EU – All Things Considered

11 May

GDPR: Goddam Data Prote-ction

Simon Richards, chief executive of The Freedom Association, has come all over strange with me.

I’ve known Simon for nigh on twenty years: we’ve been to cricket matches together; I’ve attended countless TFA meetings; and we’ve been out for scores of lunches and dinners. Then suddenly, he writes to me and asks if he can have my permission to continue to write to me. I was flummoxed. Simon is a stout Brexiteer, a better-off-out man if ever there was one. He doesn’t go in for bureaucratic procedures. So what was it all about – could he have permission to keep writing to me and phoning me up? Was he joking? Well, in that case, what sort of a joke was it? Not a very funny one. Has he been watching too many old videos of Monty Python?

But hang on, it’s not just Simon who’s come all over funny with me. I buy a specialist diary every year called The Parson’s Pocketbook. I’ve bought it through the post from Preston in Lancashire every year since my ordination in 1970. And very handy it is too with all the saints days, feasts and fasts and the table of lessons for every day of the year. Now the supplier of that book has written to ask if he can keep on writing to me.

There’s seemingly no end to it. Every day another letter or email asking the same weird question. I’ve been chaplain of the Honourable Company of Air Pilots since 1999. In fact I was at one of their court meetings only yesterday. But now they’re writing to ask the same damn fool question. Ditto the Fuellers Company of which I’m a Freeman. Ditto my friend Edward Spalton of the Campaign for an Independent Britain.

Any minute now I’m expecting a letter from my wife asking the same question – even though we’ve just breakfasted together

Well, finally I’ve found out what all these letters are about. They are required by the new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) which come into force this month.

What’s the source of these regulations? I’ll give you one guess: the EU of course. Their purpose is supposed to be to ensure our privacy. That’s fine by me: I like to be private – but I don’t want privacy at the expense of contact with my friends. What sort of nonsense are we embarked upon when someone from whom I’ve enjoyed receiving messages for half a lifetime suddenly has to ask my permission to continue to do the same?

It’s bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is mad. But it’s not just mad: it’s malign. Bureaucracy – particularly state bureaucracy – is not at all about defending my privacy but about control.

And the new GDPR mightily inconveniences me – and not just me, but you and everybody else. I have to write to tell welcome correspondents that they are at liberty to carry on corresponding. This lunacy puts me to some trouble. What if, by an oversight, I forget to give permission? Will they never write to me again? Shall I be altogether cut off from the land of the living, like a dead man out of mind?

Let me think about it.

Meanwhile, Simon, I’ve ticked the box on the form you sent me and returned it in the prepaid envelope you kindly supplied. So please don’t stop writing to me…

07 Apr

Hats off to the BBC!

I switch on Radio Four just before seven o’clock in the morning for the weather forecast, listen to the news headlines and then turn off before the relentless barrage of propaganda from the lefty clones who present The Today Programme have chance to reduce me to a gibbering wreck. But this morning I was late and, by the time I’d switched on, Britain’s very own version of Pravda was in full swing.

They were discussing this weekend’s election in Hungary in which Prime Minister Victor Orban is seeking another term.

This is how the unbiased, balanced, public service BBC presented the matter: “The populist leader Victor Orban is expected to be re-elected with a large majority.”

I pondered ever so hard what this word “populist” might mean. Clearly it was more than enough to send the state broadcasters on Today into a decline.

The distress in the voice of Sarah Montague – or it may have been Humphrys, Robinson, Husain or Webb – I can’t remember, they’re all identikit mouthpieces – was palpable. But my mind was stuck on a word they used to introduce that news item. As we noticed, Orban was described as “populist.”

Anyway, one of the Today clones interviewed an “expert” on Hungary. This man informed us that, while three years ago immigrants were pouring into Hungary in their tens of thousands, now the influx has been halted. Orban has built a wall to keep them out and he makes sure that it is patrolled by soldiers. The expert went on to say, “Unemployment is less than 4% and wages are increasing at the amazing rate of 10% each year.”

Why wouldn’t the man in the Budapest street or the woman pushing her pram through Paprika Park vote for Victor Orban? I thought to myself: Orban pursues very popular policies. And then it dawned on me like a vision, the answer to my puzzlement: a “populist” leader is a “popular” leader whom lefty broadcasters dislike.

I was keen to find out more about Hungary, a country in which the people seem to like and admire their prime minister – an opportunity which I only wish we enjoyed in Britain. Where might I find the information I was seeking? Why, the BBC website of course. Where better to find a balanced, unbiased account?

