spiked
Published Mar 27, 2024Europe’s farmers are rising up – and the elites are terrified. From the Netherlands to Germany to Ireland, farmers are taking to the streets, parking their tractors on the establishment’s lawn, spraying buildings with manure and bringing life to a standstill. The reason? Because unhinged green regulations, dreamt up by European Union bureaucrats, are immiserating them. In this spiked video polemic, Fraser Myers explores the roots of the farmers’ revolt across the continent – and explains why it must succeed. Watch, share and let us know what you think in the comments.
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March 28, 2024
Why European farmers are revolting
February 26, 2024
The Freedom Convoy’s European echoes
Niccolo Soldo on the widespread protests against the EU and various national governments’ intrusive and anti-human attempts to restrict or destroy European farmers in pursuit of their climate change agenda:
I wish there was a way to measure the gulf between ruling elites and the people that they lord over. Don’t Political Scientists have such a methodology already on hand? I don’t know.
What I do know is that this gulf is very palpable on both sides of The Pond, and that this gulf shows no signs of narrowing any time soon. Whether the issue is migration, crime, COVID-19, etc., it seems that the views of the people are simply ignored by those who can and do ignore them, and proceed to make policy that suits their own interests and the interests of their allies and class.
Judging by American media reporting, you would most likely not be aware that massive farmers’ protests are rocking the European continent as we speak. From Portugal to Poland, farmers are protesting the EU’s drive to push policies like “Net Zero” in order to “combat Climate Change” … policies that would severely impact the livelihoods of our food producers. These proposed changes are entirely top-down, indicative of just how divorced the Brussels elites are from the daily lives of the people whose lives they wish to upend with a stroke the pen. “Oppose us? You must be far right … probably a Nazi too.”
The “far-right” political libel against hard-pressed farmers is really a sign of how far the EU elites have lost touch with the reality of life for the peoples of Europe. We should ignore the slurs, and get behind the fighting farmers.
The protests by angry farmers have spread across the European Union, with mighty convoys of tractors blockading roads and cities from Romania to Rome, from Portugal to Poland, from Bulgaria to Brussels and beyond.
There might be some national variations in the farmers’ specific demands. But what unites them all is opposition to the way that the EU elites are subordinating agricultural policy to their Green agenda and Net Zero obsession, leading to more hardship for farmers and higher food prices for other Europeans.
As tractor convoys blockaded German cities in January, farmers’ association president Joachim Rukwied spelt out that they were protesting not just against the government’s proposed cuts in fuel subsidies, but against an EU-wide system where “agricultural policy is being made from an unworldly, urban bubble and against farming families and rural areas”.
This week in Poland, 62-year-old protesting farmer Janusz Bialoskorski told the media that, “They’re talking about climate protection. But why should it be done at farmers’ expense?” Farmers, he pointed out, are not responsible for industrial pollution, and “nor do we fly to Davos on our jets”.
Pitchfork Populism. The fact that the elites in Brussels have invited this in a year when elections for the EU’s Parliament are scheduled to occur indicates just how out of touch they really are.
These farmers are now in the front line of a wider populist revolt, against those elitists who DO fly in their private jets to the World Economic Forum in luxurious Davos, Switzerland, where they lecture the rest of us about how to save the planet by sacrificing our living standards.
Their protests expose the yawning gap between the high-minded talk of the Brussels Green oligarchy, and the grim reality of what those Net Zero policies mean for normal people in the muddy fields of Flanders or on the supermarket shelves of Florence.
If you can’t shut them up, call them “far right”:
Last weekend, UK Observer newspaper (Sunday sister of the liberal Guardian), the most pro-EU voice in the British media, worried aloud about how the European farmers’ cause “has been enthusiastically adopted by a resurgent populist far-right”.
Similar fears have repeatedly been expressed in the Brussels-backing news media this year: “Brussels struggles to placate farmers as far-right stokes protests,” and “EU farmers egged on by the far-right” (Financial Times); “How the far-right aims to ride farmers’ outrage to power in Europe” (Politico); “Far-right harvests farmers’ anger across Europe” (France 24) etc., etc.
The EU establishment and its media pals are so out of touch with the reality of people’s lives that they apparently imagine Europe’s naïve farmers are protesting only because they have been “egged on” or “stoked up” by “far-right” agitators. The idea that these farmers might be entirely reasonable, hard-working people who are simply at the end of their collective tether with EU bureaucracy seems beyond the comprehension of those bureaucrats and their media mouthpieces.
“A Silent War on Farming”:
As the title of a recent report by the think-tank MCC Brussels puts it, Europe’s agricultural communities are facing nothing less than a “Silent War on Farming,” waged from Brussels.
For decades, EU agricultural policy was about the efficient, cheap, and safe production of food to feed the peoples of Europe and ensure that the continent never suffered famine again. Now, that policy has instead been captured by Green ideology, which demands that farmers use less land and less intensive methods to produce lower emissions. In sum, that must mean less farming—and less food being produced.
Farmers are bearing the brunt of the ideologically-driven regulations imposed by the EU, with falling incomes and the closure of family farms. The rest of Europe faces a scarcity-driven surge in prices—with shortages being met by food imports from countries with far higher emissions than the EU’s hi-tech farming sector.
For many Europeans now supporting the farmers, however, this is about even more than the price of food on their table. Farming and rural communities are at the heart of traditional European ideas of community and self-image. People who live far from the countryside can now identify with farmers who are resisting the same sort of threat to their way of life that they see posed by, for example, EU policies on mass migration.
All Brussels seems to be able to do these days is pass laws to micromanage the lives of Europeans, while increasing the contempt that these same people have for them.
