Quotulatiousness

July 15, 2021

Out: “War is the health of the state”, In: “Pandemic restrictions are the health of the nanny state”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Food, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

British MP Andrew Lewer on the inability (and determined unwillingness) of western governments at all levels to back away from all the restrictions they’ve been able to impose on their citizens since the start of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

The list goes on. By the government’s own calculations it [banning advertising for “junk food” on TV] will reduce children’s diets by a meagre five calories a day – the equivalent of a third of a cherry tomato. And watch out for those Government figures. Pardon the pun, but given that they add weight to the arguments of those opposing their intrusiveness into our lives, would anyone be amazed if new and revised figures emerged during the course of detailed legislation? But even if the impact of these proposals was amplified by “the science”, it would still come at too high a cost to individual freedom and liberty.

And this is just the thin end of the wedge. For a moment back in winter, it looked like we had woken up and smelt the full English breakfast. It was reported that the advertisement ban would be discarded, which allowed the free market minded to hope, especially given the disbanding of Public Health England, that this might signal pushback against nanny state intrusion. Alas, no.

The appetite for ill-conceived, unworkable ideas is growing: we have plans to force pubs to disclose the number of calories in every drink they serve, just as they begin to fill their tills after months of lockdown. Plans to end deals like “buy one get one free” on foods high in fat, sugar and salt – a regressive measure that will hit the poorest consumers hardest while doing nothing to reduce our waistlines. Plans for further legislation around nutritional labelling – adding cost, probably not adding clarity.

We left the EU in part as a reaction to over-regulation. I remember well during my time as an MEP how skewed towards large corporations the regulatory regime could be in Brussels. If, having taken the difficult and painful decision to leave the bloc, we fail to roll back the overreach then people will start to ask what the last four years was all about. If freedoms regained are never applied, then what was the point? The food laws will diminish freedoms in everyday life, not just those of the important, but more esoteric and common room kind, that our political elites from time to time do remember to respect.

April 21, 2021

“The error in Western thinking was to view CCP officials as civilised counterparts”

Filed under: China, Economics, Europe, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Aaron Sarin traces the last twenty years of successful diplomacy, industrial espionage, and ever-increasing CCP media influence in China’s relationships with western nations:

President Donald Trump and PRC President Xi Jinping at the G20 Japan Summit in Osaka, 29 June, 2019.
Cropped from an official White House photo by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons.

By the end of 2020, China’s relationships with the US and Australia had reached their lowest point in living memory, while Sino-British relations weren’t far behind. Yet the European Commission chose this moment to sign a major new investment treaty with Beijing. The deal appeared to have been rushed to completion just before Joe Biden’s inauguration, as if to avoid the fuss that a new American administration would be sure to make. Indeed, incoming National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan felt sore enough to send a pointed tweet: “The Biden-Harris administration would welcome early consultations with our European partners on our common concerns about China’s economic practices.”

The truth is that Brussels has been drifting further and further from Washington ever since the election of Donald Trump, and there are few signs the winds will change now that Biden has taken office. In 2017, Merkel said that Europe could no longer rely on America. By 2020, it seemed truer to say that Europe would rely on China from now on. Indeed, diplomats like Emmanuel Bonne (Macron’s foreign policy adviser) have been most enthusiastic about “France’s readiness to step up strategic communication with China.” In his gushing deference, Bonne can sometimes sound like a man with a gun to his head: “France respects China’s sovereignty, appreciates the sensitivity of Hong Kong-related issues, and has no intention of interfering in Hong Kong affairs.” There are times when the language of neutrality reveals with painful clarity that a side has been chosen.

Brussels officials talk of “strategic autonomy,” of course. They hope to carve out a path to self-sufficiency while at the same time enjoying mutually beneficial relationships with partners like Beijing. The problem is that mutually beneficial relationships are not possible with predators. As successive American administrations have found, those who maintain close connections with the Communist Party will eventually suffer large-scale intellectual property theft and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs.

Brussels can hardly expect that Beijing will respect this new agreement. Recall the various promises that were made regarding Hong Kong: all of them were broken. Party officials may have signed a legal document recognising the city’s special administrative status, but this was purely for show. In 2017, having apparently now ascended to a position above the law, they declared that the document had “no practical significance.” Remember how Barack Obama was given firm assurance that Beijing would never militarize the South China Sea? There were handshakes and smiles all round, and then Beijing proceeded to militarize the South China Sea.

