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Britain goes to the polls tomorrow to elect a round of representatives for the European Parliament, for UK Local Authorities and the office of Mayor of London.
Or, more accurately, about one-third of Britain goes to the polls. The other two-thirds cannot be bothered and, while I entirely sympathise with their attitude of non-engagement, it is my intention to buck the trend and cast my vote. I will explain.
I have never even attempted to conceal my contempt for the ‘democratic process’ as presently configured. In modern parlance, ‘democracy’ has become a euphamism for the perpetuance of a permanent political class, devoted to conducting their mischief without hindrance, objection or opposition. When all political candidates are required to sign up to a rigidly conformist and hegemonic agenda, the process of voting becomes a waste of time. At best, it is endorsement of the status quo, a rubber-stamped approval for ‘business as usual’. → Continue reading: This town needs an enema
Tory leader Michael Howard is now loudly stressing his Eurosceptic credentials’ as the Euro elections come closer and it looks like the UKIP will be seriously cutting into the Tory vote.
Of course talk is cheap and the only way the Tory Party is ever going to actually become a genuine (rather than a tactical) Eurosceptic party is if the party’s very survival and the jobs and pay checks of its professional politicos is actually put in real, rather than potential, jeopardy… and there is only one way to do that.
Do not reward a decade of duplicity with a mindlessly tribal vote for the Conservatives. If you are going to vote at all, vote UKIP tomorrow.
That poor man in the straightjacket is having nightmares again. He is crying out in his sleep and banging his head off the walls: [note: link to article in UK Times may not be available to readers outside of UK]
EUROPEAN governments are to scrap dozens of “unnecessary” and “patronising” EU laws and directives under a plan to make the Union less bureaucratic and more in touch with the lives of its citizens.
The “bonfire of the diktats” will put an end to Europe-wide rules on the length of ladders that window cleaners can use, and laws on the materials that have to be used for children’s playgrounds.
The ambitious plan to roll back the rules made by the European Commission, which is being championed by the Dutch Government and supported by Britain, is a response to the growing concern that Brussels interferes too much in daily life, and that more decisions should be left to national governments.
About half of all laws in Britain are drawn up in Brussels and then adopted by Westminster. For environmental legislation, nearly 90 per cent of laws are made in Brussels, with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs threatened with fines if it does not put them into effect. There are 2,500 EU directives in force, with hundreds added every year.
A bit of ‘nice-guy’ PR for the run-up to the European Parliament elections to get us in a positive frame of mind. It is just a tease really. Seldom have I seen a proposal that is going nowhere on so many levels.
For every regulation they manage to scrap, two more will pop up to replace it. And even if they somehow manage to stop Brussels producing more laws, they will simply be minted at national level instead. That is what governments do. They have no other skills to offer the marketplace.
Persuading government not to enact new laws is like trying to persuade birds not to fly. You cannot change the nature of the beast. You have to clip its wings.
This is the question exercising the chancelleries of the European Union, as well as the larger horizons of the Beltway. However, one position concerns the elected leader of the free world; the other is the appointed non-entity of the slow-motion car crash vacuuming the vestiges of freedom in Europe.
Who should be the next president of the European Commission? You could argue that the whole enterprise is irredeemably corrupt, and should instill an appropriate reflex: fight or flee. Nevertheless, in the real world, what would be the preferred qualities of any candidate?
Dennis MacShane, Britain’s Minister for Europe, has outlined a few:
MacShane said the successor to Commission President Romano Prodi, who EU leaders hope to name at a summit in Brussels later this month, need not be a former EU leader. “He has to be able to communicate a vision of Europe, he has to see himself not as Europe’s king but as its servant, and he does not necessarily have to be a prime minister,” MacShane said.
“A strong commissioner or a strong minister would probably be the best choice,” MacShane said. “A Commission President must also not be seen as anti-American,” he added.
The candidate should have strong political experience and international influence; the ability to communicate well; and the desire to draw the United States of America and Europe closer together. As a libertarian, I would prefer to see a political and economic liberal who shows an understanding of and a willingness to argue for free trade and welfare reform, two areas where the EU has failed to progress, with deadly consequences for Africa and Asia.
Do the current candidates fit the Bill? If any reader has ever heard of and thinks that Guy Verhofstadt, Jean-Claude Junckers, Wolfgang Schuessel or Chris Patten are promising candidates, stop reading now and go seek professional help.