January 16, 2024
Why Real Dijon Mustard Is So Expensive | So Expensive Food | Business Insider
Insider Business
Published 12 Jul 2022Dijon mustard has a tangier, sharper, and spicier flavor compared to other types of mustard. It takes its name from the town of Dijon in Burgundy, France, where it originated. But despite its name, the majority of Dijon mustard that is sold all over the world doesn’t come from France. The few jars that do will cost you up to six times more than regular Dijon mustard (or double if we want to compare it to Grey Poupon). So how is real Dijon mustard different? And why is it so expensive?
Editor’s Note: In this video, the translations at 2:10 and 3:16 are incorrect. The rind of the mustard seed is wrongly referred to as “sound of mustard”. The correct translation is mustard bran. Insider regrets the error.
(more…)
December 9, 2023
All those (officially unexplained) “excess” mortalities
Mark Steyn discusses European and Antipodean statistical reports that echo what Maxime Bernier was talking about the other day on the as-yet officially unexplained huge rise in “excess mortality” since the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:
We are now three years into the administration of the Covid vaccines, and we have many startling statistical anomalies, including the most basic one of all: a huge mound of extra corpses. Per the EU’s official statistics agency:
Among the eighteen EU Member States that recorded excess deaths, the highest rates were in Cyprus (13.9%), Finland (13.4%), the Netherlands (12.7%) and Ireland (12.5%).
Those percentages are sufficiently high that in the Netherlands, formerly one of the healthiest nations on earth, they’re reducing life expectancy. The ongoing excess deaths are at odds with the normal post-pandemic pattern, such as the Spanish Flu a century ago. The intro to this new scientific paper sets out what’s meant to be happening:
Our approach takes into account age and gender, but also under-mortality that you would expect after a period of excess mortality.
“Under-mortality” occurs because, if the Spanish Flu killed you prematurely in 1920, you weren’t around to die when you otherwise would have done in 1924. Hence, excess mortality is followed by under-mortality. So:
If this under-mortality does not seem to be happening, it is actually hidden excess mortality.
That’s an important point. What Eurostat identifies as an excess mortality rate in Ireland of 12.5 per cent is, as a practical matter, actually higher – because it should be measured against not the pre-Covid baseline but the under-mortality one would have expected four years on. So persistent excess mortality is deeply weird, and, unlike those killed by the virus (where the median age of death by Covid is above most developed nations’ life expectancy), the extra deaths, as we have discussed on The Mark Steyn Show, are skewed towards the young and middle-aged:
We note that excess mortality in the Netherlands remains consistently high during 2020-2022 and has shifted from high to low age and towards men.
In other words, it’s not a general trend of excess deaths, but something more particular. Which, in a normal environment, would suggest something particular is causing it. Aside from excess deaths in “low age”, we also have excess deaths at no age – the babies who aren’t being born. The western world’s jabbed and re-jabbed citizenry has seen a catastrophic slump in newborns. Scandinavia:
The whole region reported sharp declines in fertility rates in 2022. Finland had the lowest fertility rate of all Nordic countries, 1.32 children. This is also the lowest Finnish rate since 1776 when monitoring of fertility rates first started.
Incidentally, that Finnish rate – of 1.3 children per woman – is what demographers call “lowest-low fertility”, from which no society has ever recovered.
Fortunately for officialdom, there was enough Covid circulating in Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, etc that the ever higher mountain of corpses can be shrugged off as most likely “Long Covid” or maybe, if necessary, “Extra-Long Covid”. In the Antipodes, they can’t get away with that. Australia and New Zealand enacted some of the most draconian public-health measures on the planet, and in effect quarantined their entire nations. As a result, pre-Omicron they had all but negligible accounts of Covid. But they obediently submitted themselves to the mass vaccination regime. And, whaddaya know, they too have extraordinary rates of excess death.
Clare Craig, a favourite guest of The Mark Steyn Show, has published a detailed analysis of the post-vaccination years Down Under. It makes for sober reading.
In 2021, for example, they had officially 1,224 deaths from Covid.
But also in 2021 – the first full year of the vaccines – they had 876 excess deaths from ischaemic heart disease alone. Plus another 583 excess deaths from other cardiac diseases.
Death by ischaemic heart disease had been in decline in Australia in the pre-vaccine years, but, having shot up in 2021, it went up even further in 2022. (Same trend with strokes.) So, having shut down the country for those 1,224 Covid deaths, you would think the public health bureaucracy might show a smidgeonette of interest in those 1,359 excess cardiac deaths.
But apparently not.
Now, across the Tasman Sea, we have a Kiwi whistleblower, Barry Young, who has released an avalanche of data with some quite disturbing takeaways that I referenced on Wednesday’s Clubland Q&A. I was careful to qualify my remarks with a lot of “ifs”, but our friend Norman Fenton, Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University, has taken a look and The Conservative Woman has published his findings. I see that on the Internet the kneejerk reaction was that Mr Young had simply leaked a lot of vaccination stuff from the old folks’ homes where the Covid centenarians would have died anyway. So it’s a biased sample.
In reality, it does not appear to be a “sample” at all:
[Steve Kirsch] says that there are widespread misunderstandings about the data and it is not biased. For a start he says that the dataset is the complete set of ‘pay-per-dose’ vaccination records and therefore there is no biased sampling at all. He says:
“The people within the group is representative of the total population. There are 2.2 million people in the group, and there are 4 million records. Each of those records is a Vaccination Record.”
