We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
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.
More ‘social justice’ from Brussels.
[From UK Times]
WITH business-class air fares paid and an all-day limousine service on tap, Euro MPs had only to pay for the taxi home after dining out in Brussels’ vaunted restaurants. Now they have eliminated even that small cost.
Blithely ignoring charges of “moral corruption”, MEPs have voted to give themselves an allowance of up to €50 (£34) a week to cover the cost of getting back to their Brussels pads after the free limousine service ends at 10pm.
It’s the concern for the poor and needy that makes European politics so progressive.
I believe this is not the last story of this sort we will see coming out of Brussels:
[Robert McCoy] has worked for the European Union for more than 30 years. His friends regard him as an upright and loyal bureaucrat, keen to uphold the EU’s name against its critics, whether in Brussels or back home in Britain.
Yet Robert McCoy must steel himself before he walks the corridors of his own EU institution. If he is lucky, senior colleagues at the glass and concrete headquarters of the Committee of the Regions – a Brussels talking-shop for local government representatives, set up under the Maastricht Treaty – merely ignore him, turning their heads ostentatiously as he passes.
If not, he may be on the receiving end of abuse. “Gestapo! Gestapo!” angry fellow workers once taunted him. One manager spat on the floor as he walked by, friends say.
As the Telegraph reports Mr McCoy’s offence – as it was apparently regarded by some EU staff and politicians – was to stumble upon, investigate and then seek to correct a series of financial irregularities within the Committee of the Regions (CoR), whose annual budget is €38 million (£27 million).
Last week, Romano Prodi and Neil Kinnock insisted that since EU commissioners were ignorant of Eurostat’s problems until this year, they could not be held responsible for what happened earlier. The frauds, and the culture that permitted them, were a one-off and had long since ended, Mr Prodi assured MEPs during a tense closed-door meeting in Strasbourg on Thursday.
In a devastating letter to a senior MEP, seen by The Telegraph, Mr McCoy details his three-year campaign to stamp out suspected fraud within the CoR, and his vain attempts to persuade senior managers to summon outside expertise to investigate the problems.
His inside account, and documents obtained by members of the European Parliament’s budgetary control committee, reveals an approach by some EU officials which helps explain how at least ?3 million (£2 million) could disappear from the coffers of an organisation like Eurostat without anyone noticing – or complaining.
I felt that I had repeatedly hit a brick wall in my efforts to do my job. I have nowhere else to turn, having exhausted all administrative and political avenues available to me within the CoR.
After Mr McCoy sought the official attendance sheets to make a spot check on the signatures, the Secretary General angrily rebuked him. “Robert, I am very displeased with this affair,” Mr Falcone wrote in an e-mail which has circulated among MEPs. “The Financial Controller is not the police.” One can only speculate why the officials in charge reacted with hostility rather than reward his for a job well done. McCoy comments:
We now know that there have been huge problems at Eurostat over many years, caused by the same kind of culture that I have encountered at the CoR. Who knows how many other EU institutions are similarly affected?
A rather late and rude awakening for Mr McCoy. The rot goes to the heart of the institution, there can be no perestroika.
ATTN: THE SAMIZDATA TEAM
FROM: THE HONOURABLE PRESIDENT
OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION, ROMANO PRODI
Dear Sir/Madam,
Good day Sirs. I hope my letter does not cause you too much embarrassment as I write to you in good faith and the transaction is of mutual benefit. Based on the contact address given to me by a friend who works at the Nigerian chamber of commerce attached to your embassy in my country.
Please excuse my intrusion into your private life. I am Romano Prodi, the appointed President of the European Commission and my friends and I are in danger of losing a lot of money due to vindictive investigators and their friends in the media who are bent on ruining us financially. Consequently, my friends in the Commission have asked me to seek for a foreign partner who can work with us to move out the total sum of €75,000,000.00 ( seventy five million Euros), presently in their possession.
This money was of course, acquired by my friends through hard work and enterprise. The Swiss government has already frozen all our accounts in Switzerland, and some other countries would soon follow to do the same.
This bid by some political rivals to deal with this my friends and I has made it necessary that we seek your assistance in receiving this money and in investing it on behalf of our behalf. This must be a joint venture transaction and we must all work together. Since this money is still in cash, extra security measures have been taken to protect it from theft or seizure, pending when agreement is reached on when to move it into a secure and anonymous territory pending on our agreement.
I have personally worked out all modalities for the peaceful conclusion of this transaction. The transaction definitely would be handled in phases and the first phase will involve the moving of €25,000,000.00 (twenty five million Euros).
My friends are willing to give you a reasonable percentage of this money as soon as the transaction is concluded. It will, however, be based on the grounds that you are willing to work with us and also all contentious issues being discussed before the commencement of this transaction. You may also discuss your percentage before we start to work. As soon as I hear from you, I will give you all necessary details as to how we intend to carry out the whole transaction. Please, do not entertain any fears, as all necessary modalities are in place, and I assure you of all success and safety in this transaction.
Please, this transaction requires absolute confidentiality and you would be expected to treat it as such until the funds are moved out of Europe to where you intend to receive them.
In compliance with this you are to forward to me the following details: your complete names and addresses, confidential telephone and fax numbers, bank account details and all relevant account numbers. This is to enable me perfect all the necessary documentation with the security firm and move this money across to your country of choice.
Please, you will also ignore this letter and respect our trust in you by not exposing this transaction, even if you are not interested.
I look forwards to working with you. Thank you.
Truly Yours
Romano Prodi.
|
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.
|
