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Just how long will the European Union last? Unarguably it is well dug in. Will it hang in there just long enough to condemn an entire continent to a painful and lingering death?
Few people are prepared to confront such a possibility or even entertain any such notion. Fortunately, one of those few is Ruth Lea:
The tectonic plates of the global economy are shifting. After a gap of several centuries, India and China are re-establishing themselves as major economic heavyweights. China, in particular, is becoming the “workshop of the world” and its economic rise will be as significant as the USA’s arrival on the global scene in the 19th century.
We may complain as jobs are “exported” to these emerging colossi but, whether we complain or not, this seismic shift is occurring and we cannot ignore it. The need to remain internationally competitive is becoming ever more critical for all the “western” economies.
I have little doubt that the US, with its “can-do” entrepreneurial attitudes and enormous economic power will continue to make the grade. But I am increasingly unsure that this can be said about the major euro-zone economies or even, in my darkest moments, Britain. After all, over the past five to six years, Britain has been slipping down the competitiveness league tables compiled by the World Economic Forum and the International Institute for Management Development reflecting higher taxes, heavier regulations and poor public services.
Government policymakers, while singing the praises of enterprise, competitiveness and high productivity, have undermined them all. The EU’s regulatory zeal has undoubtedly played a significant role in damaging British competitiveness. Over the past six years, one of British business’s greatest complaints about Government policy has been the rapid increase in the number and complexity of employment regulations.
And, as if right on cue, yet another set of Brussels-mandated employment regulations comes into effect in the UK today. → Continue reading: Laughable
The past is not another country, it is another world.
Remember all that strutting triumphalism of the EU enthusiasts? Remember their blustering certitude and stainless steel non-stick bravura? The European Union was unstoppable, invincible and the wave of the future. It was an historically-inevitable behemoth gearing up to straddle the globe and lock all of mankind into its eternal Bonapartist embrace.
Soon there would not be so much as a single molecule on the face of the earth that would not be regulated by Brussels. Resistance was futile and dissent was pointless. It was written in stone. The European union will conquer the known universe!
That was then.
This is now:
There is no doubt that 2004 ought to have been a great year, the year East Europeans became full members of a revived, streamlined and more democratised European Union. Instead, Europe is in its worst shape for years.
There is only so much battering, criticism and friendlessness any institution can take before it breaks. Europe is no different.
Victory is within sight. Just one, big, final push and we can send the whole rotten edifice crashing down.
[My thanks to Peter Briffa for the link.]
Exactly a week ago, last Friday evening, I attended a discussion at the home of CNE boss Tim Evans, one of his Putney Debates. Alex Singleton spoke eloquently about what a fine thing free markets are and how difficult it is for the government to do as well.
Also present at the discussion was a long-time friend of London libertarianism by the name of Bruce. Bruce has been living in Spain for the last decade or so, but is now back in London, and during the discussion he said something very interesting which stuck in my mind, and which I now realise deserves the attention of this blog.
For as along as I can remember, whenever we’ve met up, Bruce has been telling me that the Spaniards have had a much more sensible attitude towards the EU than the British, which is that if they don’t like any particular EUro-regulation or EUro-imposition, they just ignore it. Why, he would ask, can’t the British just learn to do the same? That’s a sentiment I think we’ve heard here quite a lot also, whenever we’ve been arguing about the nuances of the EU.
This time, however, he said something different. Apparently, in Spain, a class of pestilential busybodies who take EUro-stupidity seriously is starting to form and to make its pestilential presence felt, and the Spaniards are starting to notice this, and to get rather fidgety. To put it another way, instead of the sensible Spanish practice – of ignoring all this EUro-nonsense and just carrying on baking bread, fishing for fish, being a bit rude to the occasional ethnic minority, driving as they please, dodging VAT, and so on and so on, the way they always have – spreading to Britain, the British practice, of taking all such drivel seriously, on account of it being the law and all that, is now spreading to Spain. And my guess would be, this tendency isn’t confined to Spain.