Indeed, some of the commitments included as part of the new deal echo those made 20 years ago, when China first joined the World Trade Organisation. It was agreed in 2001 that prices in every sector would be determined by market forces; that state-owned enterprises would begin operating free of state influence; that international norms regarding intellectual property would be respected; and so on. After two decades, we can see that the Communist Party has kept not one of its promises.

The error in Western thinking was to view CCP officials as civilised counterparts. We failed to see that we were dealing with a pack of thugs and grifters — men for whom the rule of law is neither reality nor ideal, but façade. This lesson has now been learned in some quarters, but clearly not in the upper echelons of the European Union. This new investment deal even includes a reference to “commitments on forced labour,” which is little short of an insult when we consider the hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs who have been made to toil all day till dusk in the cotton fields of Xinjiang. The truth is that the EU has been fooled. There will be no “win-win situation.” Not when dealing with the Communist Party, which has always viewed geopolitics as a zero-sum game. In the words of Bilahari Kausikan, once Singapore’s top diplomat, “only the irredeemably corrupt or the terminally naïve take seriously Beijing’s rhetoric about a ‘community of common destiny.'”

February 18, 2021

QotD: The “European Project”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Whatever else the European project was meant to be, it was never meant to be very democratic. Its deus ex machina, Jean Monnet, was quite clear abut this: the plebe was neither intelligent or informed enough to decide its own fate, at least as regards high politics. It would be dishonest to say that such thoughts never run through the heads of the more intelligent sector of the population in respect of the less intelligent; you have only to walk down the street to see that the voice of the people is hardly that of God. How many people, for example, know what the interest rate should be (assuming, that is, that there is a correct answer), or even what factors should be taken into account when assessing it? But few highly intelligent people would put their night thoughts into practice, and simply say, “We should rule because we are the most intelligent and know best.”

Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.

February 12, 2021

QotD: Repartee

Filed under: France, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Clever banter can only be called “repartee” if it’s from the Repartée region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling wit.

Daniel Hannan, Twitter, 2020-11-06.

January 17, 2021

Hector Drummond on Boris “Cane-Toad” Johnson

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Environment, Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As a teaser to attract new subscribers to his Patron and SubscribeStar pages, Hector Drummond shared this piece on the ecological disaster of Australia’s 1930s cane-toad importation and the similar political disaster of Boris Johnson in Britain:

In the 1930s Queensland farmers were facing trouble with large numbers of cane beetles eating the sugar crops that were an important part of the state’s economy. So the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations came up with a cunning plan. They would import some cane toads (a native of middle and south America), because cane toads ate cane beetles. This was sure to solve the problem in a trice. One-hundred and two cane toads were duly imported into the state, from Hawaii as it happened, to do the job.

Unfortunately this soon became a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. In fact it wasn’t any cure at all because the cane toads didn’t bother much with the cane beetles, and instead ate everything else they could wrap their tongues around. The other thing they did was multiply at an explosive rate. These days there are estimated to be 200 million cane toads in Australia, mainly in Queensland, and they cause havoc with the native fauna, not least because they have nasty poison-producing glands on the back of their head which the native animals have no naturally-evolved defence against. Curious pet dogs who mess about with a toad can die.

In 2019 Britain was facing its own crisis. It had become obvious to half the country that Theresa May’s Conservative government was deliberately trying to prevent Brexit from happening. As the other parties were even worse, the only hope for a real Brexit to take place was if a new pro-Brexit leadership in the Conservative party could be installed. After a titanic struggle, this finally happened, and Alexander “Boris” Johnson became the new leader, with Michael Gove and advisor Dominic Cummings at his side.

Unfortunately Johnson has proven to be Britain’s own version of the cane toad, a cure that is vastly worse than the disease. Johnson, at least, proved to be more able than his Australian counterpart at doing the job that was required of him. Whereas the Australian toad was about as interested in cane beetles as Olly Robbins was in getting the UK out of the EU, Johnson at least gave us a middling type of Brexit which, as fudged as it was, was at least far better than anything any of his fellow MPs could have got.