2.2 million is over forty per cent of the population of New Zealand. That’s some “sample”. Nevertheless, Professor Fenton is being scrupulously cautious:
Even accounting for inevitable “survivor bias” (the more jabs a person gets, the quicker they are likely to die after their last jab) there was some evidence of increased risk the more doses a person gets. Moreover, given Steve’s comments about the datatset being the complete set of “pay-per-dose” vaccination records, this conclusion seems robust even if there were a biased proportion of vaccinee deaths in the dataset. Also (as per my above quote in Steve’s presentation) I felt that the data provided further support for the hypothesis that the vaccine was increasing the mortality rate in the older population (something which we had already concluded based on the most recent ONS data).
It’s interesting that such questions never come up at Britain’s official “Covid inquiry” which is increasingly risible in its palpable determination to find that the only mistake that was made was not to lock down harder and faster.
The other takeaway mentioned by Professor Fenton is the fatality rate of individual batches. Take a look at this handy graph:
I suppose it would be possible to argue that all 711 jabs of Batch #1 were administered to residents of the Shady Acres Retirement Home for Centenarians with Stage Four Ebola. But it’s difficult to make the same case with Batch #62 which went into the arms of 18,173 New Zealanders and killed 831 of them. Which, all by itself, is two hundred times the country’s official death toll from the vaccines. Which is to say, according to His Majesty’s Government in Wellington, precisely four Kiwis are dead of the vax.
November 30, 2023
Why Wilders’ PPV appealed to Dutch voters and why the establishment is utterly horrified
In The Free Press, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Evelyn Markus explain why Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom took so many seats in the Dutch elections:
Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV).
Photo by Wouter Engler via Wikimedia Commons.
It was in 2004, the same year that Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered, that Geert Wilders saw his opening.
Though Wilders had been in Dutch politics for a long time, that year Wilders left the VVD — the center-right party where he served alongside Ayaan — and branched out on his own with a new party, the Party for Freedom. The key issue that led to his break was that Wilders refused to countenance the possibility of EU membership for Turkey (which the VVD was willing to accept as long as certain conditions were met).
Almost immediately, Wilders became the most controversial man in Dutch politics. He urged the banning of the Quran and a halt to the construction of new mosques. He railed against what he described as the “Islamization of the Netherlands”. When he asked a crowd in 2014 whether they wanted “more or fewer” Moroccans, the crowd chanted “fewer”, and Wilders replied that this was something that would be arranged. Prosecutors argued this constituted an illegal collective insult, and the Dutch High Court ultimately ruled that Wilders was guilty, but without sentencing him to a penalty.
It was easy to be scandalized by Wilders. The press and the political class certainly were. Some publicly supported Wilders’ prosecution in the “fewer Moroccans” case.
We disagreed — and still do — with Wilders’ calls for blanket bans on additional asylum seekers, with the notion of banning the Quran (let alone any book), and with his consistent failure to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism.
But we understand how and why his message resonated with the public.
While elites over the past two decades have told the public to ignore their lying eyes, Wilders continued to emphasize the hot-button subjects that resonated with the public: the struggling economy, the importance of borders, the risks of devolving too much power to Brussels, the threat of Islamism, and the challenge of mass migration.
While elites told the public that opposing migration was xenophobic, ordinary people noticed structural changes in their country and felt they — the public — had not been adequately consulted. In the 1960s, 60,000 Muslims lived in the Netherlands; today there are around 1.2 million, thanks to massive chain migration, asylum, and a high birth rate. (Fewer than 50,000 Jews remain in the country.)
While political elites told the public to be tolerant of Islam, in keeping with a long-standing tradition of religious tolerance, ordinary people saw that Islamists were increasingly well-entrenched in the country, a point even made by Dutch intelligence officials. Although Wilders’ rhetoric can be uninhibited and extreme, he articulates a general and perfectly legitimate feeling among voters who know that Islamism is a threat to their way of life and want to oppose it. (Wilders has been the subject of sustained Islamist threats and has had to live his life within a tight security bubble because of them.)
While elites told the public that giving more power to the EU was an unqualified good, ordinary people took a more nuanced view. When we left the Netherlands in the early 2000s, the Dutch were solidly pro-EU. Today, although most Dutch voters do not wish to leave the EU, there are growing concerns that, especially when it comes to migration and borders, too much authority has been ceded to supranational institutions.
Over the years, we have heard more and more friends express private sympathy with Geert Wilders. And it should be noted that during the most recent campaign, he toned down some of his more extreme rhetoric. Previously, his party called for a “Ministry of Re-migration and De-Islamization”. That is no longer the case. Similarly, the phrase “Islam is not a religion, but a totalitarian ideology”, which was previously part of the election manifesto, was scrapped. This time around, Wilders emphasized his commitment to working within the Dutch coalition system, which he conceded would require him to make compromises in order to be able to govern.
The recent aggressive and occasionally violent pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the Dutch streets — as elsewhere — may have been the final blow that led to last week’s landslide. It’s worth noting that Wilders’ voters do not fit a crude stereotype — he won the most votes of any party among voters between the ages of 18 and 35.
September 6, 2023
Some key planks from Scott Alexander’s presidential platform
I was a bit surprised to find that Scott Alexander has decided to toss his hat into not one, but two party primaries for the 2024 presidential nomination:
The American people deserve a choice. They deserve a candidate who will reject the failed policies of the past and embrace the failed policies of the future. It is my honor to announce I am throwing my hat into both the Democratic and Republican primaries (to double my chances), with the following platform:
Ensure Naval Supremacy And Reduce Wealth Inequality By Bringing Back The Liturgy
The liturgy was a custom of ancient Athens. When the state needed something (usually a new warship) it would ask for volunteers among its richest citizens. Usually one would step up to gain glory or avoid scorn; if nobody did, the courts were allowed to choose the richest person who hadn’t helped out recently. The liturgist would fund the warship and command it as captain for two years, after which his debt to the state was considered discharged and he was given a golden crown. Historians treat the liturgy as a gray area between voluntary service and compulsory taxation; most rich Athenians were eager to serve and gain the relevant honor, but they also knew that if they didn’t, they could be compelled to perform the same service with less benefit to their personal reputation.
