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Although the EU is expanding eastwards, clutching more of the nations of Eastern Europe to its regulating breast on May 1st, only Britain and Ireland will actually be welcoming the people of those countries as residents.
Britain and Ireland may soon be the only two states willing to open their doors entirely to the 73 million people joining the European Union in May. Countries such as Sweden, Holland, and Denmark, which initially pledged to let migrants from the 10 new states work freely in their countries from day one have changed their minds. They fear an influx will drive down wages and overload their welfare systems. Per capita incomes in the ex-Communist countries are just 40 per cent of EU levels.
And yet even officials at the benighted EU admit…
Privately, EU diplomats say the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and others are ideal guest workers. Well-educated, they bring fresh blood and dynamism to an ageing Europe. If they stay, it is usually because they inter-marry. Their “migration profile” is starkly different from Muslim groups, who studies suggest are resistant to assimilation and who prohibit their children marrying into the host society.
On the purely non-scientific observational evidence of my own eyes, there do seem to be rather a lot of happy looking English blokes wandering around London with eye-widening tall blondes from east of the Oder-Neisse line, so that seems about right… which makes me wonder why the Netherlands is not welcoming the Eastern Europeans with open arms!
Well if the rest of western Europe cannot see past the ‘waves of gypsies’ scare stories and see the huge benefits of well educated, easy to assimilate Slovaks, Czechs and Poles, then their loss will be Britain and Ireland’s gain when the best and brightest (amongst other things) decamp from the east and move en-mass to London and Dublin. Excellent!
   Vitajte v Londyne!
I have been meaning for some days to add to this posting here about Denis O’Keeffe’s translation of Benjamin Constant’s Principles of Politics Applicable To All Governments the information that this book is not just available directly from its publisher but also, for a mere £15 from the Institute of Economic Affairs, where Denis O’Keeffe spoke briefly about the book last week. And while at the IEA website I also came across a recent IEA publication, entitled Friend or Foe? What Americans should know about the European Union, co-authored by IEA Director John Blundell and Gerry Frost.
The IEA is an important institution with a massive amount of momentum built up from five decades of publishing about and arguing for classical liberalism and the free market. What is says will definitely count for something. This particular publication is 44 pages in length and is downloadable in its entirety as a pdf file. The following is its conclusion:
Such are the huge disparities in economic, technological and military power and the prevailing trends that the ambition to create a unitary European state as a countervailing force to the United States is doomed, but its pursuit continues to the detriment of the economic and security interests of both North Americans and Europeans. Nevertheless, having endorsed the project for half a century, many Americans seem reluctant to withdraw their support. Some evidently believe that while their original expectations have been disappointed, the process of European integration is so well established that any reappraisal of US policy towards the EU would produce more problems than it would solve.
That approach fails to take into account both the influence that the US could still bring to bear and the fragility of the political project now approaching fruition. In our view, the attempt to bring about ‘ever closer union’ will ultimately have to be abandoned, either as the mounting economic and political price of integration becomes more widely grasped, or because Europe’s supra-national institutions break down.
Rather than wait for either to happen, the interests of the US would better served by a policy which sought to strengthen the position of those within Europe who recognise that the continent is proceeding down an historic blind-alley and wish to pursue other possibilities. It is surely time that American policymakers were more candid about the inevitable implications of particular EU measures. → Continue reading: Friend or Foe? What Americans should know about the European Union
A lovely interlude in the Telegraph yesterday:
Romano Prodi, the European Commission president, accused Britain and other member states yesterday of betraying the historic goal of EU expansion by depriving Brussels of the money needed to make enlargement work. Mr Prodi said he was mystified as to why some countries were proposing to reduce the ceiling on payments to the EU budget when the continent was about to unite “for the first time in history”.
First time in history? How about Charlemagne? Napoleon? Hitler?
Britain and five other EU nations have challenged the Commission to reduce the maximum share of national budgets that Brussels can spend from 1.24 per cent of GDP to one per cent. How revolutionary…
Will the German embassy protest, one wonders? Hardly the spirit of reconciliation.