But in terms of being worse than the disease, Cane-Toad Johnson has proven to be far, far more destructive than the cane toad ever was. The cane toad, after all, is merely an ecological pest, whereas Johnson has proved to be a dangerous menace to the country’s liberty, prosperity and health. The poison from his glands has leached into our very life. We have become like domestic dogs who have been forced to lick them every day.

November 15, 2020

Mark Steyn is looking for an argument

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I somehow missed this when it went up on Mark’s website:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

One of Mrs Thatcher’s great insights was: First you win the argument; then you win the election.

To win the argument, you have to make it. In the Westminster system, you make the argument for three or four years, then you have a six-week election campaign. That’s when the system’s functioning, which it certainly wasn’t under, say, Andrew Scheer’s Tory leadership in Ottawa.

But, even when it’s not functioning, somebody’s making an argument. Thus the fatal miscalculation of David Cameron when he decided that the Brexit referendum would be the best way to put the EU issue to bed once and for all. By then every electorally viable political party — from the Tories to Sinn Féin — was “pro-Europe”. Nigel Farage had been making the argument for twenty years, but, because he had no real political party to advance it, it didn’t get him anywhere at UK general elections. So, the minute Cameron called a referendum on Nigel’s issue in splendid isolation, it gave Farage a shot at the second half of Maggie’s great formulation: He’d won the argument; and Cameron delivered up a mechanism that allowed him to win the vote.

In the American system, it is, as the Brits say, arse over tit: As Monty Python once asked, where’s the room for an argument? There are no parliamentary debates, so you never see a Dem senator going at it with a GOP senator. Even more strikingly, there are a bazillion political talk shows, none of which ever features a Dem senator going at it with a GOP senator — the way that even the most despised BBC, CBC, ABC yakfests routinely feature opposing legislators debating health care or the Irish backstop or Covid response.

Instead, there is a multi-billion-dollar two-year campaign, which is all polls, fundraising, horse race piffle, telly ads for the halfwitted, plot twists of no interest to anybody normal (ooh, look, Cory Booker is up from point-three to point-four in Iowa!), all culminating in a stilted pseudo-debate tediously moderated by a pompous mediocrity asking questions all framed from the left’s point of view. You’d almost get the idea that the entire racket was designed to eliminate the very possibility that someone might make an argument.

October 23, 2020

The EU’s sudden but inevitable betrayal on Brexit deal

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

After a long absence, Nigel Davies posts on the breakdown of the British talks with the EU:

… I suggested that the EU would finally have to face the fact that the failure of their system was nothing to do with xenophobic little countries in the Balkans, or corrupt east European dictatorships, or incompetent Mediterranean democracies in permanent crisis.

No this disaster — the disaster that finally reveals just how impossible the European “project” is — will be at the hands of the morally superior, self righteous goody two shoes of Europe … principally France and the Netherlands.

And it will be for the obviously domestic partisan, (and completely ethically unfathomable), reason, of protecting the unnatural rights of a few fisherman who have had the unlikely and unreasonable benefit of unfettered access to British fishing waters for the decades that Britain has been in the EU.

(An unwarranted privilege for which they probably should pay compensation … Certainly if Britain was an “unjustly persecuted” Asian or African country instead of an “obviously evil” European one, compensation for this unnatural practice would be a demand of every new age propagandist of any colour.)

Nonetheless I have been amazed at the number of column inches wasted in the last week as some journalists try and pretend that it must be the British who are being unreasonable. Or indeed that there is even a remote possibility that the EU could ever come to an agreement, no matter what the British do. (Short of the British admitting that it was all a ghastly mistake, and submitting to total and permanent subservience to the benign dictatorship of the Brussels bureaucrats of course.)

The truth is that the EU is completely incapable of accepting any agreement, because that presumes that 27 individual nations can agree to overcome the drag of their own domestic policies to agree on a common good. (Or on a common decency that would require even the slightest domestic discomfort in one or more of their members.)

