding, live in areas of the country that our liberal ring masters in both houses of parliament, would not wish their household pet to experience. But where I live it is almost a paradise compared to the lives of those people who live on many of our inner city, or city council estates.

            To these people, the justice system in its present form, represents yet another impediment to their lives. To these people, if they ring the police, to report a burglary, they are usually ignored. For burglary, like some forms of shop lifting and credit card fraud,  it is left to the stores and banks to deal with.

OUR JUSTICE SYSTEM is bankrupt. Our politicians now have little to say on the subject, except to rehearse once again the old liberal catholicon that has led us to the situation we find ourselves in today.

            Social workers and probationists have been the forlorn hope of liberalism’s attempt to change human nature. Instead of meeting it half way, the liberal idealists have succumb to the criminal’s wants and needs; and in so doing seeks to justify the cruelties they unleash upon society.

            Crime should be rewarded by punishment - the severity of which depends upon the nature of the crime. But crime should be punished; if for no other reason than for the sake of the victim. For it is the victim whose rights and concerns that should never be put on an equal basis with the criminal perpetrator.

            The trouble with today’s society is that the distribution of  human rights has extended well beyond what the people would have thought possible. For they thought that human rights should only go to the law abiding and not the criminal.

            Like all of us, the criminal should know right from wrong; and from what is legal and illegal; and this in itself should have redirected their fortunes. But it did not and they acted in the full knowledge that their behaviour was illegal. Yet given this, such people attract to them people who wish to rationalise their behaviour. Such is the liberal foot print that is left behind every sentence within the criminal justice system.

           

           

ED, AND THE PEOPLE WHO GAVE HIM IS POWER

AS WE KNOW, ED MILIBAND won the leadership of the Labour Party through the union block vote. Now, the ungrateful son-of-a-Marxist is about to bite the hand that not only fed him, but helped him to destroy his brother David’s chance of leading the party.

            What Ed intends is a reduction from 50%  to 33% to the union’s block vote, and to distribute the remaining 17% among the party supporters.  He also intends to ask the unions to relinquish one third of their vote in leadership elections.

            The unions, quite rightly, see Ed’s intentions toward them as less than honourable; after all they helped him knife his own brother in the back.

            Among the union comrades who will feel they have been slapped very hard in the face are Len McCluskey of Unite, Paul Kenny of the GMB, Unison’s Dave Prentis, and Bob Crow of the RMT. I am sure these dinosaurs and others like them within the trade union movement, will not go down without a fight. For as one trade unionist has already opined: “We provide the bulk of the Labour Party's finances and are entitled to a fair say in its affairs… Ed Miliband should remember who put him where he is.” 

            The unions have, of course, always been an embarrassment to the Labour Party; and party leaders have always sought to find the leverage to shrink the brother’s overweening power to such a state whereby they pay-up and shut-up.

            But the knuckle-headed brothers would never tolerate such a relationship with the party that they are continually reminding, was the creation of the “labour movement” i.e. themselves.

            The most successful Labour government (in terms of election victories) was headed by a leader who felt no need to treat the unions with any superior weight  or significance than was given to any other part of the party, such as its members, activists and  MPs - all were (under Blair) considered equal.

            Tony Blair did not feel the need to treat the unions with any particular deference or diplomatic delicately. He knew at the time that, after 18 years of a Tory administration, the Labour party needed Blair more than he needed it; which made his palpable contempt for the unions easier for party rank and file to digest.

            He never felt the need to consult, via beer and sandwiches, with the unions on any issue that was the sole responsibility of government. His distancing the party from such an incestuous relationship with the unions, brought the middle classes on board. It was partially to this group that Blair turned in order to help him hold on to power.

            Blair demonstrated what the true relationship between the Labour Party and the unions should be. If the party is perceived as being in pawn to the unions; then the party would suffer the same fate as the Militant Tendency and pave the way for New Labour.

A LOT OF WATER has flown under the bridge since Blair was at the helm of the party. His nemesis, the emotionally unstable Gordon Brown, eventually got the job he sulked over for so many years to attain; but then, in the end, only to be found wanting as a prime minister.