Most of our readers probably know Tony Robinson best as the much put-upon Baldrick at the bottom of the Blackadder pecking order. He has cunning plans, but they don’t work.
However, last night I watched a Tony Robinson effort that was slightly more substantial than one of Baldrick’s plans, and an interesting sign of the times in this United Kingdom of ours, namely a couple of Channel 4 TV shows about the history of the British monarchy.
I missed the early part of the first of the two hour-long shows that airedlast night, but my understanding is that in the first, Mr Robinson started out investigating Richard III and ended up by satisfying himself that the current official Royal Family is descended from a deception, in the form of Edward IV.
Edward IV was born in 1442, having been conceived the regulation number of months before that in Rouen, France. Both the circumstances surrounding that birth, and the gossip which it immediately gave rise to say that Edward IV’s biological father wasn’t the King of England that he should have been, but was instead a French soldier whom the Queen had a brief fling with. Edward IV looked nothing like his official dad. More fuss was made when his younger brother was born than when he was. There’s a line in Shakespeare’s Richard III alluding to the gossip to the effect that Richard III’s rival was a bastard. And so on. Robinson even had himself a bona fide historian on hand to back this up with some new documentary evidence which further proved that the king was nowhere near Rouen when he should have been to be Edward’s biological dad.
It is possible – not likely but possible – that there will be an explosion of comments on this posting from people we don’t usually hear from, because believe it or not, the rights and wrongs of whether or not Richard III was or was not the Bad Thing that Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier, and now Ian McKellen, have portrayed him as remains a live issue among a certain sort of rather eccentric English person. The argument goes that Richard had the Princes in the Tower killed, not because he was a swine and wanted the Real Monarchy out of the way, but because he considered it his painful but patriotic duty to put and end to a couple of nationally disruptive fakes.
So, having satisfied himself that our actual monarchy isn’t our real monarchy, in the second of his two programmes, Robinson proceeded to chase down who our Real Monarch now is. To cut a long story short, this real King of England is a bloke called Mike Hastings, who left England to live in Australia in his teens, has had a great life there, and who actually voted for a Republic in the latest Aussie referendum on that subject. (I’m only making this up if Tony Robinson was too.) Mike and his disbelieving and frankly rather suspicious not to say rather contemptuous daughters were shown chuckling over it all, when Robinson arrived to visit him with a film crew. Although, it’s fair to add that Mike did take his ancestry seriously enough to possess his own chart, which luckily confirmed all of Robinson’s conclusions about his ancestry.
It was a thoroughly enjoyable programme, and on the whole Robinson didn’t try to make too much of things. By their own rules, the monarchs of England aren’t as kosher as they would like. If those rules had worked out differently, things would have been different. That was what he was really saying. His main conclusion wasn’t that Queen Elizabeth II should now be knocked off her throne. It was that we live in a rum old world. → Continue reading: Baldrick’s revenge – Britain’s Real Monarch is an Australian bloke called Mike!
Last night, while wandering through Soho to a dinner party, I encountered these posters, in Berwick Street. Luckily I have taken – Perry de Havilland style – to carrying my Canon A70 digital camera with me at all times, so I was able to snap them. (Some other snaps of the Oxford Street Christmas lights were not nearly so successful, unless you are heavily into abstract impressionism.)
I do not know who put them up. Searching for visuals on the net is a lot harder than searching for strings of words or for organisations. For example I could find no trace of this poster here.
Still, a pleasing straw in the wind, I think.
There is a huge irony happening here, I think. Like it or not, there is a widespread – not universal but widespread – opposition in Britain to the Iraq war, and now to the presence of victorious British troops staying out there to try to win the peace. The opponents of this effort have done a great deal to spread the idea that Mr Blair is a man not to be trusted, and a man who doesn’t listen to public opinion.
True or not, this charge, it now seems to me, is getting around, and is spilling over into the EUrope debate. The sense that, in matters EUropean also as well as Middle Eastern, Blair is pushing a personal and misguided agenda in defiance of the opinions or interests of his fellow countrymen, is becoming more and more dug in. Iraq = Blair can not be trusted and won’t listen = Britain being in EUrope is dodgy too. The key to this series of public opinion dominoes, so to speak, is that there is a great non-political slab of people who, unlike the leftist opponents of the Iraq war and Iraq peace, are willing to apply the same thinking both to Iraq and to EUrope (and to everything else Mr Blair is doing or not doing), in sufficient numbers to make a difference.
When it comes to anti-capitalist activism, the papier-mache puppet brigade are merely a bunch of blowhards and wannabes.
The true professionals are the ones who are not just chanting about it, they are actually doing it for real:
Euro-MPs awarded themselves a 30 per cent pay rise yesterday with no loss of their office perks.
Pay for British MEPs is to jump from £55,000 to £72,000 overnight, severing the link with their Westminster colleagues for the first time.
Must be a reward for all their increased hard work and productivity.
Spain’s MEPs will double their salaries. Hungarian or Latvian MEPs will rise into the top tier of Europe’s elite when they join the EU next year while their national colleagues must limp along on £6,500 and £7,600 a year respectively.
For all those people who are at a loss to understand why the satellites of the former Soviet Union are so eager to sign up to the Belgian Empire, now you know the answer. The loyalty of their political classes is bought and paid for.
Each MEP receives a tax-free £108,000 a year for staff expenses – used by almost half the British delegation to pay spouses, children and immediate kin, often doubling the family income.
The moonbats may be a reliable source of comedy, but they are not the real threat.
Belmont Club has a couple of fascinating entries that mesh well with my last post on the tranzi menace. Collect the set!
I was particularly struck by the Club’s take on the immediate post-9/11 tranzi reaction:
The curious antipathy of the Germany and France towards unilateral American action following September 11 was driven not by a sudden revulsion for American culture, but by the loss of something they deeply coveted: the means to exercise supranational police power under the aegis of international treaties. In the days following Osama Bin Laden’s attack on New York, hopes ran high in Paris, Berlin and Moscow, that America in her grief would deposit her strength in the hands of the “international community” who, thus armed, promised to put a stop to terrorism and uproot its causes. To provide the violins, the capitals of Europe expressed the utmost sympathy for the American loss and deluged embassies with flowers and letters of support. “We are all Americans now”. For a moment, matters hung on edge, the most critical instant in modern history. Then the haze passed, and America shook the expectant, extended hand and said “I’ll take care of it myself”. The response was immediate and incandescent. The internationalists rounded on America with as much hatred as the sympathy they had professed mere moments before.
As always, Belmont Club’s full analysis of the prospects for the future shape of international order are worth pondering. The Club posits a bottom-up New World Order founded on common law that contrasts sharply with the top-down command-and-control vision of the transnational progressives.
The transnational progressives have a new power grab underway – their attempt to seize control of the trial of Saddam Hussein and move it to the ICC or some other “international court.” I think it would be a very serious mistake to indulge the tranzis on this issue, as it would serve to validate and legitimize the most noxious pillar of their ideology.
The transnational progressive movement has a consistent theme: that governments should be answerable primarily to some overarching international authority, rather than to their own citizens. The pernicious (and unstated) part of this theme is that last phrase – the tranzis never state, and may not even recognize, that as governments become more accountable to outside authorities, they become less accountable to their own citizens.
The EU project is certainly an attempt to implement this ideal, as was last year’s attempt by the UN to control US foreign policy and military apparatus in the Iraqi, campaign. Readers will, I’m sure, be able to multiply examples, as the tranzis are nothing if not consistent in their top-down approach to accountability and control.
For the tranzis, the problem of rogue or abusive governments is not that such governments are too powerful and/or insufficiently accountable to their own citizen/subjects. After all, the source of legitimacy for this lot is not the consent of the governed; rather legitimacy can apparently only be conferred from above. Thus, the creation, from whole cloth, of international institutions such as the UN or International Criminal Court, so that there is a higher, transnational, authority to judge and confer legitimacy on the doings of national governments.