October 3, 2020

“The Tory party, desirous of a fat majority, will sell the country out over Europe”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Gawain Towler sees a major opportunity for Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party:

The simple fact is that this Government had the opportunity to do something about our negotiations with the EU in the months after the election. They had a whopping great majority and the goodwill of the nation. Boris had used his ebullience to present the country with a vision that with one bound we would be free, the deal was oven-ready, he was going to get Brexit done. Yes, he had inherited the Withdrawal Agreement, a deeply duff deal, from his predecessor. His resignation as Foreign Secretary over it gave us the confidence that he recognised it as such. And yet on the 25 January, a mere month after his triumphant election victory, he signed that same duff deal and condemned the country to this slow lingering betrayal. It was not necessary to do so, he could have pointed to the election, the vote, and with the support of the country gone to Brussels and made it clear he would not sign. This he signally failed to do.

So here we are again, with the EU making threatening noises, taking legal action with leaks coming out of Berlin and London suggesting that the UK is prepared to make more concessions. A No 10 spokesman confirmed that “The PM will be speaking to President von der Leyen tomorrow afternoon to take stock of negotiations and discuss next steps.”

According to Bruno Waterfield of The Times, “This is seen broadly as a good sign – if, as expected, the British prime minister is ready to signal a bit more give on fish, state aid and subsidy control”.

Note the “more give” – there has already been a lot of giving.

The thing is that Boris is beset with problems, with the Remain lobby, both on his own green benchers and elsewhere; yet again digging up dire predictions of economic meltdown, the CBI taking the lead. The ERG group of Tory sceptics have been oddly quiet, focusing more on Covid-19 than on the clear danger of a failed Brexit. There is no pressure on one side, and a great tidal wave of it pushing him to make a deal at any cost.

Then there is the electoral arithmetic. This shouldn’t matter so far out from an election, but the rumours of Boris’s political demise and the currents swirling around the Chancellor make Labour’s slight lead in the polls a matter of concern. Labour is beginning to solidify after years of infighting, but it is not cutting into Tory support.

That is where Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party come in.

September 28, 2020

The Elgin Marbles as oversized bargaining chips

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Greece, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Curtis on the renewed demands that the British government return the Elgin Marbles to Athens:

Some of the sculptures in the Elgin Marbles collection on display in the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum.
Photo by Paul Hudson via Wikimedia Commons.

The internecine wars in Washington, D.C., continue over government funding, a coronavirus relief bill, government shutdown, but on September 9, 2020 one form of political truce between Republicans and Democrats on foreign affairs was announced. Eighteen members of the U.S. Congress, bilateral members of the Congressional Caucus on Hellenic issues, including the chairs of the House Oversight and Rules committees, and Foreign Affairs subcommittee on issues relating to Europe, had written a letter to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

It informed him, in case he didn’t know, that the Elgin marbles, EM, had been the source of controversy among allies for many decades. The letter urged the British government, already saddled by labyrinth Brexit discussions, to negotiate with the Greek government in earnest over the return of the Elgin marbles to Greece by 2021, the 200th anniversary of the modern Greek nation. The eighteen Congress people joined other Americans intruding in British affairs. On September 16, 2020 both Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi said there can be no US-UK trade deal if Brexit negotiations undermined the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. However, the letter of the Congress group has raised the problem of the restitution of cultural objects taken from their country of origin.

Prime Minister Johnson does not need reminding that it was Thomas Bruce, Earl Elgin, British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which included Greece, who took the marbles from the Parthenon in Athens, 1801-1805. The Parthenon, the central building of the Acropolis of Athens. was built around 488 B.C. to honor a goddess called Athena, and was at different times a Christian church and a mosque. The pillars and sculptures of the Parthenon were made of marble.

Elgin, with a passion for classical antiquities, made the case that the art works in the temples of Greece, then under Ottoman control would be destroyed because of Turkish indifference. Some had been destroyed in 1687 when the Venetians attacked Athens. The Sublime Porte granted Elgin’s request to take away pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures. Perhaps this was gratitude for British action in blocking the advance of Napoleon in Egypt. Elgin took pediment sculptur friezes, metopes, and fragmented pieces from the walls of the Parthenon, and brought them to Britain. In 1816 he sold the sculptures to the British government which then sent them to the British Museum where they have remained.

Though the letter by the 18 members of Congress might be considered impertinent, it contained no threat of any kind but attempted to spark action on a disputed issue which has emotional appeal and symbolic importance, the presence of the Elgin marbles in the British Museum. In recent years the issue has been raised by officials of the European Union as well as by celebrated private citizens such as the actor George Clooney and his wife, and co-stars Bill Murray and Matt Damon, who while working on the 2014 film The Monuments Men, about art stolen by the Nazis, thought return of the Elgin marbles to Greece was the “right thing” to do.