Defense analysts warn that America’s naval dominance is declining:
Only 25 per cent of America’s 114 commissioned surface combatants (cruisers, destroyers, and littoral combat ships) are less than a decade old. By comparison more than 80 per cent of China’s 141 destroyers, frigates, and corvettes have been commissioned in the past decade. In the same time period, the United States commissioned 30 surface combatants … The nearly 600-ship Navy of the late 1980s deployed only 15 per cent of the fleet on average. Today, with fewer than 300 ships, the US Navy deploys more than 35 per cent to service its global missions, contributing to a material death spiral.
So America is short on warships. But it is very long on rich people with big egos. An aircraft carrier would cost the richest American billionaires about the same fraction of their wealth as a trireme cost the richest Athenian aristocrats. So I say: bring back the liturgy!
(source)
The American rich already enjoy spending their money on exciting vehicles — yachts for the normies, rockets for the more ambitious, Titanic submersibles for the suicidal. Why not redirect this impulse towards public service? Imagine the fear it would strike into the hearts of the Chinese when the USS Musk enters Ludicrous Mode in the waters off the Taiwan Strait, with Elon himself at the wheel. Imagine how efficiently the USS Jeff Bezos will deliver its payloads! And does anyone doubt that billionaires – usually careful to avoid taxes — will jump at the chance to do this?
The Athenians had a parallel liturgy for rich people who would select and sponsor theater productions, but I think we can skip this one for now.
[…]
Legalize Lying About Your College On Resumes
Colleges trap Americans in a cycle of burdensome loans and act to reinforce class privilege. I have previously advocated making college degree a protected characteristic which it is illegal to ask people about on job applications. But this would be hard to enforce, and people would come up with other ways to communicate their education level.
So let’s think different: let’s make it legal to lie about your college on resumes (it is already not technically illegal to lie on a resume, but companies can ask for slightly different forms of corroboration which it is illegal to lie on). Everyone can just say “Harvard”, and nobody will have any unfair advantage over anyone else.
Start An Internet-Pop-Up Trade War With The European Union
For too long, Americans have groaned under the weight of foreign cookie-related-pop-ups which they and their elected representatives have no control over. It’s time to fight back.
When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it. If the Europeans want to be able to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other US-based site without clicking “I understand” every time they reload it, they’ll have to pressure their government to do something about GDPR.
Appoint Donald Trump Constitutional Monarch
This would require a constitutional amendment, but I’m sure I could convince enough people.
The British experience suggests that the role of a constitutional monarch is to flaunt how rich they are, get 24-7 news coverage regardless of whether or not they do anything interesting, and have scandals. Donald Trump is the best person in the world at all three of these things
Trump wants to be on top, but is not that interested in governing. Meanwhile, American liberals (by revealed preference) want to continue thinking about him every hour of every day forever, but also don’t want him to govern. Constitutional monarchy would satisfy everyone’s preferences. If Trump is destined to destroy democracy — and everyone agrees that he is — let’s make it happen as gently and non-destructively as possible.
Obviously the royal family can’t participate in regular electoral politics, which means no Trump would ever be able to run for office ever again. This is the only way we are ever getting rid of them, you know this is true, please don’t throw away this chance.
I would support reverse primogeniture-based inheritance — ie the youngest son takes the throne — just so we can have a “King Barron”.
August 5, 2023
QotD: Europe
From my observations of the French, they still feel French, indeed quite strongly so. Nearly half a century after the Treaty of Rome, they can’t be said to like the Germans; to think otherwise is to mistake a marriage of convenience for the passion of Romeo and Juliet.
A common European identity therefore has to be forged deliberately and artificially; and one of the imperatives for attempting to do so is the need of Germans for an identity that is not German (the other, which dovetails neatly, is the French drive to recover world power). And since the Germans are very powerful in Europe, by weight of their economy, their need to escape from themselves by absorbing everyone into a new collective identity will sooner or later be perceived in the rest of Europe as the need to impose themselves — as a return to their bad old habits. New identities can indeed be forged, but usually in the crucible of war or at least of social upheaval: not, in the context, an inviting prospect.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Specters Haunting Dresden”, City Journal, 2005-01
November 29, 2022
In a dangerous and insecure world, the EU appears to feel that the greatest enemy is on the other side of the Atlantic
CDR Salamander on how the EU’s movers and shakers (i.e., mostly not democratically elected leaders) seem to have decided that their one true enemy is the United States:
If you are an American who lived on the European Continent, specifically Western Europe, you’re very familiar with an exceptionally sharp strain of anti-Americanism that resides in a significant percentage of their ruling elite – an adult version of the middle school mean girls. Though present in all nations to one degree to another, it is especially acute in Germany and France for slightly different reasons but are all working towards the same goal; degrade American influence in Europe.
The best way for this political and corporate anti-Americanism to find a lever of power is through the the trans-national and anti-democratic modern iteration of the European Union – made even more problematic with the departure of Great Britain who once played a balancing role between the Continental powers as she has for centuries.
Why primarily France and Germany? To start with, this is part of the sibling rivalry between the children of Charlemagne for primacy in Europe that has churned Europe over the last thousand years. The Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic kept getting in the way of their return to the struggle.
