Europe: the long goodbye......

Now that the dust is at a least settling after the Juncker donnybrook, the chatterati are fairly unanimous that Cameron’s ‘humiliation’ makes it more difficult for him to take an ‘In’ stance for the referendum and that the UK has edged closer to Brixit.  The one certainty is that he will have no ‘piece of paper’ promising the changes that the British people want – in essence  what they voted for in 1975, a Common Market, not ‘ever closer union’. Brussels will show him the same distain as at Ypres.

 

That’s Dave’s problem.

 

But he now knows how EU politicians operate. Dirty deals at dinner. He has found out who his friends are. Nobody. He has experienced at first hand the treachery, lying, and back-stabbing that goes on.  No different from the Tory Party, then. But it is the complete lack of anything resembling statesmanship that should worry him and the rest of us. Where there should be giants there are only pygmies.

 

The reality is that unless there are seismic changes in the whole structure of the European ‘project, which have no chance of being forthcoming, we are now witnessing the early stages of the complete disintegration of the whole  corrupt, anti-democratic, bureaucratic tyranny of this rotten construct. Maybe 20 years will be needed for it to finally disappear into history but there is an awesome inevitability about it, like having a ring-side seat at the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

 

Little mention is made of the real weakness at the heart of Europe.

 

Its founders had ambitions for Europe to match or even outstrip America economically. Not only has this not happened but Europe has gone into economic decline relatively and absolutely. The Eurozone economy is sclerotic except in Germany, which continues to prosper on the back of an artificially low exchange rate. Overall growth stagnates, industrial production is declining, unemployment is at levels that are a threat to the very peace that the EU was supposed to ensure, and living standards are falling.

 

Already the nay-sayers are trying to make our flesh creep with misinformation about the economic disaster that would befall Britain outside the EU. They maintain that with more than 50% of Britain’s experts going to the EU our industry would be devastated with 3 million unemployed.

 

There are two things wrong with this argument.

 

First, it is simple fantasy that Europe would stop buying our goods and services. And we have run an adverse balance of trade with EU from the start. Does anyone really believe that Europe is going to put that favourable market at risk?

 

It disregards another key aspect. Outside the EU , Britain would be free to enter into free-trade agreements with the economies that really matter, the US, China,  India   and the Commonwealth.

 

Secondly, it isn’t true. The real proportion of exports to the EU is less than 50% because a large part of Britain’s export trade is transhipped world-wide via Antwerp and Rotterdam and other major European ports so they rank as ‘EU exports’.  Foreign imports to Ireland via Belfast count as ‘British’ exports when they are actually American or Japanese or whatever.

 

Meanwhile, it continues with its insane ambitions for an ever-wider EU.

 

The current chaos in the Ukraine is a direct result of EU provocation of Russia by attempting to bring t EU up to Russia’s borders. Membership for Albania is being seriously considered, a country that appears not to have a single qualification and an economy based on people-smuggling, drugs and stolen cars. Then there are Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia.  Just what they will bring to the party is not clear. This could be revenge time because Cameron can veto every new application, and must unless he gets major concessions on immigration.

 

It does not need to be this way. The British would be happy with the EU if its main concern was the incomplete creation of a single market in goods, labour, capital and services.(Germany has consistently blocked the latter to protect its own, a contradiction of what the EU is for). Instead, Brussels has increasingly strayed into territory where it has no business. This will be its downfall without radical change of which there is not the slightest sign.

 

To plagiarise WSC, ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning’.

Benefits culture: taming Leviathan...............

‘We must roll back the frontiers of the State’ was the clarion-call from a precocious, pudgy, pudding-basin coiffed 16-year old William Hague at the Tory Party conference all those years ago. He has not done much about it since.

 

There is a strong feeling in the US and  UK (but not in dirigiste Europe) that the state ‘has grown, is growing, and ought to be diminished’. The feeling is a tad inchoate. There is not much idea on how to achieve it.  The Tea Party doesn’t concern it with such niceties. It simply wants to roll the clock back to the19th Century when the Federal State was so small it had not even introduced income tax and the good ol’ boys could get on with their lives without ever coming into contact with officialdom. They may not realise this but it makes them disciples of Karl Marx part of whose philosophy was that under communism the central state would largely wither away along with capitalism as the workers took control of their own destiny. So Sarah’s really a commie.

 

No use looking to the Land of the Free for solutions: it is an over-regulated swamp, over-governed with myriads of official bodies the purpose of which is, in many cases, totally opaque, plus vested interests such as agricultural subsidies designed for poor farmers during the Great Depression being grabbed by agribusiness, plus over-mighty public service unions that plunder the revenues.

 

To find a cure for over-government we must first find the cause.

 

And it’s not Them. It’s Us.

 

We constantly insist that government should do more –‘They should do something about it’ is the plaintiff cry in almost any situation. We want bigger, better and more services. We have become welfare junkies. The Welfare State was largely conceived by the Webbs way back in Edwardian times, but its real father, Beveridge, was the architect. His concept was a safety net. Welfare has since become a lifestyle choice. We have created a dependency culture that creates entire nuclear families in which nobody has done a tap of work since leaving school. We are now told that 56% of taxpayers take more money out of the system than they put in. Half the country is grub-staking the other half.

 

Iain Duncan Smith’s reforms are a start to putting things back in order, but they go nothing like far enough. The cut-off point for benefits is £24,000 a year. This is the average wage (not the minimum). Not much incentive to work there, then. A family nearby lives courtesy of welfare in a large expensive house currently on the market for around £800,000. There are 5 adults all living on benefits. If they are drawing at the ’cap’, that’s £120,000 going into the household. They each have a car.

 

Politicians of all stripes know that this is unsustainable and something must be done. The trouble is that they have yet to figure out how to get re-elected afterwards.

 

It does not have to be this way. Elsewhere they do things differently.

 

In parts of Asia social services are not delivered by Government  but by NGOs specifically set up for the purpose and which are subject to very stringent performance ratings. If they fail to meet them the funding is cut off and they lose their jobs.  In Singapore welfare is funded by a levy of 20% on wages and 15.5% on the employer. What you get out is what you put in.

 

In the Nordic countries, the smug socialism ran out of money. Reform moved from desirable to necessary or bankruptcy was certain to follow. A system in which income tax could exceed 100% had no alternative.

 

There has been a revolution in social welfare.

 

Pension funds have been put on a defined-contribution basis in place of defined-benefit. Most education is provided by in dependent schools with a voucher system for parents so that they have a choice. Much of health-care has been privatised, and there is a small charge for treatment. The retirement age has been raised to 67. Taxes have been slashed, productivity increased as people return to the work-force, and the Scandinavian economies are amongst the strongest in the world.

 

Like it or not, radical change must come to Britain. Leviathan can be cut down to size.

 

But we have to get our snouts out of the ‘eat all you can’ running buffet.

 

As Maggie was wont to say ‘there is no alternative!’

 

Between Iraq and a hard place................

‘As I sit here in the bar of the Hotel Splendido all around me men are dropping like flies’.

 

Peter Cook’s parody of foreign correspondents, possibly inspired by Sefton Delmer’s eyewitness account  for the Daily Express of the mutiny of the Congolese Force Publique  in 1960,  written in the Elephant and Castle Hotel in Zambia, might be apt for the confused reports about what is happening in Western Iraq.

 

We are told that Mosul was taken by 1000 ISIS fighters against 30,000 Iraqi troops in one of history’s greatest routs and mass cowardice on an epic scale, with soldiers ‘casting away their arms in the face of the enemy’. Inexplicably,  they also abandoned their transport.

 

The probable truth is that there was no battle at all; the army simply scarpered. And they may have had good reason.

 

Many will have been Sunnis who would have no stomach for doing Shia dirty-work against their co-religionists. Shias themselves would have little cause to defend Sunni towns against Sunnis. Officers were nowhere to be seen.

 

Sunni now occupy almost the whole of their ancient lands. They will not give them up.

 

The winners are likely to be the Kurds. Kurdistan, which has been doing very nicely economically, is now a de facto state.

 

But there are deeper causes.

 

Since taking over, Maliki has followed an aggressive anti-Sunni agenda. An early action was the attempted arrest of his Sunni Deputy. He has got rid of Sunni army officers painstakingly trained by the Americans and British painstakingly, sold commissions to Shia, and reduced the fighting capability of the military to what is now being displayed. He deliberately undermined the military so that it could not become a political threat. He installed political ‘commissars’, and used the army against political rivals. His government has been thoroughly corrupt, looting the treasury on a massive scale. But what will destroy Iraq is the marginalisation of the Sunni when exactly the opposite was vital.

 

It is now a reasonable certainty that what we are now seeing is a redrawing of the post-WW1 boundaries carved out by the British and French. Iraq can only survive as a Sunni/Shia/ Kurdish federation, but there is the strong possibility that three new countries will emerge out of the rubble.

 

The eventual losers may be the victors; ISIS. Its barbarity, ruthlessness and primitivity have alientated its erstwhile allies in Syria, and neither the Syrians, nor the Iraqis, nor the Iranians in particular can permit its survival.

 

Republicans have said that the fault lies with Obama for pulling out of Iraq prematurely. Prematurely? US troops had been in Iraq for11 years. When Maliki refused to indemnify them against prosecution in Iraqi courts Obama had no alternative.

 

Obama’s best and most likely stance will be masterly inactivity. He doesn’t have a dog in this fight and will wisely stay out of it. He is not going to get into bed with Iran. That country has the most to lose by a Sunni takeover in Baghdad; this would be ‘finis’ to Iran’s ambitions for dominance in the region. Maliki’s days are almost certainly numbered. He needs American help, but is unlikely to get it. And the US is very adept at ‘regime change’.

 

As for ourselves, we should not get over-excited about the prospect of 200  - or is it 2000 -British Muslim mercenaries with ISIS bringing terrorism home with them. If the anti-terrorist authorities really know the numbers, then it is reasonable to suppose that they also know their identities.

 

The role of the West should be as spectator only.

‘They make a desert and call it peace’’.

Obama was pontificating about Iraq on BBC  a last week, and got it completely wrong. So have all the chattering classes.

 

They chunter on about jihadists, Islamic extremists, terrorists and more.

 

It’s none of the above. It is both a religious and a civil war. These have always been notable for massacres and atrocities on a barbaric scale.

 

What we are seeing is a resumption of the Sunni – Shia conflict that has been going on spasmodically for centuries and the disintegration of the artificial states that were so casually and treacherously created by the British and French after WW1, breaking all the promises made to the Arabs on the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Saudi Arabia is justifiably worried. The fall of the House of Saud is only a matter of time, although it keeps paying danegeld to ISIS and every other Wahhabi militant grouping .

 

Syria has ceased to exist as a viable state and may well emerge as three separate entities, a major cause of the destabilisation of Iraq. Kurdistan is a de facto state.

 

Western policy and activity in Muslim countries has been such an unmitigated disaster that it is difficult to imagine how it could have been worse. The initial idiocy was to overthrow the only stable, secular regime in the Middle East for reasons that have still not been fully explained. It was clear at the time that the notion of replacing Saddam’s autocracy with democracy was not going to happen.

 

There was no follow-up plan after ‘shock and awe’. The Iraqi military was disbanded but not disarmed. Anyone with a Ba’athist connection was banned from public office i.e. everyone with administrative skills since membership of the Party was a prerequisite. Looting was virtually unchecked. The rule of law was almost non-existent and ‘democracy’ was a mockery.

 

When the US occupied Iraq, it put in place politicians who were incompetent crooks whose sole qualification was that they were well-disposed towards America. Every Government Ministry was an opportunity for  enrichment on a breath-taking scale, including 10years ago more than $1 billion intended for arms procurement. The US authorities must have been aware of it.

 

Iraqis regard their leaders as racketeers who will steal everything possible

 

The war cost trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of military casualties. Iraqi civilian dead numbered more than 100,000. Nearly 10,000 were killed in 2013.

 

Whether the carnage in Iraq will increase the risk of terrorism in the West remains to be seen, but there is little sign of it in the present conflict.  The one certainty is that there will  no Western ‘boots on the ground’, but real diplomatic and foreign policy opportunities might arise.

 

The media has belatedly caught on to the prospect of a rapprochement between the US and Iran. Already Iranian military assistance is arriving in Baghdad. Saudi Arabia will  have a fit of carpet-biting, but the House of Saud is yesterday; Iran is tomorrow.

 

In the likely event of Iraqi oil supplies being disrupted there is a pretext for immediately lifting the oil embargo on Iran.

 

Will the West see this as a ‘carpe diem’ moment? Not on previous performance!

 

Junking Juncker: Dave's dilemma........

No doubt about it; Cameron is painting himself into a corner with his desperate attempts to stop Juncker getting the top job in the EU nomenklatura; it will make absolutely no difference whoever gets selected because all the candidates are dedicated and fanatical federalists who will push ahead with ‘ever closer union’.

 

 

Of course, it is difficult to think of anyone less acceptable to Britain than the boozy, bombastic Luxembourger.

 

 

His ‘previous’ was leading Luxemburg, a statelet about the size of Watford, dependent on money-laundering and tax-avoidance schemes for big-hitters such as Amazon. He departed under a cloud after being involved in a security scandal. (The previous Luxembourger in the top job got an early bath for corruption, along with rest of the Commission).

 

 

He is well-known for his total disregard of democratic principles; his political  mentor might well be Machiavelli.

 

 

Dave’s problem is that he is a closet Europhile, and he is worried that the appointment of Juncker will result in his reform proposals being DOA followed by a massive ‘Brexit’ result in the Referendum. Contrarily, Juncker might be prepared to concede much if it neutralises the annoying Brits and leaves them in the EU slow lane, allowing the Fourth Reich to further consolidate.

 

 

But if Cameron junks Junkers, not only will he make enemies but also he will simply get another federalist fanatic. All the candidates are out of the same box who, like the Bourbons, ‘forget nothing and learn nothing’.

 

 

And it is a delusion to think that anything will change after the large Europhobe vote in the recent elections. Brussels will simply ignore it. As proof, the results had scarcely been published when it was up to its old meddlesome tricks. Within days it had infuriated Osborne by telling him what to do about the largely non-existent housing bubble (mainly a London phenomenon) and attempting to impose regulations on British banks.

 

 

To add insult to injury, it has been persistently blocking IDS’s plans to further restrict benefits payments to immigrants by throwing writs at him. He is not impressed.

 

 

Farage must be doing cartwheels of delight; the circumstances are near-perfect for the Europhile demolition squad.

 

 

The latest is that the EU Parliament election for the President  (which is disputed by the national leaders who rightly say that the choice is their prerogative) will be a secret ballot. So much for promises of more openness and democracy. But then the EU has always shown a fine disregard for the law, witness their illegal bail-outs during the Euro crisis.

 

 

Dave would do well to get close to the AfD, the Action for Germany Party that gained seats at the recent EU elections. It is not Europhobe. That would be political suicide in Germany. But is fiercely anti the Euro which it rightly regards as a disaster and  doomed to failure without fiscal union. It  views the idea of a European Defence Force as an absurdity. It is anti the ‘green’ power obsession that is making Germany’s economy increasingly uncompetitive, with energy costs nearly four times those of the US.

 

 

In a recent TV interview, its spokesman, Dr Hugh Bronson – a German despite his name  and impeccable English - questioned the entire EU construct as it exists at present, with the incompatibilities between successful northern economies and the semi-third world status of some countries to the east and south. He reflected on whether the solution was to reconstruct the EU  as a trading bloc comprising only the North.

 

 

Dave’s possible supporters might be The Netherlands and the Scandinavians.  Italy will be behind him. A long way behind.

 

 

The one certainty from this squalid shambles is that if Dave returns empty handy from his reform negotiations the outcome of the referendum in 2017 will be a foregone conclusion.