I don’t like it….it’s too quiet…

Michael Winning

Not much about poor Ireland right now, perhaps the journos are all stuck in the snow.

It says over at Conservative Home blog (HOward Flight, he of the comments about paying the underclass to beget more labour voters) that Germany might leave the Euro. I can’t see a problem myself, the Merkel-Hilda just has to say the word. I think most of “her” people are baying quietly for he to do it.

What the EU-governmint thinks of elections…

…especially in places like Ireland.

David Davis

How soon will the Euro implode?

UPDATE:- I said this the other day, too.

David Davis

About 12 years ago, or it may be 13, I bet a YEM* person £25 that the Euro, recently issued, would sink to UD$1.00 by that Christmas. It did fall, a bit: my prediction was only wrong in degree -  but I lost my bet and ponied up.

Now Peter Oborne thinks the project is at last about to come undone.

* “YEM” was the “Young European Movement”. God knows what’s happened to that.

How to win friends and impress America

Josie  M. Jordison (guest writer)

There could be trouble brewing, here in California. Someone called Joao Vale de Almeida has taken it upon herself to lecture the USA and this state in particular about the use of the death penalty.

There are of course libertarians who oppose it on fundamental objectivist grounds. There are moreover those who say it is jurisprudentially allowable in circumstances where sovereign individuals have the right of lethal force against intruders and those who would harm them and theirs. In this scenario they can delegate their right to punish lethally, to an externalised agency.

This interference in our businesses here will not go down well.

Addendum: Getting used to this dashboard. I now find that the Eudude is a man.

101 Years Ago – G.K. Chesterton on Home Rule

Christopher Houseman

Although he wrote the following passage in 1909 about the United Kingdom and the question of Irish Home Rule, G.K. Chesterton might just as well have written it about the EU and UKIP. Enjoy:

union is no more a good thing in itself than separation is a good thing in itself. To have a party in favour of union and a party in favour of separation, is as absurd as to have a party in favour of going upstairs and a party in favour of going downstairs. The question is not whether we go up or down stairs, but where we are going to, and what we are going for? Union is strength; union is also weakness. It is a good thing to harness two horses to a cart; but it is not a good thing to try and turn two hansom cabs into one four-wheeler. Turning ten nations into one empire may happen to be as feasible as turning ten shillings into one half-sovereign. Also it may happen to be as preposterous as turning ten terriers into one mastiff. The question in all cases is not a question of union or absence of union, but of identity or absence of identity.
Chesterton, G. K. (2010). Heretics (255). Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.

Chesterton wrote the above in the context of correcting the idea that older politicians like Gladstone were idealists whereas newer ones like Joseph Chamberlain were materialists. In fact, he noted, the real difference between them was that Gladstone thought of his ideals as things he would like to change reality to resemble, whereas Chamberlain thought his ideals simply described the way things were in any case.

Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

Could the Limp-Dems have gone off the idea of “Proportional Representation”?

David Davis

Obnoxio thinks so. Logical conclusion.

The Falklands, the Treaty of Lisbon, and the EU

David Davis

I have also facebooked this to “try it on the dog” as it were.

Now presenting… “BUROCRATIC ADVENTURES 2: RETURN OF THE RED TAPE”

Fred Bloggs.

Of all the things the EU has done over the years, i have to admit that this one suprised me.
The EU is now going to be producing a comic book, detailing the crimefighting shennanigans of two European Commission bureaucrats.
Take that free market capitalism! *BLAMMO!*
Eat this civil liberties! *THWAP!*
Wave goodbye Freedom of speech *KLONK!*

The EU: Daniel Hannan tears one of the curtains away

David Davis

The Queen cares more about being “Head of a Church” than…

…looking after her Subjects’ sovereignty.

David Davis

This actually upset me as well as making me realise that the Queen must have deliberately given assent to things like ROME, the SEA, Maastricht, Nice and Lisbon.

If a “Senior Adviser” to the Queen has asked for a meeting with the Asse-Hatte “Rowan” Williams”, then it must mean that the Queen asked for it to take place.

The Pope is perfectly entitled to try and “poach” “Anglicans” from England into the Universal Church, if he can. He’s a classic aggressive campaigning battling Christian Pope of the Old School, and good luck to him: he’s also fun to watch, and smiles often, which makes you want to like him as a person.You can imagine him on a destrier, in full armour, wielding his flanged mace (so as not to shed blood while killing) in the middle of the Battle of Hastings.

Equally, by sovereign constitutional precedent and settlement, the Queen as the Anglican Boss is entitled to try and hold on to her “farm animals”. She might also care to think about defending our liberties sometimes. But what she’s clearly doing right now is a harmless game that has no bearing on how we real individuals live our lives, which are our own: this is one of the few real comforts available to us in a darkening and less free world.