The BBC website told me that Orban’s policies are “controversial.” Not among Hungarians – Sarah, Justin, John or whoever is holding the mic at the moment. Or the Hungarians wouldn’t vote so overwhelmingly in Orban’s favour.

The BBC also told me: “Orban alarms other EU leaders with his brand of nationalism and populism.”

And there the BBC is dead right! Naturally, the unelected apparatchiks and international bureaucrats in the European Commission have nothing but contempt for the idea of the nation state and for the wishes of its people.

So hats off to the BBC for such a clear and accurate explanation of what’s going on in Hungary this weekend

10 Nov

It’s the Germans–stupid!

Jean Claude Juncker is fond of reminding us of how wonderfully the EU ensures peace in Europe. He was at it again yesterday and eulogised his beloved transnational bureaucratic dictatorship as “a benign fraternity.” His short memory allows him to overlook the breakdown in fraternity during the Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian wars of the 1990s. All the Eurocrats there have ever been repeat relentlessly that it is only the EU which prevents the rise of aggressive, expansionist factions and they often add the judgement that if only the EU had been around in the 1930s the Nazis would never have been allowed to tyrannise the continent.

There are more holes in this argument than there are on the golf course at St Andrew’s. But the chief flaw is the one that is always overlooked. The European wars of the last 150 years happened not because of upstart rogues such as Hitler and his gang: they were all the logical consequence of Prussian militarism.

I’s not the Nazis. It’s the Germans – stupid!

When Napoleon conquered Prussia In 1806 he issued an edict which limited any Prussian army to 42,000. The King of Prussia obediently recruited such an army. Then, after a year, he dismissed the whole lot – officers and men – and recruited a further 42.000. He did the same every year, so that after a decade he had a trained army on active service and a very substantial reserve of 420,000 highly trained soldiers led by an elite and aristocratic officer class.

It wasn’t the Nazis who instigated the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It was the Germans under Otto von Bismarck – and specifically the North German Confederation of States – which aimed to extend German hegemony.

Similarly in the years before 1914 it was Kaiser Wilhelm who wanted to build a great trading empire and for Germany to have its “place in the sun.” He was well-equipped to achieve this with one of the largest standing armies in Europe to support him. Moreover, his political and popular support was assured because for a century the officer class had also formed the administrative class, thus unifying the interests of the military and the government.

This was the powerful tradition inherited by Hitler in 1933.

But what Bismarck failed to secure by force or arms in 1870-71, Kaiser Bill between 1914-18 and Adolf Hitler between 1939-45, Angela Merkel has achieved without firing a shot. Through the EU and monetary union via the Euro – the Deutschmark by any other name – Germany effectively controls the twenty-seven EU states and oppresses the unindustrialised southern states of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. If you want confirmation that there is a de facto German empire, just ask the impoverished Greeks or anyone among the 50% unemployed young people in Spain

This hegemony is operated more completely by Frau Merkel than dreamed of by Otto, Wilhelm or Adolf.

I am sure the delicious irony is not lost on Jean Claude Juncker.

23 Sep

Bye bye Brexit, bye bye

That’s it then. It’s all over, folks. We are going to leave the EU, but “leave” will effectually mean “stay.”

Theresa May has already amply earned from me the epithets “spectacularly incompetent” and “sublimely inept.” To these we can now add “traitorous .”

In her last Friday’s Florence Speech, the prime minister gave away the household silver – £20million worth – when she promised to pay that sum to the EU and insisted that Britain will honour its budget commitments for two years after we have left. She will also guarantee continued free movement of EU nationals. And we shall remain bound by the rulings of the European Court of Justice.

So you see what I mean when I say “leave” will mean “stay”?

Nigel Farage has described May’s surrender as , “A big win for the political class but two fingers up to the British electorate.”

What smiles must be spreading across the creepy visages of Tony Blair, Ken Clarke, Vince Cable and the noxious Jeremy Corbyn this morning!

On the matter of May’s support for the continuing sovereignty over us of the ECJ, Jacob Rees-Mogg has just said that getting rid of that Court’s authority is for us “an absolute red line.” He has also criticised the Prime minister for “promising to give money to the EU ahead of the negotiations.”

To make matters worse, May says the transition period will be “around” two years.

In other words, it will last forever.

Over the last two years I have written many articles outlining May’s incompetence, arrogance and general unfitness for high office. She was a disaster as the longest-serving home secretary since 1945. Among her incompetences was her failure for years to do anything about the wholesale rape of underage white girls by Muslims in a score of our towns and cities. (This is still going on, by the way). She did nothing to prevent the infiltration of Birmingham schools by jihadists. Charged with getting immigration down to “the tens of thousands,” she actually oversaw a vast increase in immigration during her period of office. When challenged about this, she replied, “My hands are tied because of the Schengen arrangements which guarantee free movement of populations..”