The European Union has an opportunity to demonstrate that it will choose the next President of the Commission on merit. That is why these obscure clones from the European parasitical classes should be ignored. They should appoint an American, one person who is more liberal and more right than the current crop: Step forward:
William Jefferson Clinton
I recently gave a presentation in Bratislava, Slovakia, on the evils of ‘competition policy’ and the ‘entry and exit costs’ economic model, which is little more than an excuse for more business-killing government intervention.
My first trip there in 1991 had been as economic and political adviser to that country’s Prime Minister when Slovakia was part of the Czech & Slovak Federal Republic (1989-1992). In those days, talking about a single tax band, a competitive advantage of Slovakia compared with Germany, why an independent Slovakia would actally reform better than under Prague tutelage and so forth was often like trying to explain Switzerland to a Pol Pot survivor.
The first photo that I took in 1991 was of the Iron Curtain seen from the Austrian side, a forest of trees leading up to the jagged line of a forest of rotting concrete.
This time on the way back I took a coach from Bratislava to Vienna airport. The following photos show the turnaround.
Slovakia�s ruling coalition: conservatives and libertarians
(photo taken at Bratislava bus station)
This Slovak election poster for the EU parliament
seems to get the message. (Sorry about the
quality but I snapped it out of a coach window
on a bend, outskirts of Bratislava)
Austrian Social Democrats know what they stand for:
No privatisation!
(dotted all over the Austrian countryside North of Vienna)
Not everyone who reads this blog will be particularly keen to know what the new EUropean Parliament building in Brussels looks like. But if you would like to know about this, I have a posting up at my Culture Blog which starts with a huge aerial photo of the place taken by someone else, and then has twenty four thumbnail photos you can click on to get to bigger photos that I took myself of this vast building when I was myself in Brussels not long ago.
It has taken me more than two months to get around to exhibiting these photos, for which apologies, but I presumably things have not changed that much since I took them. Partly this was because until recently I had much to learn about how to do this – “thumbnails” etc. (merci Monsieur) – and partly it was that, even if you do know how to stick up a mass of these thumbnails, it is still (for me anyway) a very unwieldy process to actually do, and to actually arrange them in a semi-coherent order, especially since this was the first blog posting effort along these lines that I have attempted.
The building is a scarily impressive edifice, or rather, agglomeration of edifices. I really missed not having a wide angle lens. As it was, it was like trying to photograph an elephant in a crowd. All I could do was assemble lots of details (hence the need for lots of pictures), with only occasional views that got the bigger picture, and none of the whole thing.
Which is only appropriate, considering that this is the EU, and that this entire building is itself only a relatively minor part of the big EU picture, which is itself utterly impossible to get in one snap.
Speaking as someone who is really far too cynical for his own good, I shall believe this when I see it:
Voters in next month’s European elections could shock the political establishment by giving the United Kingdom Independence Party more seats than the Liberal Democrats, a poll suggests today.
A YouGov survey for The Telegraph indicates that UKIP, which is committed to British withdrawal from the European Union, is ahead of the Lib Dems among those who are “very likely” to vote.
But I really and truly hope that I do see it.
This on the midday BBC Radio 4 news:
The Government is resisting pressure from the European Union to introduce random breath tests.
Yes, my ears did not deceive me. Here is the story in writing:
Police should carry out random breath tests as a matter of course, according to the European Commission.
Under existing laws, UK police can only carry out a breath test if they believe the driver has been drinking.
But the European Commission wants all member states to allow its police to carry out random tests.
The Home Office said introducing random testing was “inefficient in catching drink-drive offenders.”
Whenever the British Government describes itself as resisting pressure from the European Union, it is a good bet that this pressure will in due course be succumbed to.
I’m watching Robert Kilroy-Silk on Question Time, and I think he’s doing rather well.
Kilroy started out as a Labour MP, believe it or not. But he was never really convincing in the role. The others did not like him, and he sensed that he was not one of them, was my impression. Too keen on personal advancement, and not nearly keen enough on concealing it under a veneer of class solidarity. So he stopped doing that and switched to Kilroy, one of those early to mid-morning mini-amphitheatre televised bore-ins with Kilroy himself as the roving interlocutor.
Kilroy’s basic problem with Kilroy was that he seemed to regard everyone present except himself an idiot, a feeling which must have been hard to fight, given that everyone present except himself was at the very least behaving idiotically. (I speak as one who used to appear on this show myself from time to time, until I saw the pointlessness of my ways.) Kilroy tried to conceal his contempt for everyone under a layer of somewhat overdone good humour and what I presume he thought was charm, but what everyone else called smarm.