Their armies under various blood-soaked leaders moved across Iberia to Moscow and back for centuries in order to be THE driver of power in influence on the continent. The European Union, once the “trade association” nose was in the tent, is now seen – fairly – as a mechanism to centralize power so The Smartest People in the Room™ no longer have pesky minor powers and – Buddha forgive – voters getting in their way. Without checks, power only seeks more power for itself. The morphing of the EU is just the latest example.
Not unlike their American counterparts who would like the USA to extract itself from foreign entanglements (NB: as I have written through the years, I am sympathetic/supportive of these efforts), many of the strongest proponents of the EU just want the USA to go home.
The Europeans, while benefiting from the WWII/Cold War leftover presence of the USA, want it to end and the influence that comes with it. If any opportunity to push back against the USA appears, they have their talking points ready to dirty up the reputation and standing of the USA. If that can be done while blaming Eurocrat failures on the USA as well, even better.
You know the Americans, citizens of that mongrel nation whose gene pool is full of religious zealots, failed revolutionaries, slaves, economic refugees, grasping second sons, criminals, and their descendants – spoiled with a continent overflowing with food, water, minerals, forests and open land they don’t even appreciate.
Loud. Fat. Pushy. Americans.
The usual snarled insults cobbled together by smug people who get much of their opinions of the USA by reading The Washington Post or The New York Times. “I know America, I read your newspapers.” That is right after, “I’ve been to America. I spent a week in DC/NYC/Boston/Chicago. I studied a semester at Brown.”
[…]
The smaller European nations don’t trust France and Germany all that much, for good historical reasons. Most of the Europeans in the “new territories” in the east like the USA. They see the Americans as a more reliable guarantee of safety from hostile powers in the East, having a few centuries of experience of the Western European Frankish tribes carving them up for fun and profit – irrespective of local desires. Collectively these nations are not that large in GDP or population – not much more than Italy (for now), but that’s OK. They have the correct geography.
If we shape this relationship correctly, we don’t have to permanently garrison this part of Europe. Poland is already establishing a new paradigm of proper levels of security investment. Once NATO’s eastern front calms down a bit, we can rotate through forces for exercises and training. Perhaps even create some combined training and logistics bases ready to scale up in case of trouble in Mordor. A template we should have put in place in Western Europe decades ago.
Reward positive behavior and let the French and Germans continue their millennium-length struggle – peaceful this time – in the west; keep them frothing in Brussels and Strasbourg while the forward-looking nations try to set up the next thousand years of Western progress in a positive direction.
Perhaps.
June 13, 2022
The idealized EU that British “Remainers” still long for
The Brexit debate was at least as much a cultural as it was an economic or political struggle. Many of the people who wanted the UK to remain within the European Union would be instantly comfortable as members of Canada’s Liberal or New Democratic parties, as our “Laurentian elite” are culturally much more attuned to their European elite counterparts than they are to ordinary Canadians. British “Remainers” similarly have much more in common with their Euro counterparts than with ordinary Brits:
For many in the British cultural establishment, Brexit was (and still is) an incomprehensible, foolish rejection of the unqualified benefits of the European Union. The creative industries, according to one noted poll in the lead-up to the 2016 referendum, were 96 per cent in favour of staying in the EU, and many working in the arts and culture have been raging ever since. Britain’s contemporary artists are some of the most outspoken about Britain leaving the EU, to the point that some of them would rather leave Britain. Last week, speaking at an exhibition opening in the Netherlands, famed sculptor Antony Gormley announced that such were his strong feelings over Brexit that he had applied for German citizenship. “I’m embarrassed about Brexit”, he lamented, “it’s a practical disaster, a betrayal of my parents’ and grandparents’ sacrifice to make a Europe that was not going to be divided again”.
[…]
None of our parents and grandparents who experienced the war, and the postwar reconstruction, would have envisioned the EU in its current form. It is a backroom technocracy of elites, making decisions beyond the reach of popular accountability, increasingly hostile to democracy and the aspirations of its millions of citizens. As many of us have always maintained, it’s possible to be for Europe, for fellow Europeans and for European culture – but against the EU.
The “little Englander” slur is one of the more ingrained prejudices of cultured Remainers. It has always been a way of expressing their contempt for those stuck with the consequences of the European project, those people unable or unwilling to shift from their “little”, provincial world and attitudes. These are the people, moreover, who the cultural establishment spent two decades up until the referendum patronising and cajoling. Arts policies and newbuild art galleries imagined that culture would rehabilitate the left-behind provincials of post-industrial Britain. Until, that is, post-industrial Britain voted the “wrong” way. (Gormley, with haughty disdain, has previously described Brexit as “a stupid moment of collective fibrillation” and “a disease”.)
Prominent Remainers profess their love for EU free movement, but studiously look the other way when it comes to its less romantic reality. Its only real achievement has been to facilitate the flow of cheap labour from poorer to richer EU states. This is the dominant economic reality of the free movement of labour, not the individualist idyll of foot-loose, self-determining bohemianism, or the career mobility of the well-paid creative. The latest Home Office figures for applications to the EU settled-status scheme reveal the stark trends in where Europeans, settling in Britain post-Brexit, are from: while the table is headed by poorer Eastern European Romania and Poland, these are followed by Italy, Portugal and Spain – southern Eurozone countries which were battered by the consequences of the EU’s stubborn and heedless imposition of the single currency.
While Remainers crow about insularity and “little Englanders”, it turns out that Britain is actually becoming more cosmopolitan, not less, since Brexit – just not in the way they mean it. Not only are 3.2million European citizens now fully settled and 2.6million “pre-settled” (meaning they’ll be fully settled after five years of residence), but also the British population is becoming more international. Recent ONS figures show that the number of workers not born in the UK has increased as a share of the labour force, from 17 per cent in June 2016 to 19 per cent in March 2022, with the increase made up of non-EU workers.