August 21, 2020

Geography works against CANZUK ever happening

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell is a big fan of the CANZUK scheme (Canada-Australia-New Zealand-United Kingdom) to create an “anglosphere” power alongside the current economic big-hitters on the world stage like the United States, China and the European Union. I agree it has historical, nostalgic appeal, but as Aris Roussinos points out, geography is a big stumbling block to it ever being much more than an idea:

Since losing the empire, Britain has notoriously struggled to find a role on the world stage. Initial attempts to piggyback on the power of our successor as global hegemon, the United States, by acting as a guiding force — a Greece to America’s Rome, in Harold Macmillan’s phrase — faltered due to the total absence of interest ever shown in this arrangement by any American administration.

The subsequent attempt to remould Britain as a European power acting in concert with its continental neighbours through the European Union was an unhappy marriage, and has ended in a rancorous divorce whose final settlement is still to be determined. Adrift on the world stage, we are in need of good ideas.

Instead, we are offered CANZUK, a reheated Edwardian fantasy of a globe-spanning Anglosphere acting as a world power which excites the enthusiasm of a small coterie of neoliberal and neoconservative ideologues, if no one else.

In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, the historian and Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts argued that the CANZUK nations — Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK — ought to establish “some form of federation among them” as a “second Anglospheric superpower” combining “free trade, free movement of people, a mutual defense organization and combined military capabilities” , which would “create a new global superpower and ally of the U.S., the great anchor of the Anglosphere”.

One cannot fault Roberts for the grandeur of his vision, even if the details of how this would actually work are left to others to fill in. Instead, we are reassured, this would not be a centralising project like the hated EU; rather, “its program for a loose confederal state linking the Westminster democracies would be clearly enunciated right from the start.” Already, we see the harsh hand of reality ready to crush this initially appealing vision. On the one hand, CANZUK is a globe-spanning superpower ready to be born; on the other, it is merely a loose grouping of separate national governments, which would, like all national governments, act according to their own interests above all.

By totting up the different GDP figures of the various CANZUK nations, Roberts claims that his proposed Empire 2.0 “would have a combined GDP of more than $6 trillion, placing it behind only the U.S., China and the EU,” while “with a combined defense expenditure of over $100 billion, it would also be able to punch above its weight”.

Yet the flaws of this argument are obvious. As other critics have noted, only a minuscule proportion of the CANZUK nations’ trade is with each other, save New Zealand, an economic satellite of Australia. Australia is a great East Asian trading power, and will remain so. Canada is enmeshed in the greater North American trading sphere, as are we with Europe, whatever Brexiteers may wish. As always, the simple matter of geography trumps the affective bonds between far-flung kith and kin, whatever their emotional appeal.

August 15, 2020

French President Emmanuel Macron – “We are a country that for decades is divided and in doubt”

Filed under: France, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Individuals in France may be chauvinistic, says Joseph de Weck, but the French as a whole are less chauvinistic and more self-critical than the British or the Germans:

There is no doubt that the French are a self-sufficient bunch. After all, it was a Frenchman who once wrote, “Hell is other people.”

COVID-19 or not, the French rarely travel abroad for holidays. In terms of food, most French people think they have it best. And at housewarming parties in Paris, the music playlist is usually primarily made up of chansons and French rap classics.

And despite President Emmanuel Macron’s attempts to turn Europe into a global “balancing power,” what happens abroad doesn’t seem to spark much interest at home. The evening news on the public channel on average dedicates 16 percent of its coverage to European and foreign news. By comparison, that proportion rises to 50 percent in Germany. No surprise then that polls show the average French person knows little about the functioning of the EU.

But if this cliché about French aloofness is easily backed up with data points, another common trope about the Gauls doesn’t: that of French arrogance. At least when it comes to the present, the French are brutally self-critical.

In fact, France seem to be among the least chauvinistic countries in Europe. Asked whether they think their culture is superior to others, 36 percent of the French answered “yes” in a recent poll. This compares to 46 percent in the United Kingdom and 45 percent in Germany.