This official bEUrocratic infestation process, if it is indeed happening, strikes me as a lot more significant than the grumbling that is now occurring throughout the Euro area about inflation, because this ‘inflation’ could just be a one-off effect from the switch from the local currencies to the Euro. Yes, prices have gone up a gut-wrenching amount, and a lot more than is being officially admitted, but presumably that effect will calm down, and in due course be forgotten. But this hideous tribe of meddling EUro-despots look like being a permanent and ever-growing presence, and the hatred of them seems likely only to grow and grow.
I don’t have any links to stories which might back up any of this, but of course commenters may well be able to correct that omission.
Low cost airline RyanAir is a subject that gets mixed feelings from this blog’s different contributors. Their latest problem is an EU ruling that affects their French and Belgian operations from the British Isles because the preferential rates offered to RyanAir amount to a state subsidy (funny how state subsidies to farmers do not seem to get the same response, eh?) because the airports in question are all state owned:
The airport is owned by the Walloon regional government, which approved grants worth an estimated £5 million a year to subsidise landing and handling charges and marketing costs. Ryanair pays a landing fee 85 per cent lower than the list price. However, since the airline’s arrival, the annual passenger “throughput” at Charleroi has risen eight-fold to nearly two million, sharply boosting the local economy.
[…]
Managers say they would adopt the same approach for other publicly-owned airports. Negotiations are already under way with a dozen private alternatives. Some European countries, such as Italy, Germany and Sweden, have a significant number of non-state airports, but not France.
The solution is screamingly obvious. Privatise all the frigging airports in Belgium and France and the problem goes away! Duh.
And quite eminent men to boot:
A powerful cross-party group of peers will seek today to begin a national debate on whether Britain should stay in the European Union by demanding a parliamentary investigation into the economic benefits of membership.
Their action reflects a growing feeling in the House of Lords that withdrawal from the EU might be preferable to signing up to a new European constitution that would erode British sovereignty.
They may not get the debate they want as it is highly likely to be scuppered. Even if they get the debate they want it may not produce the result they want. And even if it does produce the result they want said result will have no legal or political effect whatsoever.
But it will have an effect, albeit a marginal one.
To date, the idea of British withdrawal from the EU has been unthinkable in any respectable circles. It is the Great British Political Taboo. Discuss our relations with Europe by all means and criticise the EU if you must but suggest we pull out?!! Are you mad?
But the problem with taboos of this nature is that they will not bend so they can only break and it only takes a few people to start thinking the unthinkable before they begin to look fragile. If people start saying the unthinkable (and keep saying it) then it is only a matter of time before the cracks begin to appear.
We are not there yet. Not even close. But if more people just keep talking publicly about withdrawal then that emboldens others to do the same and eventually the drip, drip effect begins to eat away at the consensus. What starts as a few whispered heresies can grow into a chorus of raucous disapproval.
So, more and faster please.
De Great White Colonial Adminstrator, Tony Blair, him be most worried about stirring up de
It is hard to know what to make of this:
Gordon Brown celebrated his return to politics yesterday by firing a shot across the bows both of Brussels and Tony Blair. Perhaps the Chancellor has found the time while on paternity leave to read the 250 pages of the draft European constitution. Mr Brown evidently does not agree with his neighbour in Number 10 that the constitution is a mere “tidying-up exercise”. On the contrary, he is obviously alarmed by the text agreed by the constitutional convention, which extends EU competence into areas of economic policy hitherto jealously guarded by the Treasury.
The only thing I am sure of is that it does not mean exactly what it says. My tentative take on it is not that Brown dislikes a regulated economy/society per se, but rather than he insists on being the one doing the regulating. The guy is hardly a free market capitalist after all and neither is he much of a nationalist. Maybe he feels that as Kinnock already has his snout highly placed in the EU’s trough, there will not be room enough for another ‘big beast’ such as himself and thus he is stuck with maintaining his looting rights via obsolescent old Westminster.