Update: Added the link to J.J. Charlesworth’s article at Spiked.
May 12, 2022
QotD: De Gaulle and FDR
De Gaulle’s struggles with Churchill were, by comparison, lovers’ tiffs. Churchill, like most civilized Englishmen, loved France, “that sweet enemy”, as Philip Sidney called her. While de Gaulle was cold to veterans of the Resistance, Churchill — when he went to Paris to meet them — was so moved by their bravery that he was in tears for most of the day.
De Gaulle’s quarrel with Roosevelt was based on real loathing. Washington’s vision for postwar Europe, in which the old nations would be diminished and homogenized, was directly opposed to de Gaulle’s idea of a French resurrection in glory and might. Washington loved and promoted the idea of a Europe dominated by supranational bodies, and would later use Marshall aid and the CIA to spread the idea of a European union. Jean Monnet, one of the founders of the eventual European superstate, was much more welcome in the U.S.A. than de Gaulle, whom FDR once airily dismissed as “the head of some French committee.” No doubt, this was what Roosevelt wished he was. Nancy Mitford, in her satirical 1951 novel, The Blessing, neatly caricatured this American unifying vision of the new Europe in the figure of the appalling American world-reforming bore, Hector Dexter, who dreamed of seeing a bottle of Coca-Cola on every European table:
When I say a bottle of Coca-Cola I mean it metaphorically speaking, I mean it as an outward and visible sign of something inward and spiritual. I mean it as if each Coca-Cola bottle contained a djinn, and as if that djinn was our great American civilization ready to spring out of each bottle and cover the whole global universe with its great wide wings.
In May 1962, de Gaulle would oppose to this his assertion that Europe could not be real “without France and her Frenchmen, Germany and her Germans, Italy and her Italians.” He said (a recording of the performance still exists) that Dante, Goethe, and Chateaubriand “belong to Europe,” precisely because they spoke and wrote as Italians, Germans, or Frenchmen. They would not, he jeered, have served Europe much if they had been stateless and had written in some form of Esperanto or Volapük.
Peter Hitchens, “A Certain Idea of France”, First Things, 2019-04.
April 21, 2022
EU accuses Le Pen of financial skulduggery, in what I’m sure must be purely co-incidental timing
Theodore Dalrymple on the surprisingly frequent “charges made against anti-EU politician late in election campaign” phenomenon that seems to have become standard practice in France:
Marine Le Pen speaking in Lille during the 2017 French presidential election
Photo by Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick via Wikimedia Commons
A disturbing pattern has emerged in French presidential elections: A credible candidate is found almost at the last minute to have committed an illegal act, the revelation of which is intended to spoil or destroy altogether the candidate’s electoral chances.
The latest “victim” of this pattern is Marine Le Pen, who is facing the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron, in the forthcoming second round of the French presidential election, a repeat of the contest of 2017. The main difference between the two contests is that, this time round, the polls give Le Pen at least some slight chance of victory, while last time Macron gained not only an overwhelming victory, but from the first had also appeared likely to do so. The outcome was never in any kind of doubt, as it is now.
Le Pen is usually described as being of the far right, though in fact her economic ideas are in some respects not very different from those of the candidate of the far left, Jean-Luc Mélanchon, who came not very far behind her in the first round of the election, in which the two candidates who receive the most votes go forward to the second, and decisive, round.
Perhaps economic affinity helps to explain why almost as many voters for the far-left candidate say they will vote for the candidate of the far right as say they will vote for the centrist candidate, Macron. Mélanchon himself has expressed the wish that not a single one of his voters should vote for Le Pen, without, however, having asked them to vote for Macron. He seems, then, to be hoping for a high rate of abstention, which would strengthen his argument that the current French political system is undemocratic and illegitimate, and that the country needs yet another new constitution.
Le Pen has just been accused by the European Union’s antifraud office of malversation of funds, 136,993.99 euros (about $148,000) of the Union’s money to be precise, while she was a member of the European Parliament between 2004 and 2017. For example, she is accused of having claimed 23,100 euros (about $25,000) for the purchase of little objects such as pens and bags to be given out at her political party’s annual conference in 2014, which is not allowed under the rules.
It might be a coincidence that the accusation of something that was allegedly done eight years ago has emerged in the week before the election, but I do not think many people will be found to believe it. After all, Le Pen is decidedly hostile to the European Union, while Macron is almost a religious devotee of it. There are no prizes for guessing, then, which of the two candidates the Union would prefer to win.
April 7, 2022
The EU only cares about democracy as long as the voters make the “correct” choice
In Spiked, Tom Slater points out the most recent proof that the EU’s principled defence of democracy fades out quickly when the voters don’t vote the way they’re “supposed to”:
Remember the other day when the European Union was pretending to care about sovereignty and democracy? When Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine had supposedly united European elites in their staunch, unflinching belief in a people’s right to determine their own destiny and shape their nation? You’ll be shocked to learn that they didn’t really mean it, at least if their reaction to the Hungarian election is anything to go by.
On Sunday, Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party won a landslide victory. Already the longest-serving EU leader, Orbán is now heading into a fourth consecutive term, with a two-thirds majority in parliament and an increased mandate. United for Hungary – an opposition coalition stretching from ex-communists to ex-fascists – defied the raised expectations of Euro elites and put in a dreadful showing, capped by gaffe-prone leader Péter Márki-Zay failing to win his own constituency race.
In the election, Orbán presented himself as a doughty defender of Hungarian national identity and interests against a meddlesome European Union and international set. Budapest and Brussels have been locked in a years-long battle over alleged “rule of law” breaches and LGBT rights. The EU is currently withholding €7 billion of coronavirus recovery funds from Hungary as part of a bitter legal standoff. In this, Márki-Zay was an all-too-willing foil, arguing that his government would be a “grand prize” for the EU.