Or take the COVID-19 crisis: unlike other nations, the Republic’s citoyens won’t rally around the flag. Among Europeans, the French give their government the lowest grades for its handling of the pandemic. Never mind that four of France’s neighbors have significantly higher death-per-capita rates. Never mind either that France’s short-time work benefits are among the most generous, also explaining why consumption is almost back to pre-crisis levels.

Of course, one could explain the French’s dim view of the state’s COVID-19 response as being due to Macron’s unpopularity. But by French standards, the president is actually polling relatively well. At 39 percent, Macron’s approval ratings surpass his predecessors François Hollande (23 percent) and Nicolas Sarkozy (35 percent) at the same point in their terms.

The negative view the French have of their country goes far beyond the complaint du jour. As Macron put it, “We are a country that for decades is divided and in doubt.”

February 21, 2020

British wages to be further impacted by Brexit

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As we were told for years, if Brexit happened there were going to be dire consequences to the British economy, and here’s the latest one:

Employers are complaining that without badly paid immigrant labour they’ll just not be able to get the staff. The answer to which is that they’d better start paying higher wages then, eh?

[…]

The analysis here stems from something Marx got right. It’s competition among capitalists for scarce labour which pushes wages up. If there’s a vast reserve army of the unemployed then anyone needing more straining backs just tosses a crust to those in that army and gets as many limbs and torsos to exploit as desired. But if all are already employed then any desire for extra labour requires tempting it away from current employer and occupation to the new. That means a better job offer. Some mixture of conditions, enjoyment of the job, cash and so on that makes up a more attractive package.

The combination of cheap flights and free movement of labour has meant that the reserve army lives in Wroclaw and Debrecen. It’s also been near unlimited – compared to the size of the UK economy – these past couple of decades.

The absence of free movement – what is being complained about here – will mean that to gain the desired labour those employers are going to have to offer higher wages, higher compensation rather, to those not ordinarily resident or stemming from central Europe.

[…]

But back to the basic complaint here. These employers are complaining that Brexit will mean they’ve got to raise the wages they pay. To which the correct response is “Ah, Diddums”.

February 18, 2020

“The real battle for the immortal soul of France is about something far more important — cheese”

Filed under: Europe, Food, France — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Lichfield on the plight of the cheesemakers (get your MPATHG jokes out of the way now):

French cheese seller, offering Villefranche de Rouergue and other artisanal cheeses.
Photo by Sybren via Wikimedia Commons.

In his small fromagerie at Saint Point Lac in the Jura, Fabrice Michelin produces authentic, hand-made, raw-milk Mont d’Or cheeses. He is the last person in France to do so — the last in a line of local cheese-makers which goes back for centuries.

“I get up at 5am. I collect the milk myself from the farms in the village. I warm the milk,” Mr Michelin told me. “I scoop it carefully into cylinders. I pay attention to the varying consistency and taste of the curd. It alters subtly with the seasons, depending on the qualities of the grass. I mold the cheeses by hand. Every cheese is a little different.”

Individual, artisanal cheeses? Wonderful.

Not any more, it seems.

“That’s what gets me into trouble these days,” M. Michelin said. “Brussels and Paris say that the cheeses must all be the same. There seem to be new rules every month. How can I carry on if all my cheeses have to be identical?”

Forget the yellow vests. Forget the strikes against pension reform. The real battle for the immortal soul of France is about something far more important — cheese.

The infinite variety of French cheeses — one of the finest achievements of French culture — is gradually being eroded and dumbed down. Only one in ten of the cheeses now consumed in France is made with raw milk or “lait cru” in the authentic manner.

Search where you like in the finest cheese shops in France, you will no longer find a Bleu de Termignon or a Galette des Monts-d’Or. They are among 50 species of French cheese that have vanished, like rare flowers or butterflies, in the last 40 years. Other varieties, like Vacherin d’Abondance and M. Michelin’s hand-made Mont d’Or have been reduced to a single producer.

Many of the best-known French cheeses — Brie or Pont L’Evêque or Camembert — thrive at home and abroad, but they are overwhelmingly made in large factories with pasteurised or sterilised milk. To purists, that is a betrayal of the French tradition of “living cheese”.