            So today we have Ed Miliband leading the party and attempting to do what all previous Labour leaders have failed to do: change the rules to restrict the might of the unions in determining how a particular vote should be directed, either at conference or during leadership elections.

            Ed Miliband knows that his brother, had the voting arrangements been in any way democratic, would be sitting where he is now at the head of the Labour Party.

            Labour history says that the unions will only bend to the will of the party leadership if the party has been removed from power for an inordinately long period; as Labour was, between 1979 and 1997. Which means Ed, if he is serious, has a  fight on his hands if he wishes to wean the unions from the party’s teat.

            I think that since capitalism’s current crises, with its impact upon public spending; the unions now feel reinvigorated, and are once more asserting themselves within the Labour Party. But if the unions think that the current debt crises will restore to them the damaging power they once had in the 1970s, then they should be quickly disabused of such a thought. For, in today’s world, the public sector, and only the public sector, acts in solidarity.

            The private sector have long since had to adapt to the changes in pension arrangements that the public sector are now being asked to comply with as part of the public sector’s reformation. The public purse needs to make billions of pounds in cuts throughout the whole public sector if we are to make any kind of practicable impact upon this nation’s £170 billion debt.

           

I AM NO FRIEND OF Ed Miliband; I would have sooner seen his brother at the dispatch box at noon each Wednesday, but, if he is serious in his intension to once and for all reign in, or ideally abandon the unions; then I must say he has made the task much more difficult by proving himself reliant upon his union brethren for his preferment.

            I do not know what goes through the lesser Miliband’s mind if he thinks he can now  turn upon his Frankensteinien union brotherhood and expect from them their silence, if not their support, for his reformation of their deciding influence upon all voting procedures within the Labour Party.

            I suppose Ed knew what he was doing when he took on the one body that created him as Labour leader; just as he also knew what he was at when he planned his brother’s betrayal, with his embracing of the trade unions.

            But if Ed now believes himself  to be able to bring about a diminution of the trade union link with Labour; then his urging of the Party’s ruling National Executive Committee to pick Labour loyalist Chris Lennie, the party’s long-serving deputy general secretary, as the new general secretary, failed; and the National Executive Council of the Labour Party, put in place, Ian McNicol, the GMB union’s political officer; thus snubbing Ed Miliband choice for his personal preferment.

            Ed will never be able to rescind his Faustian pact with the unions. His brother knew better than to become entangled with the “brothers”; for to have done so would have diminished any authority he would have been given by the electorate.

            David Miliband should have been crowned the leader of the Labour Party. He earned such a position on the votes of the party membership and the MPs. These two constituency’s should have been the only electorate that mattered. But the Labour Party, always afraid of upsetting the unions, gave them the final say once more.

           

           

WENDI DENG – THE IDEAL WIFE FOR ANY CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY

THERE SAT RUPERT AND HIS SON JAMES: while behind them sat Wendi Deng, who became the unexpected focal point of the day’s events when an anarchist comedian (sic) rushed forward and tried to ram a plate of foam into Rupert’s face. While the whole of the committee room remained stunned and motionless, Mrs Murdoch leapt to her feet and launched herself at the “young” comedian, and prevented the plate of foam from reaching its intended target’s face.

            Yet again, as they did in the recent demonstrations against government cuts, the young middle class radicals, represented on this occasion by one Jonnie Marbles, grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory.

            This whole piece of theatre that the liberal Left had waited almost forty years to see come to fruition, was ruined by one of their own. This was meant to have been the day when the Left’s anti-Christ was to have had a stake put through his cruel heart.

            Still, no doubt Channel IV will give the (I think the fashionable term is “edgy”) comedian a series once the law has finished with him.

            It is interesting to observe that these young radicals are the gilded children of successful and wealthy parents, who, when arrested and found guilty, can find sympathy with certain journalists who think it extreme that they should receive a term of imprisonment, for what they regard as youthful indiscretions: but they would, no doubt, and quite rightly so, be averse to granting the same level of charity to the chav fraternity that disrupt the harmony of our town centres on a Friday night.