In February, the European Court of Justice rejected a challenge by Hungary and Poland, upholding the legality of withholding funds from member states if they fail to adhere to “core values”. It sent a clear message to the Hungarian electorate in the run-up to the election: reject – or at least humble – this troublesome government or else. Now that Hungarians have politely refused to be pushed around, the European Commission has said it will press ahead with the formal mechanism that will deprive Hungary of the funds indefinitely.
Meanwhile, the European liberal media took a break from piously intoning about the defence of democracy in Ukraine to decry the election result in Hungary. Timothy Garton Ash even linked the ballot-box revolt to the barbarism in Bucha. “The Ukrainian horrors are clearly far worse than the Hungarian miseries, but the two are fatefully connected”, he wrote in the Guardian, accusing Orbán of being a Putin stooge. “Europe should now get tough on both the Russian enemy without and the Hungarian enemy within.” A Guardian editorial similarly called for swift EU action against this pesky central European state.
February 5, 2022
A new biography of Nigel Farage
For a man who’s never been elected to Parliament, Nigel Farage has been a major mover-and-shaker in British politics. In the Literary Review, Steve Richards reviews One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage by Michael Crick:
Most political figures come and go. Nigel Farage, in contrast, seems always to be around, close to the centre of the political stage. Sometimes he is leading a political party. Occasionally he is setting up a new one. Between such roles he is on television. Currently, the former leader of UKIP and the Brexit Party hosts a nightly show on GB News.
The consequences of Farage’s ubiquity have been seismic, reshaping the UK and the wider political landscape. He sought a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU and then a hard Brexit, and ultimately got everything he wanted. The Conservative Party’s embrace of a form of English nationalism was partly a response to the threat that Farage posed. The near-silence of the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, on the subject of Brexit is a form of vindication for him. Starmer knows that Brexit is having calamitous consequences but does not dare to say so. No wonder Michael Crick concludes that “it’s hard to think of any other politician in the last 150 years who has had so much impact on British history without being a senior member of one of the major parties at the time”.
Among Crick’s admirable passions is his interest in those individuals or forces that have shaped the major political parties from outside the mainstream. He wrote an important book on Militant, the left-wing group that in the 1980s sought to infiltrate the Labour Party and for a time made life hellish for Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, the two party leaders during that stormy decade. His biography of Jeffrey Archer, the Conservative MP who became a bestselling author and then a convicted prisoner, was revelatory. Now he has set his sights on Farage, who has never been an MP and yet has been such a prominent figure in recent years.
As Crick always does with his subjects, he has researched meticulously every twist and turn in Farage’s life. He regrets that his investigations were constrained by the pandemic. He need not worry too much. His diligence has enabled him seemingly to have unearthed every internal dispute in UKIP and the Brexit Party, along with the eccentric figures who lined up on different sides in them. The characters that emerge would fit neatly into a Dickens novel. One of the most unsavoury right-wingers to feature in the book is now an avid supporter of the Green Party, lives in Germany and is passionately opposed to Brexit – a novelistic metamorphosis. We are also reintroduced to Farage’s old friend Godfrey Bloom, a UKIP MEP and economics spokesman, who in 2013 famously hit Crick with a party conference brochure as the journalist pursued him down the street after he had made characteristically indiscreet and outrageous remarks in a speech to UKIP members.
This book is full of fights, usually between party members. We see Farage repeatedly falling out with other potential leaders. More prominent members who cannot hide their real views in public have to be admonished. Some flirt with the BNP. Even during the triumphant 2016 referendum campaign, there were two pro-Brexit camps, one led by Farage and the other by Dominic Cummings. Farage and Cummings loathe each other and their campaign groups fought bitterly for pre-eminence. This is the most striking theme of the book. UKIP and the Brexit Party, which Farage set up in 2019 to campaign for a hard Brexit, were utterly dysfunctional most of the time. They make the UK’s main political parties, all going through various existential crises at the moment, seem models of smooth, sophisticated professionalism. The amateurism extended well beyond the eccentric characters near or close to the top. Neither party offered coherent policy programmes beyond opposition to the UK’s membership of the EU.
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
December 8, 2021
Pandemic authoritarianism in the EU will be the death of Europe’s liberal traditions
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill says we’re watching the “death of Europe” driven by the authoritarian instincts of government and EU leaders in thrall of public health officials:
Europe is on a precipice. It has marched, blindly, towards something very much resembling tyranny. Austria will shortly criminalise those who refuse the Covid vaccine. Germany looks set to follow. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, is wondering out loud if every member state should do likewise and make offenders of those who reject this form of medication. In Italy you are deprived of your livelihood rather than your liberty if you say no to vaccination: the unvaxxed are not permitted to work. Anywhere. In Greece, everyone over the age of 60 must pay the government 100 euros for every month they remain unvaxxed. As if the Greek government, in cahoots with its masters in Brussels, had not immiserated Greek pensioners enough already.
Police in Rotterdam opened fire on people protesting against Covid restrictions. Three were seriously injured. Austrian cops have wielded batons and shields against the thousands who took to the streets of Vienna to say no to mandatory vaxxing. In Brussels, the black, bureaucratic heart of the EU project, water cannons and tear gas were unleashed upon citizens agitating against vaccine passes. The irony is almost too much: in the European quarter of Brussels, the very part of Europe in which the modern European sensibility was forged by politicians, experts and technocrats, ordinary people make a blow for freedom and the forces of this supposedly liberal new continent beat them down. Rarely has modern Europe’s bluster about “human rights” and “respect” been so savagely exposed.