Major French AOC cheese designations: the size of the symbol indicates the relative production of that variety. Many smaller cheese varieties not shown.
Graphic by FrancoisFC – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3640022

February 10, 2020

The coup that toppled Margaret Thatcher

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Charles Moore published the third volume of his Thatcher biography last year (I’ve read the first two volumes, but not the final one). In Quillette, Johan Wennström reviews the book:

This November will mark 30 years since former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher left office. After she had narrowly failed to secure an outright win in a 1990 leadership contest triggered by a challenge from Michael Heseltine, her former defense secretary, the majority of Thatcher’s Conservative cabinet colleagues withdrew their support and forced her departure following what she described as “eleven-and-a-half wonderful years.”

For Thatcher, the “coup,” as she referred to the events of 1990, had been unexpected. But as journalist Charles Moore explains in the third and final volume of his authorized Thatcher biography, Herself Alone (2019), the writing had been on the wall for some time. Thatcher’s style, which some considered abrasive, had turned senior figures against her. And many younger party members believed that if the party were to win a fourth consecutive election victory, in 1991 or 1992, it should be under a new standard-bearer (who turned out to be John Major).

An important underlying factor was the long-standing policy conflict regarding the European Community (or the EC as the European Union was then known), which pitted Thatcher against many in her own government, as well as against continental European leaders and George H. W. Bush’s White House. She was perceived as a “Cold Warrior” who was overly cautious in regard to the future of Europe, especially the project of European political and economic integration.

To some modern observers, that criticism of Thatcher remains apt. In a recently published book on international relations authored by former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, The Age of Disorder (Den nya oredans tid, 2019), Thatcher’s reluctance to endorse a speedy German reunification is attributed to her obsolete anxieties regarding “the dangers of a strong Germany.”

Moore’s latest volume, which focuses extensively on Thatcher’s views about Europe, shows her in a more nuanced light. In some ways, in fact, she was actually ahead of her time. And some of the current problems facing Europe, and the West more generally, might have been mitigated had her opinions been given a more generous audience.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the money for new hardcover books these days so I’ll have to wait until this volume gets a paperback edition or [shudder] get a library card and wait for it to show up at the local library.

February 3, 2020

“The people could not be given what they had asked for. It would set a precedent.”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb reacts to the changes (or lack of changes) on Brexit Day:

London on the morning after Brexit Day, according to the BBC and other mainstream media.

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Yesterday evening — that is, the 31st January 2020 — at 11pm GMT, my country left the European Union. We did so after four years of heated and often hysterical argument. Nothing much seemed to have changed this morning. I went out shopping, to see the same people buying the same things at the same prices. Since we are now in a transition period, lasting till the end of this year, in which we remain within the Single Market and subject to the rules of the European Union, it would have been odd if anything visible had changed. Yet, if nothing visible had changed, one very important thing has changed.

The ruling class has suffered its first serious defeat in living memory. The coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, educators, media people and associated business interests who draw wealth and power from an extended state was committed to European Union membership. This coalition was never uniformly committed to membership. Some elements were strongly committed, others only mildly. But all were agreed that membership was good for them, so far as it blurred the lines of accountability and gave the exercise of power a supranational appearance. This was the position before the 2016 Referendum, which was not expected to go as it did. When the result was to leave, ruling class support for membership strengthened. Long before it ended, the referendum campaign had become a vote of confidence in the ruling class. Losing this vote was a shock. The people could not be given what they had asked for. It would set a precedent. Give them that, and they would start believing they lived in a democracy where votes counted for something. If this happened, the people might be inclined to start asking for other things – all things variously unwelcome within the ruling class.

The ruling class response to losing fell under two headings. One was to deny the validity of the vote and to demand another, and to make sure that this one was rigged in favour of remaining. The other was to deliver an exit so partial that it amounted to continued membership, and that could be upgraded to full membership after a few years of propaganda. These responses eventually merged into a single project of dragging things out so long that the people would get bored and stop demanding that their voice should be heard.

These responses failed. The people had spoken, and they continued speaking — eventually giving the Conservatives their biggest majority in a generation. Because of this, our departure yesterday was more definite than had previously been imagined. Immediately after the Referendum, I think most of us would have accepted a slow disengagement — perhaps including ten or twenty years of remaining within the Single Market, though out of the customs and political union. The next three years of bad faith killed any taste for gradualism.

Emphasis added.

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