THE MURDOCHS, I THOUGHT, PERFORMED WELL; as did the markets. As the proceedings continued News International’s share price continued to recover  some of the losses incurred by this whole episode.

            But what not many observers have focused upon, is how Mrs Murdoch, sitting as she did behind her husband, kept poking him in the back whenever Rupert started to bang the table. This contribution, perhaps more so than her intervention against the bloke who lost his marbles, did far more good to her husband’s cause.

            Yesterday had to be a day of contrition for the Murdoch family. Rupert’s volatility had to be suppressed and Wendi Deng once more served her husband’s interests well by her gentle prodding whenever he showed signs of his explosive nature.

            No doubt it is because Mr Murdoch had to betray his true nature in the interests of his media empire, that he appeared at times doddering, and delaying his answers to the questions asked of him from the Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

            What could have turned into a shouting match that would have been too News International’s disadvantage, became a contrite yet informative appearance, that, had  the actions of an egotistical non-entity not intervened; no doubt a more serious light would have shone on the events in the Wilson Room.

            As far as the wider public are concerned this whole business matters little. Before the Millie Dowler episode, the British public cared very little about the privacy of celebrities; especially as they were shown to thrive on publicity themselves; and if they were to go a day without it, they would panic at the possibility that their status had taken a tumble.

            So the British public cared little for the privacy of celebrities. But when an ordinary family like Millie Dowler’s is subjected to the same horrors, then the British public seems, rightly, to draw a line: and the politicians whose cynical antennae are always working overtime for an opportunity - took it.

           

FROM THE MOMENT WHEN Millie Dowler became a victim of hacking, then politicians, competitors, and liberal opponents, including the BBC, knew they had a chance to get their man. Until an ordinary family were cruelly subjected to such a criminal act, the politicians, as well as Murdoch’s competitors, knew that the public cared little about phone hacking.

            But with Millie Dowler, an opportunity that had taken over four decades to accomplish finally arrived; and it set the liberal hearts fluttering. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee was ecstatic at the possibility of News Corporation’s bereavement.

            News Corporation will survive, despite Polly sticking pins in an effigy of Rupert Murdock. Rupert Murdoch identified that, in this country in the eighties, the printing industry needed reformation. What he then did was to counter antiquated employment practices with modern technology. In so doing he had to lay off several thousands of printers at Wapping.

            However, before those of you not born or are too young to understand what was going on at the time of the Wapping dispute in the 1980s, let me tell you.

            Rupert Murdoch appreciated the advances in technology that were then on the market; he also understood that such computerised technology would undermine the melted lead approach to newspaper printing.

            In Fleet Street at the time, the printing unions enjoyed what were then widely described as “Spanish practices” within the newspaper industry. This meant, for instance, that printers would clock in and go home; it meant that the aristorcratical practice of inheritance, applied to the families of employees in the printing industry, just as they applied, at the time, to the families of dock workers. This meant that the hereditary principle (much despised by the Left) had applied to both print workers and  dockers; just as it applied to the much despised Royal Family.

            Fleet Street needed shaking up and Rupert Murdoch led the charge and has never been forgiven since. But rather than living up to the Right-wing despot painted of him by the Left, Murdoch is above all a business man seeking out profit for both himself and his shareholders. It matters little to him whether his newspapers belong to the Right or Left, for each of them represent a targeted  constituency that will bring him profit.

            Rupert Murdoch may be a son of the Right; but he is above all else a business man, and as such is immune from such categorisation. For is the loss-making Times or Sunday Times Right-wing? Murdoch’s shareholders would not allow him to organise News International in such a bias fashion. Share holders look toward their dividends. They would not look favourably upon a CEO of a company that sought, for purely ideological reasons, to bend his whole empire to any kind of dogmatic will. Profit and profit alone is the raison d’être of  any entrepreneur including Rupert Murdoch.