What is happening in Europe right now is nothing short of terrifying. We are not merely witnessing another round of Covid restrictions. This isn’t just the introduction of another set of emergency measures that some people believe are necessary to stave off the latest Covid wave and the Omicron threat lurking on the horizon. No, we are living through a chilling overhaul of the entire relationship between the state and the individual, with the state empowered to such an extraordinary degree that it can now instruct its citizens on what to inject into their bodies, and the individual so politically emaciated, so denuded of rights, that he no longer even enjoys sovereignty over himself, over that tiny part of the world that is his own body and mind. We are witnessing the violent death of European liberalism and the birth pangs of a new and deeply authoritarian era.
Many seem not to recognise how serious a development mandatory vaccination is. Even those of us who are pro-vaccination, who have been happily vaxxed against Covid-19, should look with nothing less than horror upon the proposal that it should be an offence not to be vaccinated; that a citizen should be fined thousands upon thousands of euros if he refuses this treatment. One of the ideas being discussed in Austria ahead of its mandatory vax law that will be introduced in February is that citizens who refuse vaccination will be summoned to a local court. If they ignore the summons twice they will face a fine of 3,600 euros. If they continue ignoring the state’s demand that they receive medical treatment that they do not want, they’ll be fined 7,200 euros. These are life-ruining fines. There is no talk – yet – of imprisoning people who reject the vaccine, but the Austrian state is making it crystal clear that it will happily wield its power to propel the unvaxxed into destitution.
[…]
This spells the end of freedom as we know it. Bodily autonomy is the foundation stone of self-government, and self-government is the thing that gives freedom meaning. If we do not enjoy sovereignty over our minds and our flesh, then we are not free in any meaningful way. And it won’t just be the minority of people who feel forced to receive the vaccine whose freedom will suffer under this new regime of state power over people’s bloodstreams and muscles and flesh – everyone’s freedom will. The state diktat determining that only those who receive a certain form of medical treatment will get to enjoy freedom will make freedom itself contingent upon doing what the state wants you to. Even the vaxxed will not be truly free people in this world. Rather, we will be the beneficiaries of state favour, the enjoyers of small privileges, in return for our agreeing to receive an injection. We will have a license from on high to go about our daily lives. And we will know that that license could swiftly be revoked if we refuse medical treatment in the future. The redefinition of “freedom”, the making of liberty contingent upon submission to medicine, will throttle the rights of all of us – vaxxed and unvaxxed alike.
What if the refugee flow was crossing the Channel the opposite way?
In The Critic, Joel Rodrigues considers what the media narrative would say if the constant stream of migrants from the EU to Britain was reversed, as all the major media outlets predicted would happen if Brexit went through:
This map shows the location of the Strait of Dover between England and France, and part of the English Channel and the North Sea. It also shows nearby towns such as Dover, Calais, and Dunkirk.
Image created by NormanEinstein via Wikimedia Commons.
Imagine “tent” cities on the Kent coast, similar to “the Jungle” that existed in Calais up until 2016. These camps are the type of camps that the Remain campaign (wrongly) warned would spring up if Britain voted to leave the EU, as part of their Project Fear campaign. The tent cities are full of migrants, hoping to reach the French coast and the “sunlit uplands” of the European Union.
The camps are filthy, riddled with violent crime, and it is here that people traffickers sell spaces on dinghies to cross the channel for thousands of pounds a ticket. The British police and immigration services are aware of undocumented people living in squalor in the camps, but largely do nothing.
Occasionally a camp is cleared to placate the locals, but it quickly springs up somewhere else. The British government make no effort to document, accommodate or process the migrants living in appalling conditions on its territory. Instead, it blames the “pull factor of the EU’s single market”, saying that many of these migrants have family in France and want to live in a French or German speaking society. A junior British minister suggests that the black market economies in the EU are also a pull factor, and that there are a “lack of safe asylum routes” into the EU.
People smugglers continue operating from the British coast, and the migrant camps expand. Dinghies are now launched daily from the UK towards the continent. Police are aware of the launches, but do nothing. The RNLI and Royal Navy escort these flimsy boats until they are in EU waters, despite their not being seaworthy. Thousands succeed in making the crossing.
Then, tragedy strikes when a boat sinks. Statements are released from the British and French governments lamenting the loss of life. Trying to find a solution, Emmanuel Macron writes a letter to Boris Johnson urging increased collaboration, with joint patrols if necessary, to prevent a repeat of the tragedy.
The British government issue a response claiming that the perfectly conciliatory letter is in fact unacceptable, a “threat to British sovereignty”, and that France is uninvited from crisis talks. British media later reports that in a meeting with some of his advisors, Boris Johnson branded Emmanuel Macron as “a clown in charge of a circus”.
Imagine the media commentary and narrative in the UK surrounding such a situation, especially post-Brexit.
“Migrants die fleeing racist, Brexit-ridden, plague island,” says an op-ed in the Guardian. The comments are largely agreed that Boris Johnson is personally responsible for each of their deaths.
“UK condemned as using migrants to destabilise the EU’s single market,” reports the BBC. Parallels are also drawn in The Times between Boris Johnson and Belarus’ Lukashenko. There are mass demonstrations outside Parliament as the crisis worsens.
One can imagine the EU Commission swiftly and publicly denouncing the UK and drawing up sanctions. The Labour party would likely call it a national scandal, and demand resignations, as well as accusing the government of taking a hardline stance as cynical electioneering.
I searched for public domain or Creative Commons images of the English Channel migrant crisis, but came up surprisingly empty, hence the generic map to illustrate this post. I had expected to be inundated with lots of heart-rending images of desperate refugees, but not this time…