Of course, being made answerable to the “international community” (read: other governments) comes at the cost of being accountable to your own citizenry. This is the reason that the whole tranzi project is fundamentally corrupt, and corrupting. In my book, consent of the governed is the only source of legitimacy. Period. Discussion over. Turn out the lights as you leave. The tranzi project is corrosive of the consent of the governed, because it substitutes the consent of other governments for the consent of the governed.
The whole meme/dynamic is on full display in Iraq right now. The tranzis and their project are the long-term enemies of liberty, my friends, as much as or more so than your penny-ante domestic politician.
Many thanks to Tacitus for his rather more brutal assessment of the tranzi attempt to shove the Iraqis out of the way and seize control Saddam’s fate, which got the juices flowing this morning.
The French Government has reacted with fury to the news that Saddam Hussein has been captured by US forces.
Speaking to reporters in Paris this evening, the Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, denounced the arrest of the former Iraqi leader as ‘an act of international piracy’:
“Saddam Hussein has been kidnapped by America. You cannot simply seize and detain people without proper negotiations. The Americans should have given more thought beforehand. This situation requires the careful application of justice not cowboy tactics”
His words were echoed at a meeting of EU Ministers in Brussels this evening. Speaking on behalf of the assembled ministers, Dutch Commissioner Willy Van Der Pimp issued a warning to the Americans not to ‘go it alone’:
“If the Americans think that they alone can administer justice, then they are very mistaken. The international community will not tolerate being ignored in this fashion. Europe has a vital role to play in deciding the future of Saddam Hussein”
The Council of Ministers will meet again tomorrow in emergency session to draw up an action plan.
But still under sentence of death.
That is why I have such mixed feelings about the apparent breakdown of talks to finalise an EU Constitution:
European leaders are playing down the scale of divisions at their Brussels summit that made it impossible for them to agree on a constitution for the EU.
The can play it up, down or any way they damn well please. This is not the end, merely a brief setback. There is far too much vested interest in this wretched process for it to be simply left at that.
Nor has this impasse been brought about by anything as welcome as reflection or second thoughts. Assuming any of the participants have ever read this monstrous charter, it is probably a stretch to assume that they have even given it a first thought. No, the bandwagon has been brought to a grinding halt by an intractable bunfight over their respective looting voting rights:
Negotiations broke down over how voting will work when the EU expands from 15 to 25 members in May.
Poland and Spain insisted on keeping voting rights already secured, while France and Germany want a system to reflect their bigger populations.
Glueing an entire continent into a permanent state of indenture will have them feverish to sign the dotted lines but fail to stroke their egos sufficiently in the process and they will make a brave stand. I have long since passed the point of expecting reason or common sense to prevail; there is not enough of either of those qualities among Europe’s political classes to fill a thimble. But at least their over-arching need to all get their snouts in the trough has worked in our favour (albeit for now).
But, lest we forget, Mr Velveteen (and his huddle of Vichyites in the Foreign Office) is no better. He simply cannot wait to get this whole train back onto the tracks:
Tony Blair insisted, however, that the humiliating inability of heads of government to get beyond the first items on the summit agenda did not spell doom for the constitution. “We have got to find a way through. We have got the time to do it,” he said.
If Mr Blair gets his way this country will cease to exist in any meaningful or material sense. We will have been delivered up as a mere component of a big, despotic, inescapable dirigiste asset-stripping operation. This is what he wants and he wants it more than anything else.
But why? Why does he want to assassinate this country? What is impelling him and this cadre of political fixers to want to drive a dagger through our hearts? If we can find the answers to those questions then maybe we have a means of turning this stay of execution into a true and lasting victory.
I am reminded of an old, inscrutible Oriental saying: time is a slow but fair judge:
Less than half the population in the European Union’s member states now support the EU project, according to polling results yesterday.
The latest Eurobarometer to be released this week found that just 48 per cent of EU citizens viewed membership as a “good thing”, down from 54 per cent last spring.
Britain was by far the most negative state, with positive feelings tumbling to 28 per cent, but even the French were below half for the first time after months of battles with Brussels over tax cuts and illegal aid to ailing firms.
How long until George Bush scores a higher approval rating among Europeans than Brussels does?
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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