THE MURDOCH’S have supplicated themselves before this committee as they will have to do before the numerous other committees of enquiry, whether in this country or America and Australia. Whether, during these confrontations Wendi Deng will be able to protect her husband as she did yesterday only time will tell.

            News International under Murdoch’s tutelage has become a successful international corporation. Murdoch has had to rely upon the market place for his achievements. He has had to use the market place rather than pick the pockets of the tax payer for much of his income; unlike the BBC, who are celebrating what they hope will be this great man’s departure.

            Rupert Murdoch bared a well justified grudge against this country. As when, in an emotional interlude to his evidence; he referred to his journalist father who wrote exposing the stupidity of the British adventure on the shore of Gallipoli during the First World War.

            Following his father’s expose, the British establishment (after all it was Churchill  who thought the whole episode of Gallipoli up) turned on the Rupert’s father and left Rupert himself with a grudge against the British establishment. A grudge, I feel sure, I for one, would have shared given such a circumstance.

            It was the standard of journalism shown by his father that Rupert felt the News of the World had betrayed by hacking into the lives of people like Millie Dowler; and it was this betrayal that led to his decision to close the News of the World.

           

              

           

           

           

LORD GLASMAN COMMENTS ON IMMIGRATION

LORD GLASMAN, DESCRIBED as being one of Ed Milliband’s top advisors has called for a freeze on all immigration. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, the noble Lord speaks of drawing a line and insisting that Britain is “not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first”, implying that, as things stand at the moment, this is exactly what the UK has become – an outpost of the UN.

            Of course, the Labour Party was quick to distance itself from Lord Glasman’s comments, insisting that they were his own views and not representative of those of the Labour Party.

            Closing the stable door… is one aphorism that springs to mind. For was it not the noble Lord’s own party that deliberately, as a process of social engineering, set the immigration ball rolling? Having thrown the working class out with last week’s rubbish, the previous Labour government hoped to find their replacement within large scale immigration, calculating that they would be rewarded at the ballot box.

            They immediately stifled debate on this one subject close to the voters heart. Multiculturalism was to be the new orthodoxy after the death socialism. So if anyone challenged that orthodoxy they would be called racist - the modern counterpart of heretic.

            The last government did great damage to this country’s social fabric. They allowed more or less unhindered, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from outside the EU to enter our country. But then, they signed us up prematurely to the Schengen agreement that allowed a further explosion of migrants, mainly from eastern Europe, to seek employment by right within the UK. It was a decision that could have been delayed for three years and most other EU countries took advantage of the delay. But the then Labour government were in the middle of their great social experiment.

            When we signed the Schengen agreement, we were told that, government calculations estimated that no more than 13,000 people would take advantage of their right to come and work here; in the end, nearly half a million were to eventually take advantage of the agreement.

LORD GLASMAN HAS finally had his Damascene conversion, and is prepared to speak bluntly on this issue. Ed Milliband however, despite admitting earlier this year, to too many mistakes having been made by his party’s previous governance over immigration, he still felt the need to distance the Labour Party from his advisors comments. During Labour’s 13 years in power three million people were added to the population through immigration

            It is the sheer weight of immigrant numbers that has caused Lord Glasman to become so outspoken; he told the Telegraph: “We've got to reinterrogate our relationship with the EU on the movement of labour.

            “The EU has gone from being a sort of pig farm subsidised bloc. to

the free movement of labour and capital.”

            I assume that by “reinterrogate” the EU on the issue of movement of labour, he means persuading a rethinking of the Schengen agreement; a development that would meet with enthusiasm, especially among the North European nations.

            Which brings me back to my half finished aphorism. For the damage has already been done; and been done by Lord Glasman’s party. To call now for a freeze on immigration and for the EU to revisit the Schengen agreement is too little too late. For, short of forcefully removing our unwanted immigrants; which is wholly impracticable as well as being Nazistic, there is now very little we can do.

            Freezing the influx is needed and should be put in hand at once, but even this measure still weighs heavily upon the liberal conscience, and is unlikely to happen. But even if such a measure proved practicable, it would not in any way compensate for the damage that has already been done.

           

IMMIGRATION WAS NEVER about race but numbers. To the last Labour government, their numbers mattered little. For they were needed, or so we are told, to do the low paid work our own people refused.

            If this argument were true; then there is indeed something wrong with our welfare state that keeps in idleness over two million people who must receive more in state handouts than those immigrants that are employed in the kind of jobs the unemployed turn up their noses at.

            Rather than tackle head on the numbers in receipt of state handouts, the previous government, for what they judged to be their own electoral advantage, brought in millions from abroad to do the work.

            Lord Glasman should now speak further on this subject. The horse may have bolted but he can still help change the perception and the conscience of the liberal mind from within all parties, that has helped weave this tapestry.

            That a freezing of future immigration still challenges the liberal conscience and is considered extreme, does not bode well for the future of our nation.

IT APPEARS THAT  we are governed by weak and supine politicians throughout Europe. But it is those who fit the description within my own country that I wish to concentrate upon.

            “Enoch Powell was right” - this is often heard in pubs and taxis throughout the land. It is a comment familiar to our politicians and is often mocked by them; and if anyone dare take such an observation seriously, then they have recourse to the various quangos of the race relations industry to turn to for redress – I will not mention justice in this context; for it would be ill-deserved.

            This one time MP for a part of Wolverhampton  went even further than our noble Lord in his hostility to immigration; and it was this accrued Powellite hostility that has kept our Tory politician’s mouths shut on the subject for over 40 years; and allowed their Labour opponents to make hay on this issue.

            Enoch Powell, if you listen to much of the liberal intelligentsia, was a racist. He was not of course; but to the colonial guilt ridden liberal establishment of his time, Enoch became the demon incarnate of racialism. It was from him that all prejudice and narrow-mindedness flowed into the tributaries of, first of all the National Front, and then the BNP.

            When Enoch Powell spoke, the working-class people that the Labour Party hierarchy came to despise, sat up and listened. In so doing they truly represented their British culture, that evolved into a single tongue that eventually carried the world before it.

IN CONTEMPORARY TERMS, Lord Glasman, through the nature of his current intervention on the subject of immigration, could be compared with the demon Enoch. I say this because Lord Glasman’s somewhat sensible and rational observations on immigration, could, in the contemporary age be considered racist – especially by his own party’s leadership - the same leadership, you remember, that admitted to past mistakes on immigration.

            I feel that immigration into this country has become unstoppable. It has been made so by, in the first instance, the pea-brained liberalism that sought to salve its conscience by allowing almost free access into this country of members from all the countries of empire that they felt guilty about this country occupying. This was the first influx of people who apparently despised colonialism, but still sought citizenship of the “mother country”.

           

           

            

WE MUST TURN THE TIDE OF EUROPEANISATION

HAVING MADE THE RIGHT DECISION not to join the euro, one would have thought that a feeling of schadenfreude  would have been the right response to the unfolding calamity now besetting our European partners. After all, the whole venture was heralded within the corridors European power as the glue that will forever bond the continent’s various civilisations into a homogeneous whole. Much back slapping followed, and much inflating of egos occurred among those politicians chosen to oversee the whole undertaking.

            In this country at the time, there was much Merlot drunk (more in sorrow than in celebration) among our Europhiles within parliament; who had either spoke or typed their support for the euro. They  were all representative within the main parties who cursed the decision not to join. Their warnings of disaster for our economy went unheeded, and they sat back abiding their time until we would have to go cap in hand, as we once did in the early years when Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle refused us entry to the Common Market.

            Such was their certainty that history would once more assert itself with the euros success, that many a Europhile’s political career became predicated upon that success. So all that was needed was for such people to wait until the nation called them forward to serve; at a time when the pound sterling was bound to take on the pallid aspect of the ancient groat.

            Such people today are indeed silent, but not awaiting their chance of political preferment; but either hoping that their support will, over time be forgotten; or they will remain the servants of a European single currency come what may.

BUT MANY OF THOSE like myself, who believed that a single currency was not only undesirable, but unworkable (given the blue print concocted for its introduction), did not realise that our nation would be just as much a prisoner of its failings as those nations that drunk from the poisoned chalice.

            Today, the idiocies of our so-called European partners have created and spread a contagion, not only throughout Europe, but throughout the Western world. In this country four of our major banks, HSBC, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group, have, between them, tied up more than £214 billion in the so-called PIIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.

            What this will mean for us, is that we will have to keep pouring billions of pounds, either directly through Europe, or indirectly via the International Monetary Fund (IMF), into keeping these countries within some level of solvency.

            What should have happened of course, is that each of these countries should return to their own currencies. In the short term it would have meant further pain for all concerned. But in the long term, these nations would recover. They should not have been given the opportunity to become part of a European single currency in the first place. If I were a Europhile, I would have fought for a two speed Europe: which was something that, at the time, was airily dismissed…for it had to be all or nothing.

            Now, rather than feeling a sense of schadenfreude; because of our own bank’s exposure to the failing economies of Europe, those of us who stood fast against the whole idea of a single currency, are in a better frame of mind than the Europhiles who truly believed.

            But we now have to face the possibility of one or more of the PIIGS defaulting on their debts. According to Jason Karian, of the Economic Intelligence Unit[1]: ‘It was not politically palatable for the tests to consider an inevitable Greek default

‘After so much dithering to date, there is no elegant solution to the euro area’s debt crisis. The pressure brought to bear by the markets next week should sharpen the minds of policy-makers. Harsh medicine is needed. The sooner that officials swallow hard and take decisive, painful measures to draw a line under the crisis, the quicker that Europe’s sickly financial system can begin to nurse itself back to health.’

            Harsh medicine indeed! The whole European project was born from the tragedy of the Second World War, when a United States of Europe was first concocted as an antidote to Europe’s volatile past. Such an arrangement however, required a great deal of deception and duplicity from its enthusiasts if it were to see the light of day.

            As its enthusiasts were no architects; and as they were driven more by idealism than practicalities, they pursued their dream without any workable intellectual blue print. If they had, then a two speed euro would have saved them today’s devastation.

I AM STILL ANGRY; because, having made the right decision regarding a single currency, this nation still has to cough up billions because of our banks involvement in the PIIGS.    Our banks are still holding, not only the nation, but also the politicians to ransom. Despite making the intellectually correct decision regarding the introduction of the euro, we are still in thrall to the whole European project.

            I hope that the euro fails; I hope that the PIIGS’ nations can go back to their own currencies; I hope that, if this happens, the whole concept of European unification through political and economic union, will also fail.

            Europe is better served by its age old allegiances between nation states. Part of the enthusiasm for a United State of Europe in the modern world, is based upon a European anti-Americanism, and the hope of tailoring an entity to compete with the USA.

            Nationhood has been created over the centuries, involving the spilling of much blood wherever it has been attempted; and nationhood should remain the unit of identity for all peoples. Nationhood should not be sacrificed so easily when wars have been fought through the centuries to defend its existence involving the deaths of millions.

           

THE NATION STATE, for all nations within Europe, should continue and Europe’s people should remain suspect of their politicians wet dreams of a Europe that forfeits their national identity.

            The single currency was an unrealistic and impracticable adventure that has finally met its nemeses…the free market. Its creation should serve as a warning to any kind of reliance upon an idealistic future – especially when it involves economics.

            The European project, as it is currently perceived, had better die a graceful death than continue to incur the anger of its citizens. The people of Europe have been ill-served by every institution that the EU has managed to create. All over Europe the people have seen their own parliament reduced to nothing more than a rubber stamp for whatever the European union proclaims as law; and they wonder why they should continue to vote (in such circumstance) for their own parliament to exist at all.

            Such is the state in which we find ourselves; a state which our politicians show little enthusiasm for changing, yet a state that still recommends itself to the European Union.

           

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Quote taken from the Daily Mail[1]