But the Queen – rather than get exercised about playing harmless games – ought to have spent most of the last 50 years resisting far far more dangerous and important threats, both to our status and hers: such as the encroachment of the fascist EU upon especially and in particular British Sovereignty – no?

It’ll be the Churches to go next…

Fred Bloggs.

The Church of England has finally begun to notice that the EU is a large pile of dog excrement, albeit a very clever and malicious pile of dog excrement. The Church attacked them on multiple fronts, both financially and politically, saying that “millions of pounds of public funds risk being wasted on redevelopment projects unless local people and religious groups are also involved to bring about spiritual regeneration” and that “The European institutional public sphere is largely a public discourse for elites, it is a sphere in which citizens remain uninvolved. This has in turn contributed to the EU’s democratic deficit.” 

It’s nice that people are beginning to wake up to this sham of  a “Union”, although I fear that the Churches will be found guilty of made up crime and shut down because they dared to speak out against this bureaucratic dictatorship  “Economic Friendship”

Britain and the EU: time for a divorce

David Davis

Norman Tebbitt gets it right here. The only fly in the ointment for libertarians, most of whom would be cool about the idea of the UK leaving the EU right away, is that we still here have our own sadly home-grown gramscoFabiaNazi enemy-class, which habitually gold-plates everything the EU decrees before foisting it upon us.

These people would have to leave office by force, in a “great burning” of their work-premises, records, filing cabinets, pension-entitlements (sorry, Sean, I cannot view them with such equanimity as you sometimes do) hard disks and the like. A rebirth of British let alone English sovereignty and liberty would be still-born while such organisations staffed by such people remain in being.

The thing is worth quoting in full:-

By Norman Tebbit Politics Last updated: January 22nd, 2010

319 Comments Comment on this article

It may well be that Mr Cameron regards any discussion of the EU as “banging on about Europe”, but here in the Telegraph blogosphere – to judge from the over 350 comments on my last blog post – it does seem to be a matter of some interest.

However, I should first say to Gary 4 that I certainly did NOT tell people “to get on their bikes”, I am not, and never have been a “Monday Club politican”, although I see nothing shameful in being one. After all, it is not like being a Fabian. Nor have I ever urged people to vote UKIP.

On the other hand, ZigZag says he cannot understand the logic behind my view on the EU since he thinks that “the English are just a European Nation” and “the EU is simply an institution to which most European nations belong”.

So let me explain. The English are, of course, a European nation, but we are different by virtue of our history from the others. And I suppose that at this stage I should come clean about my own background.

Yes, we are all immigrants, since during the depth of the most recent ice age Britain was not inhabited by man. Even since the land bridge to the mainland was submerged there have been a good number of new arrivals, not least the Scandanavians, Romans, and Normans. My paternal forebears probably arrived here sometime in the 16th century from the continental lowlands. Indeed had they not got on their bikes, so to speak, I might have been born a Belgian. Happily they passed the cricket test with flying colours and integrated into the East Anglian turnip taleban of their time.

They, and most of us who came here until recent times, adopted the history and culture of England and the English. We were much infuenced by the Scandinavian practice of the folk moot, wherein lie some of our democratic ideas and which had a part in the thinking which led to Magna Carta.

It saddens me that in the bastardised ruins of what was once an educational system even children taught the importance of what happened at Runnymede are often told that the barons forced King John to grant rights, such as free speech, freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and the right to a fair trial. No, not quite so. The King was forced to sign a declation that he would not interefere with, nor abridge, those rights which were were the inherent rights of English freemen (and women too, Harriet) according to rank.

Our fellow Europeans may well enjoy similar rights, but they are rights which have their origins in constitutions and laws. The right of a German or Frenchman to free speech is a grant by law – essentially an entitlement rather than a right. Here, it requires a law to set limits upon that right, which in this Kingdom is (I’m sorry Professor Dawkins) the God-given right of an Englishman or woman from birth.

What I discovered during many days (and not a few nights) negotiating and dealing around the table in Brussels was that my colleagues were, with a few wonderful exceptions such as Count Otto von Lamsdorff, not just corporatist by nature, but inclined to the unspoken assumption that man was made for the state rather than that the state was made for man. At its worst, that became an assumption that whilst the citizen must obey the law and his rights were limited by the scope of the law, the state could do whatever was not specifically forbiden to it.

The basic assumptions underlying the two systems of law, English Common law and European law, are such that they cannot exist side by side. While we are members of the EU as it is constructed today, wherever the two clash on a matter within European competence, European law is superior.

Nor is it just a matter of law. Our history has shaped our society to be different. We have suffered no invasion nor conquest since 1066 and no civil wars, revolutions nor military dictators since Cromwell’s time, and we have stopped one attempt after another to create a pan-European state. Philip of Spain, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin have all been frustrated by the people of these islands. In short, we have form as a destructive force against European political and military union.

