Stupid people - by Richard... Saturday, February 27, 2010

Stupid people - by Richard... Saturday, February 27, 2010

The woman pictured is a professor of global governance and co-director of LSE Global Governance at the London School of Economics. Her name is Mary Kaldor and despite her elevated position and title, she is stupid. We know this. No one gets to that position and remains that ignorant unless they are seriously stupid.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, The Guardian chooses to give Mary Kaldor an outlet through which to display her stupidity – thereby conferring on her more gravitas than she deserves – even the little conveyed by this dismal rag.

Thus we get this stupid woman, under the heading, "The EU needs to return to its roots", telling us via the strap line, "Europe has spent too long besieged by regulation culture and market obsession, forgetting its original purpose: peace."

Her golden words then tell us that the world needs something like the European Union. It needs a global actor, she says, ready to take the initiative on climate change. It needs a polity underpinned by a powerful economy that can push for new global financial arrangements. And it needs political leaders able to articulate and act upon an alternative to the war on terror.

Getting to the root of what she then believes is the cause of its failure to achieve all these great things, she asserts – rightly – that, from the beginning, the EU was a peace project. It was designed, initially, after Europe's great "civil war", to prevent another war on European soil and later to overcome the cold war divide.

But, she tells us – again rightly - the method chosen, known as the Monnet method (after one of the founders, Jean Monnet) was to bring Europe together through economic integration, through policies adopted by the political elite rather than through public debate.

As a result, she continues, to a younger generation, who did not experience the world wars or the cold war, the European Union appears not as a peace project but as a neoliberal bureaucracy, a fundamentalist market project.

Then we get the stupidity writ large. "Somehow, popular support for the EU needs to be remobilised," she writes. "It is perhaps the only way out of the current global crisis now that it is becoming clear how difficult it is for the US president, Barack Obama, to act decisively."

Forget the bit about Obama acting "decisively" – we can only cope with so much stupidity in one sitting – concentrate on her staggering assertion that, "Somehow, popular support for the EU needs to be remobilised."

The whole point, of course, it that the EU never has had popular support and, if it had needed to rely on it – as we saw with the French and Dutch referendums on the EU constitution – it would never have come into being.

And it was precisely because such an undemocratic construct – the aim of which is the destruction of nation states – would never have got public support, that Monnet adopted the strategy of economic integration, as a mechanism for achieving political integration, disguising the aim and pretending that the only objective was economic.

Thus, the state of the European Union is no accident. It has not gone off the rails – it is what it is because that is what it was designed to be. But, as the political integration agenda becomes more obvious, it is meeting with ever-increasing resistance from the very peoples who would never have approved of it in the first place, had they known what was to come.

But, says la Kaldor: "Of course there need to be new, more democratic, structures. There should be an elected president, for example." Then she tells us, "there ought to be a family of taxes at a European level that would allow the EU to develop a degree of autonomy – carbon taxes, for example, or taxes on international speculation."

With the perspicacity that only truly stupid people can achieve, she then adds: "these can only be achieved through political pressure." You don't say!

Needless to say, her innate stupidity re-asserts itself as she concludes with a stunning non-sequitur. "And that means that the EU has to reconstruct itself as a peace (and green) project instead of a fundamentalist market project," she writes.

However, we would love to see it try. I would give it five years before it collapsed.

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Joined-up commentary - by Richard...

One used to enjoy the periodic rants from Simon Heffer, especially when they are directed at the putative chancellor, little Georgie Osborne – although the constant repetition is now getting a little tedious.

Nevertheless, amongst the many sins which Heffer lays at the door of this political dwarf is his timorous approach to public expenditure cuts, the only firm commitment being to shave a mere billion from the total, even when Heffer identifies £72 billion being spent under the category "other" expenditure.

Heffer, though – like so many who brand themselves "political commentators" - seems to have as narrow a vision as the very politicians of whom he is so scornful. He is locked into a somewhat outdated paradigm where he sees government spending as representing sum of the costs imposed on us, primarily though taxation.

He and his ilk do not yet seem to understand that some of the most damaging raids on the private purse are coming not through government expenditure financed from taxation, per se. Increasingly, it is coming through government directed expenditure which is extracted in devious ways via goods and services for which we must pay.

Here, then, is a serious blind spot. In terms of private wealth, what matters is disposable income, the amount of discretionary spending left after tax and other essential costs have been deducted. In terms, it makes no practical difference whether those deductions come as taxation – direct or indirect – or other imposts. Should Heffer have understood and recognised this, his "rant" in today's newspaper could have gained considerably more power.

He could, for instance, have pointed out that the Conservatives are not only pathetic in their lack of commitment in reining back government expenditure but that the parliamentary party enthusiastically backed the imposition of an extra £4 billion in costs last Wednesday, though its support of carbon capture and storage.

This £4 billion is but one tiny part of the avalanche of the "green" Danegeld which is coming our way, building on the Taxpayers' Alliance estimate in its recent report (pictured) of £26.4 billion in green taxes and regulations that we were forced to pay, net of road spending, in 2008-09.

Of that, just over £1 billion was spent on the Renewables Obligation (£1,036,170,245) – up from £873,870,190 the previous year – mainly to finance the scourge of windmills that is disfiguring our countryside. Should the government succeed in reaching its wind generation targets, we have estimated that we are looking at an extra £6 billion a year, implementing a policy which again the Conservative Party also enthusiastically endorses.

To that can be added the £2.9 billion extracted from consumers' wallets and purses via the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme – a sum that is expected to double in the forthcoming year – and about £0.9 billion on landfill tax.

These costs (not taxes) are wholly unnecessary. Far from adding anything to the economy, they reduce our efficiency and competitiveness as a nation, with knock-on effects as we price ourselves out of business, competing against low-cost producers such as China and India, which are not similarly burdened.

Throughout this political cycle, however – picking up on a phrase popularised by Blair – commentators have been quick to condemn governments for their lack of "joined-up" policies. But those self-same commentators are stuck in their own little pigeonholes.

Thus we get political pundits doing "politics" and environment correspondents doing "climate change", with a whole raft of specialists doing their own things – the European Union amongst them. No one seems to be able to put them all together and look at the big picture.

Worst of all though, the political commentators tend to regard themselves as the crème de la crème and, having lost sight of what politics is all about, increasingly constrain their own horizons to the trivia and tat of domestic party politics.

Alarmingly, when these pundits do venture out of their narrow, claustrophobic field – as Brogan did recently - they are immediately out of their depth and most often make fools of themselves.

However, real politics is what real people are concerned with and, sooner or later, the self-appointed journalistic élites are going to have to climb down off their high horses and re-learn the art of joined-up commentary. Failing that, they will go the same way as the increasingly irrelevant politicians on whom they expend so much energy.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD