Tag: UK

Convinced by unreality

Megan McArdle visits Britain and learns that there is more to a nation than its economy:

Somehow, over the last half-century, Western elites managed to convince themselves that nationalism was not real. Perhaps it had been real in the past, like cholera and telegraph machines, but now that we were smarter and more modern, it would be forgotten in the due course of time as better ideas supplanted it.

That now seems hopelessly naive. People do care more about people who are like them — who speak their language, eat their food, share their customs and values. And when elites try to ignore those sentiments — or banish them by declaring that they are simply racist — this doesn’t make the sentiments go away. It makes the non-elites suspect the elites of disloyalty. For though elites may find something vaguely horrifying about saying that you care more about people who are like you than you do about people who are culturally or geographically further away, the rest of the population is outraged by the never-stated corollary: that the elites running things feel no greater moral obligation to their fellow countrymen than they do to some random stranger in another country. And perhaps we can argue that this is the morally correct way to feel — but if it is truly the case, you can see why ordinary folks would be suspicious about allowing the elites to continue to exercise great power over their lives.

It’s therefore not entirely surprising that people are reacting strongly against the EU, the epitome of an elite institution: a technocratic bureaucracy designed to remove many questions from the democratic control of voters in the constituent countries. Elites can earnestly explain that a British exit will be very costly to Britain (true), that many of the promises made on Brexit’s behalf are patently ridiculous (also true), that leaving will create all sorts of security problems and also cost the masses many things they like, such as breezing through passport control en route to their cheap continental holidays. Elites can even be right about all of those things. They still shouldn’t be too shocked when ordinary people respond just as Republican primary voters did to their own establishment last spring: “But you see, I don’t trust you anymore.”

First of all, they’re not right. Second, they are evil, self-serving people who shouldn’t be trusted about anything. Third, if they’re for it, the wise thing to do is oppose it at all costs even if you don’t have a clue about it.

Politics by other means

It’s not at all surprising that European politicians have been attacked in more than one country. I’m only surprised that more of them haven’t been targeted, considering what they have done to their nations.

Labour MP Jo Cox was shot and injured in an attack in her constituency near Leeds today. The 41-year-old mother of two was left lying bleeding on the pavement after the incident in Birstall, West Yorkshire, an eyewitness said. She is in a critical condition in hospital.

Cox isn’t the first pro-immigration politician to be attacked in Europe. It would be astonishing if she was the last.

That being said, we’ll have to wait and see if the attacker is a genuine pro-British activist, if this is just another antifa false flag, or if it something else entirely.

#Brexit

If Oliver Cromwell were alive today, he would beseech the British people, in the bowels of Christ, to get out of the Fourth Reich while they can still do so peacefully.

What do they know about #Brexit?

Heat Street analyzes the Bilderberg 2016 attendees and notices something of potential significance:

As Heat Street has previously made clear, the secretive Bilderberg Group is rabidly anti-Brexit and ultra pro-EU. This year’s meeting, held in the German city of Dresden between Thursday and Sunday, will be no different.

No Brexiteers have been invited.

Having seen the guest list of the so-called shadow world government, it confirms that the attendees from Britain and Ireland have been campaigning publicly for months to keep Britain IN.

It might mean nothing. But my admittedly uninformed guess is that it means Bilderberg knows that Britain is going to vote for #Brexit, so they are having a strategy session on how to keep Britain in the European Union despite the British people clearly voting to leave it.

Business for #Brexit

320 business leaders sign a letter to the Telegraph:

Britain is the fifth biggest economy in the world and, on current projections, will overtake Germany to become Europe’s powerhouse. Britain is America’s largest inward investor, and our openness and dynamism mean we attract more inward investment than any other European country.

Three of the world’s top 10 universities are British, we speak the international language of business, our legal system is trusted round the world and we have an unrivalled reputation for innovation and creativity.

These are just some of the reasons we believe that Britain is world-class. However, we also believe that Britain’s competitiveness is being undermined by our membership of a failing EU.

Year-on-year the EU buys less from Britain because its economies are stagnant and millions of people are unemployed. According to Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, the euro “might explode”. Brussels’ red tape stifles every one of Britain’s 5.4 million businesses, even though only a small minority actually trade with the EU.

It is business – not government – which generates wealth for the Treasury and jobs for our communities. Outside the EU, British business will be free to grow faster, expand into new markets and create more jobs. It’s time to vote leave and take back control.

If you’re British, you must seize the opportunity to free yourselves from Eurofascist rule. Seize your national sovereignty and retake control of your own laws. Britain stood alone against a continent occupied by Berlin, and it can stand alone against a continent occupied by Brussels.

Vote Leave.

Cameron must go

Is it possible David Cameron is a secret Leave? Because short of growing a Hitler stache and dressing in a EU fascist uniform, complete with a blue-and-yellow armband, it’s hard to imagine how David Cameron could more aggressively drive the British people towards #Brexit:

Thousands march on No10 calling for Cameron to quit over tax revelations: Under-fire PM admits ‘I should have handled it better’ and agrees to publish his returns amid Panama Papers scandal

Protesters called for Mr Cameron to resign after he admitted profiting from more than £30k in an offshore tax haven. Revelations about Mr Cameron’s financial affairs followed a leak of 11 million documents held by Mossack Fonseca. PM’s ratings now lower than Jeremy Corbyn with 56% saying they did not think he had been ‘open and transparent’. Speaking at the Tory Spring Conference, Mr Cameron admitted he botched the handling of the row over his finances.

He’s also botched the handling of the most important political decision of his time, which is the recovery of British sovereignty.

Wonderful timing from Wikileaks.

I don’t know if the Prime Minister will resign, but he most certainly should follow the lead of Iceland’s prime minister and do so. He’s a horrendous hypocrite, he’s openly taken sides against the nation he is supposed to govern, and he has zero credibility.

This looks like a Labor protest, but if the Conservatives join them, as they should, Cameron will have no choice but to step down in disgrace. It’s time for Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage to step up and demand his resignation.

Britain is breaking out

#BREXIT takes the lead in the UK polls.

This may be their last chance to restore British sovereignty without having to fight for it. Here is hoping that the British people have the courage to vote themselves free of the fascist shackles that have been imposed upon them by decades of deceit.

It’s still early, though, and one expects the EU establishment will run a sweets-and-scares campaign sooner or later. There is, however, some reason to hope it will be an indifferent one, because there are no shortage of French and German politicians who would just as soon see the British leave.

Why Boris is Leave

The Mayor of London explains his reasoning in The Telegraph, and for someone who reportedly vacillated on the matter, it is a surprisingly powerful and comprehensive case:

I am a European. I lived many years in Brussels. I rather love the old place. And so I resent the way we continually confuse Europe – the home of the greatest and richest culture in the world, to which Britain is and will be an eternal contributor – with the political project of the European Union. It is, therefore, vital to stress that there is nothing necessarily anti-European or xenophobic in wanting to vote Leave on June 23.

And it is important to remember: it isn’t we in this country who have changed. It is the European Union. In the 28 years since I first started writing for this paper about the Common Market – as it was then still known – the project has morphed and grown in such a way as to be unrecognisable, rather as the vast new Euro palaces of glass and steel now lour over the little cobbled streets in the heart of the Belgian capital.

When I went to Brussels in 1989, I found well-meaning officials (many of them British) trying to break down barriers to trade with a new procedure – agreed by Margaret Thatcher – called Qualified Majority Voting. The efforts at harmonisation were occasionally comical, and I informed readers about euro-condoms and the great war against the British prawn cocktail flavour crisp. And then came German reunification, and the panicked efforts of Delors, Kohl and Mitterrand to “lock” Germany into Europe with the euro; and since then the pace of integration has never really slackened.

As new countries have joined, we have seen a hurried expansion in the areas for Qualified Majority Voting, so that Britain can be overruled more and more often (as has happened in the past five years). We have had not just the Maastricht Treaty, but Amsterdam, Nice, Lisbon, every one of them representing an extension of EU authority and a centralisation in Brussels. According to the House of Commons library, anything between 15 and 50 per cent of UK legislation now comes from the EU; and remember that this type of legislation is very special.

It is unstoppable, and it is irreversible – since it can only be repealed by the EU itself. Ask how much EU legislation the Commission has actually taken back under its various programmes for streamlining bureaucracy. The answer is none. That is why EU law is likened to a ratchet, clicking only forwards. We are seeing a slow and invisible process of legal colonisation, as the EU infiltrates just about every area of public policy. Then – and this is the key point – the EU acquires supremacy in any field that it touches; because it is one of the planks of Britain’s membership, agreed in 1972, that any question involving the EU must go to Luxembourg, to be adjudicated by the European Court of Justice.

It was one thing when that court contented itself with the single market, and ensuring that there was free and fair trade across the EU. We are now way beyond that stage. Under the Lisbon Treaty, the court has taken on the ability to vindicate people’s rights under the 55-clause “Charter of Fundamental Human Rights”, including such peculiar entitlements as the right to found a school, or the right to “pursue a freely chosen occupation” anywhere in the EU, or the right to start a business.

These are not fundamental rights as we normally understand them, and the mind boggles as to how they will be enforced. Tony Blair told us he had an opt-out from this charter.

Alas, that opt-out has not proved legally durable, and there are real fears among British jurists about the activism of the court. The more the EU does, the less room there is for national decision-making….

We have given so much to the world, in ideas and culture, but the
most valuable British export and the one for which we are most famous is
the one that is now increasingly in question: parliamentary democracy –
the way the people express their power.

This is a
once-in-a-lifetime chance to vote for real change in Britain’s relations
with Europe. This is the only opportunity we will ever have to show
that we care about self-rule. A vote to Remain will be taken in Brussels
as a green light for more federalism, and for the erosion of democracy.

In the next few weeks, the views of people like me will matter
less and less, because the choice belongs to those who are really
sovereign – the people of the UK. And in the matter of their own
sovereignty the people, by definition, will get it right.

The choice facing the British people is a straightforward one: will you be sovereign or will you be slaves?

This is one of the great moments of our lifetime, comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. One of the great nations of history is deciding whether to extinguish itself or not. If there is to always be an England, then England must vote Out.

BoREXIT is go

The Mayor of London declares his support for reclaiming British sovereignty:

Boris Johnson tonight declared he will campaign for Britain to leave the EU because it would save money and regain control for the British Parliament.

The Mayor of London electrified the EU referendum campaign by ending months of speculation and dismissing David Cameron’s EU deal as insignificant, saying he could not turn down this ‘once in a lifetime’ chance to quit the EU.

And he told the Prime Minister he was making the announcement by text just nine minutes before he appeared on live TV outside his north London home.

Mr Cameron was said to be ‘absolutely furious’ with the Mayor of London’s decision and earlier today he made a last ditch attempt to persuade him to join the In campaign by warning against ‘linking arms with Nigel Farage and George Galloway’.

Good on him. Johnson not only just ensured that he will become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain, he just significantly increased the probability that the title will actually mean something.

If you are British, vote BREXIT. Vote leave. Vote out. Escape the Fourth Reich while you can.