Churchill was right. We should wish European union well – so long as it does not seek to cross the Channel. Certainly I have no ill will towards our friends on the mainland, but I think it is time the British dog got out of the federalist manger. I could live happily on the mainland as a foreigner. I believe that we should have a treaty relationship with other European nations covering matters of mutual interest, but that our Parliament should remain fully sovereign.

Divorce is never easy, but it may be better than persisting in an unhappy marriage. The question should not be whether we part, but what sort of relationship would follow.

Tags: cricket, David Cameron, eu, europe, get on yer bikes, Scandinavia, Winston Churchill

Ten reasons to leave the EU at Christmas

David Davis

Daniel Hannan lists them of course.

And if we go quietly now, slipping the door-latch after us, the buggers won’t notice for some days. Neither will our Parlimanent, cos’ it’s all getting sloshed on holiday at our cost.

Britain to “leave the EU”

David Davis

Well, it was nice to dream if only for a second or two. Via the eternally-estimable Devil, we learn that Douglas Carswell has tabled a Bill, asking for a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU.

It won’t happen like that, of course. Carswell will get his marching orders and P-45 from the Camoron, and for now we’ll have business (or not any) as usual. But one day, one day…..

And to end, a comment on the front of The Devil’s thread on that posting, stated that it says in the Register that “online publications are to be regulated by the PCC”. But not those of Soviets, for these are “marketing material“. Well, the Libertarian Alliance Blog has just this minute become one of the LA’s “marketing publications”. Officially. You have read it here first!

The Libertarian Alliance is a Soviet, at last.

That’s the problem

It’s 2nd December 2009, ans this place does not really feel any different from what it did on 30th November (2009.)

David Davis

The fact that the UK is no longer a Sovereign State, I mean.

Libertarians, these last 50 years, have spent too much time hailing the virtues of Sovereign Individuality, and Rand has much to be blamed for here.You just can’t go off and do a John Galt any more, however good it makes you feel to read about it, in a world where all the Statists have guns and satellites, and you have nothing except, possibly a candle if you are allowed the fat (meat-eating) and string (global rain forests) to make it. (And nothing to light it with, for Health and Safety.)

Simultaneously Libertarians have spent too little time thinking about the inevitably-partly-Statist environment under which we all have for now to operate.  Too much effort has been devoted, with the best of intentions, to suggesting via think-tanks lots of interesting and entirely logical ways of “increasing choice” while simultaneously negating the influence of The Enemy Class.

Since the Enemy Class is currently in charge, this will no longer do. It is a waste of effort, since (a) they won’t listen and (b) they’ll “surveille” and then take down names. Some protection of an at least slightly non-fully-statist environment ought to have been undertaken, such as the British Conservative and Unionist Party, as an example of something we’d have liked to take over and redirected to proper objectives.

Perhaps, in our trying to take over Conservative Movements here and there, we ought to have covertly hidden our neutrality towards things like Guns, Drugs, Homosexuality, low tax, Rock Music, fast cars, gender-equality and proper education, until we’d got proper control of whatever movement it was we were trying to subvert. Our Policy Position should have resembled The Daily Mail for as long as it was convenient to do so, and as we are all more sexy than 1,000 Paul Dacres and Melanie Phillipses, we would have wiped the floor: Obama would be begging under a Chicago flyover by now, if we had thus had our way.

The future of libertarianism as a mass philosophy, if one exists, lies not in think tanks: these have been, are and will be bright stars of reason and correctness for sure, but are increasingly designed to be surrounded by armed Endarkenment backed up by a comatose population, which has been first disarmed, then de-educated and de-mobilised, and finally starved on purpose all together for one objective.

The passing of the UK into history in its form as a Soveriegn State does not seem to matter to most people in any way much. There is still the Wireless Tele Vision, which broadcasts much the same material as on Monday: Non-Denominational-Community Winter Trees still appear in all shops, slightly earlier and slightly more expensive than usual: Cheryl Cole still has “nights out” while wearing various items of clothing: the Tele Vision News still broadcasts footage of a “house fire” in which a “mother and young children died while a man was seen running away”, accompanied by a grieving Chief Constable who “appeals for information” while stating that “_his thoughts are with_”.

Perhaps it does not really matter that this is happening, or even that it happens against the background of public apathy about big things and shallow voyeurism about tiny ones. Except that both these trends are driven by and happening in a State which has actively sought to being them about. It did this so it can refortify itself behind a more powerful wall of absolutism, the EU (or should I say the USE?) than would have existed if Lisbon hadn’t been able to happen.