Then she voted Remain! How’s that for joined up thinking?

In the light of her record at the home office, what would be the best thing to do with a woman such as this? Relegation to a clerking job in the back office more suitable to her level of intelligence? The sack with the provision that she must never again be put in a position of responsibility? A spell in remedial psychotherapy?

None of the above. Her colleagues in the Conservative party decided instead to make her prime minister where her notorious incompetence meant she couldn’t even see off a twerp like Corbyn – and that after 192 members of Corbyn’s own party had signed a vote of no confidence in him.

Today the papers are accepting Corbyn’s self-assessment that he is “the political mainstream now.” The papers are right.

Thanks to Mrs May it is very likely that we shall shortly be ruled by a left wing government more extreme than anything seen in this country before. Think Venezuela.

Let me remind you that more people voted Leave than have ever voted for anything in Britain. Yet we shall, in all but name, still be a member of the wretched EU five years after that referendum.

What more is there to be said?

Private Frazer in Dad’s Army got it right: “We’re all doomed!”

02 Aug

Well, well Welby

There are varieties of fatuity – and then we come to Archbishop Justin Welby.

Yet again this week he offered to the nation the benefit of his boundless wisdom and called for a cross-party commission to negotiate Britain’s departure from the European Union. He said major decisions should be “taken off the political table.”

Even someone with less perspicuity than Welby – always supposing such a person could be found outside Bishopthorpe Palace – would understand that Brexit and the whole business of Britain’s negotiations with the EU are political issues and so it is nonsense to suggest that they be removed from the political realm.

We might as well suggest that when Welby sits down with his fellow bishops to discuss, say, a fresh translation of The Athanasian Creed, the matter should be “taken off the theological table.”

Besides, when Welby wades in as he has with his dazzling moral superiority on full beam, you would think that even he would understand that such an intervention is itself a political act. Thus incoherently he uses a political statement to declare that the matter should not be political.

The Archbishop’s first language is gibberish

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Can the politicians not put at the front of their minds the needs of the United Kingdom to come out with a functional, working system for Brexit, and agree that certain things are, as it were, off the political table and will be decided separately in an expert commission, or commission of senior politicians led by someone that (sic) is trusted in the political world?”

Welby would benefit from reading the well-known primer for infants and juniors Janet and John Look at Polity. For the decision to leave the EU was a political choice made by the British electorate. What we did in the referendum of 2016 was to express our will and then hand the matter over to the politicians whose job it is to work out the details

He wants “an expert commission” or “a commission of senior politicians led by someone that (sic again) is trusted in the political world.”

Does such a paragon exist?

What he really wants is a nanny – someone who knows best.

I wonder that Welby hasn’t noticed that Brexit is a divisive issue and a sizeable minority of the electorate voted against it. Any “expert commission” would of course itself be contentious from its appointment, with one side claiming it to be independent and the other side accusing it of bias

Crying for nanny is of course a characteristic of the infantile mind.

Like weak men everywhere, Welby has a craving for authority, for someone to tell him what to think and what to do. Plato would have provided him with such figures. Plato called them Guardians which the Latin philosophers translated as Custodes.

And they immediately asked the question, Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?

Who Will Guard the Guardians?

Round of applause, please everyone. Let’s hear it for the Archbishop of Cant.

04 May

The game’s up for the Fourth Reich

Here is part of a SKY News report:

“Senior EU figures are expected to react later to Theresa May’s combative speech in which she accused some in Brussels of ‘not wanting Britain to prosper.’ Launching the Conservative Party’s general election campaign after the dissolution of Parliament, she suggested leaks and threats had been ‘deliberately timed to affect the result of the general election’.”

Allow me to translate this journalese for you ,please, into something that resembles the way we speak in the street:

“The unelected EU Commissioners and others in their gang of apparatchiks and bureaucrats are in a state of panic and emotional shock because it has dawned at last on their sluggish collectivist minds that Britain is determined to leave their corrupt and disastrously inefficient and destructive political project. They will use every dirty trick they can think of, every lie they can invent and every false statistic they can manufacture to prevent our exit from the EU. Deceit and deception are the only ways of working known to them. Like the devil himself, these vile, self-promoting Eurocrats have constructed an empire of lies. So we should not be surprised when we notice their meddling in our elections with the intention of perverting the results – as they pervert everything else they touch.”

But why are the leaders of the EU in such a flap about Brexit?

Because Britain is a massive contributor to the EU budget and our leaving might be enough by itself to bring about the collapse of their whole rotten project.