Alternatively, could it is just a ploy to demonstrate that there is a ‘vibrant Euro-sceptic wing in the Labour Party’ and thus forestall natural Labour supporters from feeling they have to vote a revitalised (ha!) Tory Party under Count Drac… Michael Howard, given that Brown is making it clear that “Labour is not entirely in the pocket of Brussels”. Are Labour’s strategists really that clever though? Not sure.
Cynical? Moi?
I have been struggling to find a slick way to use the phrase the ‘gobbledegook’ in this sorry little saga but however I stack it, it still sounds clunky.
Let’s just say, as ye sow so shall ye reap. [From the UK Times.]
TURKEY farmers are barricading their premises to prevent the spread of a savage disease after Brussels banned the only drug that can eradicate it. Ten million turkeys being reared for the £100 million Christmas trade are at risk from blackhead (Histomanos meleagridis), which can destroy entire flocks.
The disease, which enters the gut of birds and attacks their liver, has broken out in France, Germany and the Netherlands and farmers fear that it will be carried into Britain by migrating birds. East Anglia and Kent are particularly vulnerable.
Two predictions:
- It will transpire that this drug was banned as a result of ferocious lobbying by the enviro-mentalists.
- The EUnuchs will try and find some way to blame this whole farrago on the Americans in general and George Bush in particular.
The Sunday Telegraph reports on yet another example of the EU ‘standards’:
It was reported last week that an Austrian farmer, Johann Thiery, had been fined and threatened with prison for selling “apricot marmalade” made from a traditional Austrian recipe passed on by his grandmother. Under EU rules “marmalade” can only be made from citrus fruit. Sternly defending Mr Thiery’s punishment, a European Commission spokesman said: “The law is the law.”
Next day Pedro Solbes, the EU’s economics commissioner, was reported as defending the right of France and Germany to run up huge budget deficits, in flagrant breach of the Growth and Stability Pact. “Given the circumstances we face,” he said, “it would be unwise to follow the letter of the law.”
Last week I linked from White Rose to this piece by Jemima Lewis in the Telegraph, because it contained some stuff of White Rose relevance about using technology to enable parents to keep track of their kids.
But, as commenter Mark Ellott pointed out there, this Telegraph piece also contained some interesting reflections on the teaching of history, provoked by the increasing annoyance being expressed by Germans about Britain’s continuing obsession with the history of Nazism to the exclusion of any other sort of history.
Our Education Minister, the big-eared Mr Clarke, has been using his big ears to listen to his German opposite number Edelgard Buhlman, tell him that:
… our fixation with Hitler is leaving British teenagers with a distorted view of German history, and a violent prejudice against the Teutonic race.
A lot of the problem, says Lewis, is that children don’t learn history dates any more. I think she’s probably right. When I was about eight or nine I had a vast set of history dates dinned into me – with my enthusiastic cooperation I should add – and I’ve been fascinated by history, all history, any I could lay my hands on that was fun and made any sense, ever since. My only regret is that the list I imbibed wasn’t bigger and more global in its scope. I should guess that much the same applies to many of the regular readers of this blog. How can you understand history without getting a handle on the basic stuff that it happens in, namely time?
Yet this boringly chronological approach to history teaching was, Ms. Lewis tells us, abandoned in the 1970s for a more pick-and-mix, bring-it-alive and never-mind-when-exactly-it-happened approach to history, and the only bit that kids now want to pick is The Nazis.
This is not a matter of opinion, but of fact. An Ofsted report earlier this year confirmed that British pupils spend more time learning about the Nazis than any other period of history. Meanwhile, one survey after another suggests that our broader historical knowledge is dying out. The statistics are hair-raising. More than half of Britons are unaware that America used to be a British colony; 55 per cent believe that Elizabeth I introduced curry to this country; 17 per cent of teenagers cannot even guess in which century the First World War took place.
Never mind the Tudors and the Stuarts and the Industrial Revolution and the Suffragettes, what we want is Hitler!
Now that they can – and do – choose to spend almost every lesson poring over the evil deeds of history’s most infamous homicidal maniac, the evidence suggests that they love it. As one teacher bemoaned last week: “If you try to avoid him, the pupils say: ‘I was only doing history to study the Nazis.’ ” But a diet of unleavened Hitler is no good for anyone. We need to see the broader sweep of things.
But for me there is a huge irony here. For ask yourself this: why is Mr Clarke so anxious to de-Nazify the teaching of history in Britain? And why are German politicians making such a fuss about this issue? I’m sure that part of the answer is that they just are, and that as time goes by, the thing just gets more and more embarrassing and uncouth.
But I think that the EU is involved here. If a generation of Brits has now grown up thinking that “Europe equals Hitler”, that could be the popular opinion half of a British pincer movement against British EU provincehood, the other half being British elite hesitations. For as long as the “bloody Huns” view of history was confined to the old geezers who had actually fought against the Huns, then that sentiment could simply be left to die out with the old warriors. But now, it turns out, this sentiment is not dying out. The kids hate the Huns too! Indeed, that’s the only thing about the past that they’re sure of.
We are told again and again that British public opinion is now unchangeably against British becoming a province of the new EUropean nation that they are busily forging on the continent, to the point where this public opinion might not merely vote against the EU constitution if granted the opportunity, but actually vote for such an opportunity in the meantime. Where did this opinion come from? Might the “Hitlerisation” of British history teaching not be one of the big the culprits?
Ms. Lewis says that “a diet of unleavened Hitler is no good for anyone”. But if you are the type, as I am, who believes that Britain should shake itself free from EUro-provincehood, might you not reckon that the collapse of that more nuanced and informed and less melodramatic presentation of History – of History with lots of history dates and with that “broad sweep”, as Ms. Lewis terms it – turn out to have been … rather a good thing?
How huge an irony would that be? The very people who have worked hardest to beat British national pride out of Britain, namely the teaching profession and the theorisers of teaching who have been guiding them, have ended up with a kind of History that says only one thing: Germany bollocks!! Don’t want nothing to do with them bastards!!! As a result these anti-historical history persons, mostly rabidly pro-EU on anti-British grounds, could be achieving what looked impossible as recently as only a decade ago, namely the saving of Britain from permanent EUro-subjugation.
Lefty bastard enemies of British History, we hail you, the savours of British national independence.
Or, as Instapundit would say: Heh.
What a sorry state of affairs, when we are reduced to hoping that the Queen of England, a monarch, will prove to be the bulwark of liberty against the encroaching EU superstate.
The Queen is growing more concerned about Tony Blair’s plans to sign a European constitution that she fears could undermine her role as sovereign.
The Telegraph has learnt that Buckingham Palace has asked for documents highlighting the constitutional implications of the EU’s plans to be sent to her advisers.
It is believed that the Palace’s concerns focus on whether the Queen’s supreme authority as the guardian of the British constitution, asserted through the sovereignty of Parliament, could be altered or undermined by article 10 of the draft text.
This states: “The constitution and law adopted by the union’s institutions in exercising competences conferred on it shall have primacy over the law of the member states.”
Many MPs say that this will rob the House of Commons of its ultimate authority to override decisions and laws made by the EU.
I love that “many MPs.” I mean, it isn’t like they are making their interpretation up out of thin air. Isn’t that what the damn thing says in so many words?
So, fill in this American on what, if anything, the Queen can do to toss a spanner in the works. I tend to believe that liberty is preserved when power is dispersed through competing authorities. Does the old girl still have the stuff to make a difference?
So much for European unity:
Seven out of ten German voters would reject the euro if they were given the chance, a new poll has shown.
Maybe surprisingly, it is younger Germans that are the most eurosceptic, with 73 percent of 18-24 year olds saying they would reject the euro.
The poll also showed that French voters would reject the euro, but by a much more slender margin (approximately 51-49). This has provoked fears that French voters may use a referendum on the Constitution to voice their concerns about the euro.
Nothing surprising to me. The European Union is yesterday’s solution to the day before’s problem. It is a sullen, unloved political dinosaur fixed only by a combination of political inertia and the career-ambitions of a cossetted technocratic cadre. It is doomed.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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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