Monday, 19th July 2010
A social revolution -- or a superior sound-bite?
8:51pm
I have long been extremely keen on the idea that the welfare state should give way to a welfare society – or, as David Cameron would call it, a Big Society. That is because I think Britain’s welfare state has not only debilitated and enslaved individuals through a dependency culture, but has eroded the bonds that keep a healthy society together and functioning: bonds of duty and responsibility, selflessness and altruism, initiative and entrepreneurialism. A true liberal society, in other words.
I have often written about grass-roots, bottom-up community initiatives which have been springing up in recent years and which seemed to me to capture some of this lost spirit of English liberalism. I was impressed and often very moved by the way in which they restored some self-reliance and motivation to shattered areas – and I observed also the...
'The only place where refugees drive Mercedes'
5:52am
Tom Gross has posted up another set of pictures which show how false is the propaganda we are fed that Gaza is a ‘humanitarian disaster’ on a par with starvation in Africa. Gross observes:
...Two days ago the EU pledged tens of millions of EU taxpayers’ euros to add to the hundreds of millions already donated to Gaza this year, much of which has been misused to procure arms... When leading news outlets mention the so-called humanitarian flotillas from Turkey, why do they omit the fact that life expectancy and literacy rates are higher, and infant mortality rates are lower in Gaza than corresponding rates in Turkey? Have they considered that perhaps the humanitarian flotillas ought to be going in the other direction, towards Turkey?
...As I have written before, of course there is poverty in parts of
July 19, 2010 Britain’s Lady Pooh-Bah and the EU hall of mirrors Daily Mail, 19 July 2010 By now, we are all so used to stories of EU profligacy and intrusive ineptitude that surely we should be inoculated against amazement or outrage. Nevertheless, the revelations over the weekend about the activities of Lady Ashton, the EU High Representative, still take the breath away. It appears that the noble Baroness and British Labour Party loyalist — who is effectively the EU foreign minister — is interviewing prospective ambassadors and senior officials to create the European External Action Service (EEAS) of EU diplomats. Governments were originally promised that this new bureaucratic empire, which has been brought into being by the Lisbon Treaty (the one that created the EU constitution on which the British public were denied a vote), would entail no extra cost to taxpayers. But a former chief accountant of the European Commission has estimated that it is likely to cost at least an extra £45 million to set up. And just look at what is being established here. The EEAS will control a budget of £5.8 billion, including the EU’s enormous aid and development packages and the costs of peacekeeping operations in global trouble spots. To administer this, a vast infrastructure is being created of 7,000 civil servants, with embassies around the world. And this when the countries of Europe are under the financial cosh as never before, and with the British Foreign office planning to cut its costs by up to 40 per cent in order to help cut this country’s budget deficit. But then the EU never did observe the same rules that govern mere nations, such as prudence, accountability or proportionality. To a bureaucracy whose profligacy would have made even the Sun King Louis XIV blush, what’s a little thing like the global economic crisis — particularly when there is a whole new political order to be created? For let us not forget that the very purpose of Lady Ashton’s burgeoning empire is to undermine and even negate the ability of individual countries to have their own foreign policy. That’s why, as Britain’s embassies and consulates in smaller countries are forced to shut down, their duties will be passed to the new network of 136 EU embassies. That’s why High Representative Lady Ashton says she will be speaking on behalf of the EU countries’ 27 foreign ministers on global conflicts such as the Middle East or Iran. But the idea that anyone should be able to speak ‘for’ William Hague or the foreign ministers of other EU member states is preposterous. These countries employ Foreign Ministers to be the voice of their nation abroad. They don’t need anyone to speak for them. The real purpose of the EU High Representative is to override what they are saying, and to substitute for the foreign policies of democratic nations an approach that has no popular mandate. For this EU superstate, which so grandiosely lays claim to a collective voice on foreign affairs, has no coherence, identity or legitimacy — except what was brought into being by craven politicians whose electorates have remained overwhelmingly hostile to this coup d’etat against national self-government. Indeed, the EEAS will be taking foreign policy decisions that may well run entirely counter to the policies and interests of member states — but which, frighteningly, Britain and other EU countries will be forbidden to oppose. In order for all 27 member states to agree on a united foreign policy, they will inevitably be forced to coalesce around the lowest common denominator. Though such a position will be weak — maybe dangerously so in the case, say, of Iran — neither Britain nor any other country will be able to pursue its own foreign policy. This is because the Maastricht Treaty (remember the fight that was lost over that?) lays down that every country inside the EU must ‘actively and unreservedly’ support the EU’s foreign and security policy, and must do nothing that is ‘likely to impair its effectiveness as a cohesive force in international relations’. This common foreign and security policy has already made Europe weaker, leading to inaction or to positions dominated by France and Germany. And now, at astronomical cost, an infrastructure is being bolted into place under Lady Ashton that will turn the foreign ministries of Europe into a ghostly hall of mirrors. It is not just the foreign ministers who will find themselves second-guessed and undermined by the High Representative. Every country’s ambassadors and foreign embassies will be replicated by EU duplicates. In other words, the whole thing is nothing other than extravagantly subsidised megalomania. In truth, Jonathan Swift or Franz Kafka would have had difficulty conjuring from their imaginations something quite as preposterous as this. And on top of this whole baroque edifice of extra-territorial excess sits Baroness Ashton, the living embodiment of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pooh-Bah or Lady High Everything Else, whose epic expenditure appears to be matched in scale only by her incompetence. Indeed, both the way in which she was appointed to her £270,000-a-year post and her subsequent performance in office have provided a veritable parable of the cavorting caravan of the contemptuous and the contemptible that is the EU. It was suggested that Gordon Brown had wanted the post of High Representative filled by David Miliband or Peter Mandelson, but that he was outmanoeuvred by France and Germany, who believed they could control someone as inexperienced as Lady Ashton. And yet these countries have been queuing up to moan about her incompetence. The German magazine Der Spiegel called her ‘a walking disaster’, with a German MEP saying she was ‘simply out of her depth’. The French went for her throat after she failed to visit Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake there — she argued in her own defence that ‘disaster tourism’ would detract from vital humanitarian efforts. The French Europe minister even insultingly told her to brush up on her French — an offer she humiliatingly accepted by enrolling for a week at a French residential language school. Oh dear. There were also reports that she was neglecting her duties by returning to Britain most weekends to be with her family and refusing to take calls after 8pm. Complaints about her amateurism and even incompetence erupted across the EU. officials sniped that she had become the ‘mediocrity everybody loves to hate’. But the criticism also laid bare the competition for primacy between the High Representative and the other two main EU figureheads, the presidents of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, and the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso. All three lay claim to being the voice of the EU in the foreign councils of the world. In the EU’s hall of mirrors, even Pooh-Bah, it appears, comes in multiples of three. It is the other side of Henry Kissinger’s famous aside that when he wanted to speak to Europe he needed to know which number to call. Well, now there are multiple numbers — an exponentially increasing empire to service them, paid for by the long-suffering British and European public even as their own foreign services and powers of self-government are decimated. Lady Ashton’s performance has been a humiliation for Britain. But it has also shown up the EU’s endemic incoherence and arrogant excess. ‘No taxation without representation,’ goes the defining slogan of democracy. But in the EU, it seems, there’s not so much representation as replication — with the progressively disenfranchised being fleeced to provide it. |
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