Because when other European nations see the success of Britain’s Brexit policy, they will be emboldened to leave too. Already there is strong support for Leave in a number of EU member states.

Because the people of Europe have come to see that the EU is not the benign keeper of the peace and bountiful distributor of funds which it pretends to be. By obliging all member states to adopt the Deutschmark – that is the Euro by any other name – EU economic policy is run by the Germans and for the Germans, with the deliberate result that the non-industrial nations of southern Europe are impoverished to keep the Germans in the prosperity to which they have been accustomed ever since the USA pumped billions into their country’s restoration after the collapse of the Third Reich.

As the direct result of EU economic policy, the people of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal have been made poor. Youth unemployment in these countries varies between 25% and 50%, a disaster producing a lost generation

Britain’s determination to make a success of Brexit is stirring these impoverished peoples and teaching them that they do not need to continue for ever as vassal provinces of Frau Merkel’s Fourth Reich .

That was a good speech yesterday, prime minister. Now don’t go all wobbly on us!

25 Apr

Same old Frogland

In an uncertain world, it’s reassuring to fortify oneself with a few truisms such as All Cows Eat Grass, All Men Are Mortal and All Entries For The Eurovision Song Contest Are Bound To Be Trash. Let me add another: All French Politicians Are Lefties.

From time to time a new face appears on the French political scene who is announced as right wing. Who can forget Nicolas Sarkozy? Well, I’m trying to. He was said to be a conservative and to have “broken the mould” of socialist leaders in France.

The broken mould was quickly restored to its former perfection as Sarkozy revealed himself to be a collectivist like all his confreres.

Step forward the next alleged mould-breaker, the so-called “centrist” Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frederic Macron, born on St Thomas’ Day 1977. He is to become France’s new president in a couple of weeks, for no better reason than that the French Establishment – a very powerful force, unlike the French Resistance – can’t stand Marine Le Pen who is always described, at least when people are speaking politely, as of the “far right.” No, she’s another socialist – perhaps even a national socialist – and her economic policies are to the left of Hollande’s.

At least Macron has had an education to fit him for his new job. he has a master’s degree in public affairs and he went on from that to study at the Ecole Nationale D’Administration, France’s top college for apparatchiks and career bureaucrats – a bit like PPE, but for people imagined to have some intelligence. From there he slipped silkily into the post of Inspector General of Finances. After a short break at Rothschild’s to allow him to make his millions, as all successful socialists and egalitarians do, Macron was appointed Deputy Secretary General to Francois Hollande, the leftist of the French lefties who buggered what was left of the French economy after Sarkozy had departed the scene.

Asked about his political and economic beliefs, Macron replied he is in favour of “collective solidarity.” In other words, do as the trades unions demand, or they’ll set fire to all the motor cars.

He is also an enthusiastic Europhile and a committed federalist who wants to “strengthen the EU and provide a common budget.”

He shares Frau Merkel’s open door immigration policy. No wonder Angela is in raptures at the prospect of Emmanuel’s appointment!

He is an avid global warmer and wants to see “ecological transition” which, being interpreted, means more windmills.

At least young Manny Macron displays the French tradition of toujours l’amour. He fell in love with his schoolteacher, Brigitte Trogneux when he was fifteen – she is twenty-four years his senior – and now they are wed with three children from Brigitte’s first marriage.

What are we to make of all this? Just that in Frogland Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose

06 Apr

Leave means Remain

Here’s a little quiz for you…

When is a Brexit not a Brexit?

Answer: when it’s Theresa May’s Brexit.

What does that mean?

It means that we shall have the appearance of Brexit while in reality all our ties to the EU will remain in place.

To quote John McEnroe, “You cain’t be serious!”

Oh yes, I’m being very serious.

Give us some examples of what you mean, then.

Easy. Already Britain is in the process of translating all the myriad EU laws and regulations which bind us into British laws and regulations where they will still bind us.

Anything else?

Yes, Mrs May says that free movement of populations – that the EU Shengen Agreement or, in a word immigration – will stay in place even after we’ve left.

She can’t say that!

She can and she did – yesterday. Here’s what she said about our continued accommodation to the EU:

“Once we’ve got the deal … it will be necessary for there to be a period of time when businesses and governments are adjusting systems and so forth,”

Well, there’s bound to be a period of transition.

And it will last forever.

This is dreadful – but she’ll never get away with it. Parliament will hold her to account to aim for a genuine Brexit.

But Mrs May will get around that. Indeed she did so yesterday by making her remarks about free movement when parliament is in recess and while she was out of the country.