As his show moved away from semi-intelligent debate into the territory already occupied more entertainingly by Jerry Springer – my mother is a cross-dresser, I want to have a fight with my step-dad, my twin sister is a prostitute and I am a nun and I want to have a fight with her, etc. – Kilroy’s manner became ever more off-putting and false and desperate.
But Kilroy-Silk’s manner on Question Time was downright … appropriate. Gone was the layer of smarm. And out from under it came this really quite attractive and intelligent man. He used to be hated because he was appalling. Now he will be hated because he is not nearly as appalling as his enemies would like him to be.
Most of us are familiar with the Peter Principle, the one that says that people are promoted until they arrive with a thud at their level of incompetence, at which they then remain for ever. But in politics as in life generally, I think we sometimes observe the opposite process. Sometimes, people arrive at their level of competence, having just buggered about pointlessly for the previous two decades until they reached it. Kilroy-Silk strikes me as a fine example of a man who is now, as a Eurosceptic politician with the right, the duty, and the inclination to speak his mind, at last arriving at his level of competence.
It could turn out that by switching off Kilroy the talkshow host, and unleashing Kilroy-Silk the reborn politician, the BBC has made one of its most important contributions to the EUro-debate, in favour of the NO side.
Please understand that I am talking here about competence, rather than about the rights and wrongs of it all. I generally hate what politicians do, but my point is: some of them do it very well, while others mysteriously run out of steam, seem woefully miscast, and should have carried on with what they had previously been doing.
For the opposite tendency, a perfect example of the original Peter Principle rather than of the reverse version of it which I am here offering: Glenda Jackson. What a fine actress. And what a sad, drab failure as a politician.
We never saw this coming, did we?
The Government signalled yesterday that it was willing to breach the first of its “red line” safeguards on the European constitution by agreeing to cede Britain’s veto over sensitive areas of criminal justice.
The shift in policy raises fears that Brussels could acquire the power to interfere with the common law tradition of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and rules of evidence.
Whereas, until today, nobody had ever thought that possible.
I remember once defining “compromise” as you doing something I want, and in exchange me doing something else I want. Which makes me a bit like the EU. What a horrible thought. Eeeeuuuu!!!
In France on Sunday, Nicolas Sarkhozy has manouvered the UMP government party into supporting a referendum for the proposed EU constitution [link in French].
The decision to hold a referendum will be taken by President Jacques Chirac (anyone’s guess what that will be), but the call by the newly appointed Minister of Finance represents a shift away from automatic rubber-stamping by the French parliament.
Privately Chirac will be fuming. He hates Sarkhozy and fears his possible election in 2007 as President. Unlike the recently convicted fraudster Alain Juppé, Mr Sarkhozy might not feel inclined to whitewash the current President’s dubious financial history. Meanwhile, Alain Juppé the UMP party chairman, has endorsed Mr Sarkhozy’s call with the qualification: “within the constitutional prerogatives of the President”. Mr Juppé no doubt feels it is a good time to roll with his colleague’s punches.
He is back and this time he is pissed off!!
Former Labour MP and TV presenter Roberty Kilroy-Silk has emerged from his brief period of public exile to announce that he intends to stand as a candidate for the UK Independence Party in the forthcoming European Parliament elections.
The UKIP leadership will almost certainly regard this as something of coup and not without justification. They have had a dreadfully hard time getting any public traction for their campaign to get Britain out of the EU altogether and celebrity commitments of this nature can (if not turn the tide) at least help to raise profile.
But what will the Europhile side make of this? Hay, is the answer. Indeed, the harvesting is already underway:
Robert Kilroy-Silk, the politician turned TV presenter who lost his daytime show for insulting the Arab nations, has now joined a group of people who think that continental Europe is ruled by “barbarians”.
The former Labour MP, whose opinions have become more right-wing as he has grown older, wants Britain to withdraw from the EU altogether, and to impose heavy restrictions on immigration.
The entire case of the Europhile lobby consists of the wicked calumny that anti-EU campaginers are merely a motley bunch of rabid, red-necked bigots and foaming-at-the-mouth nazi-types who just do not like ‘foreigners’. It is the only weapon in their armoury and they wield it with alacrity.
Given Mr. Kilroy-Silk’s recent, well-publicised and rather uncharitable outbursts (the nature of which were sufficient, in the current ethical climate, to brand him as an incorrigable racist) his candidacy is going to provide the Europhiles with a big dose of ‘see-we-told-you-so’ corroboration for their libels. I expect that they will milk this unfortunate and inaccurate conflation for all it is worth.
I hope that good fortune smiles on UKIP and Mr Kilroy-Silk’s campaign for electoral success but I do fear that his candidacy will prove to be a propoganda victory for the other side.
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