In 2010, Libertarians ought to consider how best to help existing parties and statists tactically, who have the best chance of forming British governments which are specifically not this one: even if it means only a slowing of the drift towards slavery for now and not even a cessation of the drift. This is better than falling down a torrent.

If that does not work, then one day perhaps we have to consider the alternatives.

Some more marvellous news!

David Davis

Jean-Pierre Cafard, and Baroness Bentbint Torporsen, are the first new “Officers” of the United States of Europe.

Will opposition to the EU fragment in the face of new Labour….

...and what ought to be done about it?

UPDATE: there is a good debate going on over at Samizdata, here.

David Davis

There is a school of thought (to which I do not subscribe) that the Tories are cleverly allowing themselves to be the hard-done-by party, courtesy of Labour who has reneged on a referendum promise about Lisbon. The “Labour has boxed us into a corner on this one, so we’ll have to make the best of a bad job” might wash with Old One-Nation-Tories, and perhaps with neo-Labour-voters coming across. But what about the increasingly large constituency of liberals (both Tory and from elsewhere) who think UKIP is more in the right?

There is a danger of fatally splitting the Tory vote in constituencies where it matters, either for the Tories to hold on to them or to throw Labour out on its ear to simply get a bare majority. We must agree that, if Labour failed properly to rig the election-results in its favour (it  _will_  try: you and I both know it) then a Tory majority, however slight, might give sovereign individuals precious time: either to get out to Montana or Alberta with their assets intact, or to continue to oppose GramscoFabiaNazi creep and EuFederalism, for a bit longer – so that there might – just might – be created what Chris Tame used to call “enough people to make a difference”.

More than one of us on here has already stated that we propose to verbally assault the Tories (if they manage to form a government) just as vehemently over their Europhile and other GFN-type policies, and for their flagrant betrayal of liberal ideas. But the election that matters is _this_ one. There may not be another chance after it.

Their election is (a) more probable than that of UKIP,

and (b) the ratchet of GramscoCollectivism will proceed slightly more slowly under tham than under ZanuLieBorg.

Imagine if you will the re-election of a Gordon Brown administration, next June. How do you all think the bastards are going to feel, and therefore to proceed with all their most nefarious plans? And at what sort of pace?

PRAVDA…rips face-mask off Lisbon, plus a USSR soldier-robot

I never thought I’d see this here.

Michael Winning

Either it’s a wind-upp and I’m being had or the USSR continus its strategic policy of being open and clear about its objectives and its helpers.

And I spotted this film while I was in Pravda:-

http://en.rian.ru/video/20091028/156623945.html

Sorry I cant work out how to directly embed the video like a U-tube whatsit, I’m not a geek. Sohere’s something else you might not have known, or else as I suspect, it’s been PhotoShopped cleverly:-

http://english.pravda.ru/photo/report/usaf-3118

This is thought to be funny in the USSR:-

http://cavemancircus.com/2009/10/26/a-rat-stuck-in-a-sidewalk-makes-for-funny-photoshopping/

And this is just a sawn-off-old-Bear, but with jet-engines stuck on:-

http://www.moscowtopnews.com/?area=postView&id=903

TEN YEARS ON: Britain without the EU…order your free book!

David Davis

Get it here. The first 5,000 copies are free. (Thanks to the Taxpayers’ Alliance for the resource.)

So what should we do now?

David Davis

It’s the morning of the General Election result, UK, 2010.

All the ballot-boxes for Labour’s Rotten and Pocket Boroughs have been mysteriously “mislaid” in the small hours, after the solid 90% majorities for Gordon Brown and his GFNs were triumphantly declared by the BBC during the night on uncommonly high turnouts to show workers’ solidarity, so a number of unfathomable evil people have been re-elected to the Commons, incliding “Jacqui” “Smith” and “Gordon” “Brown”. But the overall picture gives “Cast Iron Dave” a tentative working majority of about 40 seats. A number of “New Labour new-Britain-franchise extension facilitators” were caught during the night, trying to open and stuff ballot boxes in what they termed “safe Tory seats”, and were summarily shot at the roadside by “vigilantes” claiming to be members of the “Libertarian Alliance”, an extremist-right-wing fringe political group of skinheads and Gramscian intellectuals.

The draft-make-up of the Commons seems to be:

Conservative = 343

Lib Dem = 24

Labor = 260 (further enquiries to be made about counting irregularities later, although “no-one to be charged”)

UKIP = 14

BNP = 1

SNP = 2

IRA = 2

So what could be done about the Lisbon disaster?

The easiest plan is for the incoming administration simply to say that we have left the EU. Since it will probably be the Tories, and since these have already nailed their colours to the mast by saying that any referendum can only be about whether more powers can be extended to the EU than now (and since the EU now has all the powers it needs, Lisbon being automatically-self-amending) the only substantive decision to be taken is whether to leave the EU or not.