But she promised “Brexit means Brexit”

And so it does. And “soap” means “soap.” But there’s soft soap and there’s hard soap. Mrs May’s line is in soft soap. And she has always been a Remainer, remember. What we shall end up with is the word “Brexit” but not the substance of Brexit. May will say, “Brexit changes everything” – which, being translated, means “Everything will stay the same.”

03 Apr

Confessions of a Europhile

It’s time I came clean and owned up: I am a Europhile.

But, before all my fellow Brexiteers disown me, I must make clear that the Europe I love and daily thank God for has nothing to do with that monstrous tyranny in Brussels. I hate and despise the EU: its unelected Commissioners; its extortionate fraud called the customs union which sets British taxes and disbars us from trading freely with the rest of the world; its manifest corruption demonstrated by its refusal to publish audited accounts for two decades; its doctrine of universal rights derived from the blood-soaked philosophy which guided the French Revolution; its thorough atheism by which it has banished Christianity from the public realm; its relentless invention of new business taxes and regulations which stifle Britain’s economic prosperity and which have produced catastrophic unemployment among the young throughout the continent, impoverished Italy, Spain and Portugal and brought Greece to the edge of economic collapse and social disaster. Most of all I despise the EU for its suicidal immigration policy which is importing millions of members of an alien and vicious ideology – people who have repeatedly declared their contempt for the West – to live among us and so transform our continent until it comes to resemble the s*** heaps from which these hordes are glad to escape.

I fail entirely to understand the minds of the Remainers who regard this tyrannous servitude, this blatantly repressive regime, as freedom and as a paragon of the liberal values.

Have I made myself clear? Good – then I will tell you of that Europe which I love and for which I daily give thanks.

It is the Europe which, in the early Middle Ages, began to fashion the modern world: the monks, their monasteries, their agriculture and their learning; the common Latin language and the universities as the bedrock of scholarship; logic, philosophy; men such as Anselm, Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Francis Bacon.

Then there are the sublime creations of European literature, music , art and sculpture: The Divine Comedy; the paintings of Giotto; Gregorian plainchant; the invention of polyphony which produced the classical musical tradition; Tallis, Byrd, Purcell, Bach, Haydn, Schubert, Mozart and Beethoven; the public schools; hospitals and hospices; the trades guilds and the livery companies; the Gothic and the Romanesque, a cathedral in every city and a parish church in every village; the practical virtue of charity; Europe’s scientists, mathematicians, astronomers and medical doctors who have enriched our understanding and our wellbeing.

All these blessings and wonders – and many more besides – were and are the creation of the Europe I confess I love.

I confess, but I do not apologise

01 Jan

May, or May not?

Theresa May has delivered us a New Year message in which she begins 2017 in the same style as she ended 2016: in a paroxysm of indecision and malintent. She says she is to develop policies which will appeal to Leavers and Remainers alike. And after she has accomplished this, she will make supporters of Rangers and Celtic vow a vow of perpetual amity, Benjamin Netanyahu lie down with Hamas and Sunni and Shia kiss each other.

Why should anyone ever believe anything said by this woman?

When she was the longest-serving home secretary since 1945, she did nothing to prevent the infiltration of Birmingham schools by Muslim advocates of jihad and nothing to stop the rape and sexual abuse of underage girls by Muslims in a score of British towns over decades. Charged with reducing immigration to “the tens of thousands,” she stood back and supervised its doubling. When challenged about this, she said she was “powerless” because of EU rules on free movement of populations. Then, with characteristic perversity and double-mindedness, she voted Remain.

When it comes to duplicity , she makes Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson look like amateurs.

She described the near year long, catastrophic disruption to Southern Trains as “unacceptable” – and then accepted it. This trades union action is an openly declared outbreak of class war. It is costing the economy £11million each day. For hundreds of thousands of commuters, this is more than an inconvenience. Many have lost their jobs because they cannot get to work on time. Many more will do so in the next few months. Others have been obliged to move house.

Corbyn and the unions, defeated at the ballot box, have turned to anarchy. This is not in dispute: they have clearly stated time and time again that their aim is to bring down the Tory government. What Tory government? Under Cameron, but increasingly under May, their policies are indistinguishable from socialism. Business taxes have increased and the burden of regulations has got heavier. While business rates are set to rise once again.

Theresa May’s response to the chaos which surrounds us and the dangers with which the economic life and the social stability of the country are are threatened is to make another speech and avoid her responsibilities.

The only matter on which she has shown decisiveness is in her choice of a pair of fancy trousers to enhance her ability to compete in the mutton-got-up-as-lamb stakes.

While May the inept, May the Remainer, is in charge, things will only get worse.

Theresa May has always had only one interest in life: and that interest is Theresa May.

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: EU