Delusional - by Richard... Sunday, April 10, 2011

Delusional - by Richard... Sunday, April 10, 2011

Picked up yesterday was this remarkable quote from the The Daily Telegraph, noting that: "If Tory members looked back at their 13 years in opposition they would, until recently, have comforted themselves with the thought that their party did at least become properly Eurosceptic during that wilderness period".

This is Tim Mongomerie, editor of theConservative Home website, continuing his breakout into the MSM, offering what he evidently believes passes for intelligent political comment. One thing for sure, I remarked, there is no way of dealing with anyone in the grip of such a delusion. They are not of this world.

Coincidentally, Autonomous Mind is struck by the volume of anti-Cameron pieces in the media that are being trailed in the Newslinks section of the website.

"For a moment", says AM, "I had to check I wasn't on Labour List. But what is notable about these pieces is that the attacks are not ideological. They are not about policy. These have been spawned by the abject failure of leadership. And there is a lack of leadership because the leader, David Cameron, has no principle or clear political direction". He continues:

It is dawning on people who supported the Conservatives in the hope Cameron would reveal an inner conservative after assuming residence in Downing Street, that Cameron is not a Conservative. What is more worrying is that it’s becoming apparent that Cameron is nothing. He is not a conservative, he is not a liberal, he is not a social democrat and he is not a socialist. In fact he stands for nothing – apart from the desire to attain office – and he has successfully deceived people by pretending to hold their political convictions when he holds none.

Rehearsing then the decay that is only too apparent in Government, AM comes to the conclusion that the only person responsible for this is the autocratic meglomaniac, David Cameron. "Devoid of conviction, belief or substance, he is not only continuing the decline of this country overseen by Labour, he is accelerating it under this insipid coalition of the self interested".

But here, we have to beg to differ – which we do rarely with AM. It is not Cameron, per se, who is the problem, but the people who put him in the position, despite the very obvious evidence that he was a wrong 'un from the start. And that, in the first instance, was the Conservative Party. So desperate were its members to win that they chose for their leader someone who, above all, they thought could win. They had absolutely no concern for what he might do, once he had "won".

To reconcile their choice with the reality, these tribal Tories then deluded themselves into thinking that Cameron was a Eurosceptic, despite the very good and growing evidence to the contrary - for not other reason than that is what they wanted him to be. And I particularly recall the aggression against anyone who dared say different - with Mr Montgomerie's website very much in the forefront. And the delusion continues, as Montgomerie still tries to convince himself, if no one else, that the Party had become Eurosceptic.

But the point about the Conservative Party is that it isn't anything, except tribal. AM condemns Cameron (rightly) for "pretending to hold their political convictions when he holds none", but that also describes the Conservative Party. It too is devoid of political convictions. It exists only to exist, and occasionally to win "power", even if it has to share it with another Party which, on the face of it, is its ideological enemy.

That this is the case is well-illustrated by the recent poll, on Tory leaders, which has the legend: "Budget boosts Osborne, Libya boosts Hague". How easily pleased the tribe is, fawning after an idiot who produces a lacklustre budget which does not even begin to address our financial problems, while applauding a fool for his ill-judged intervention in Libya, a man who is set for the title of the worst foreign secretary we have ever had.

And therein lies our main problem: Delusional Tories. They are the ones that got us into the EU (then Common Market), on a false bill of goods, because they had actually convinced themselves it was something it wasn't and never will be - a free trade area. Scratch a High Tory, and even to this day, they will tell you that free trade was the objective. He, like the Montgomeries of this world still, want to convince the world (and themselves) that they are Eurosceptic - and mightily offended they are when you do not sahre their fantasy.

But the long-standing delusion (and the aggression) is the result of their inability to cope with the fact that the default value for the Tories is Europhilia. The tribal Tory believes his party is Eurosceptic. And, to the tribe, belief is fact. Thus does the tribe survive, on a diet of fantasy. Now, when even the best of them can no longer sustain that belief without looking ridiculous, they still huddle together bleating their mantras. The tribe comes first, last and always.

Unsurprisingly, they cannot even begin to understand why so many of us - natural Conservatives all - hold them in such complete contempt, a group with as much political principle as a football fan club, and less sense. They are the Party of Cameron. Their tragedy is that they chose him. Our tragedy is that we didn't. They got what they deserve. We didn't.

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Fantasies collide with reality - by Richard...

The analyses which brought us this book on storytelling are today employed by Booker in his column, where he links global warming and the futility of wind farms with the ongoing collapse of the euro.

In several directions at the moment, he asserts, we can see the unfolding of one of the hidden patterns shaping human affairs, which years ago (in his book) he called "the fantasy cycle". It is a pattern that recurs in personal lives, in politics, in history – and in storytelling. Thus he tells us:

When we embark on a course of action which is unconsciously driven by wishful thinking, all may seem to go well for a time, in what may be called the "dream stage". But because this make-believe can never be reconciled with reality, it leads to a "frustration stage" as things start to go wrong, prompting a more determined effort to keep the fantasy in being. As reality presses in, it leads to a "nightmare stage" as everything goes wrong, culminating in an "explosion into reality", when the fantasy finally falls apart.

From that platform, Booker then goes on to evaluate the ramshackle state of the global warming argument, with reported that global temperatures, as measured by satellites, having fallen by 0.65°C since March 2010, making the world cooler now than its mean over the past 30 years. Yet again the computer models, predicting that, thanks to rising CO2, the world should have warmed in the past decade by 0.3°C, have proved hopelessly wrong.

But, if it hasn't looked too hot for the theory on which our politicians base their plans to change the world, adds Booker, then last week it looked equally dodgy for what has been one of the most grandiose of their responses to this supposed crisis. Two sets of figures exposed more than ever the degree of delusion which surrounds the wish of our governments, in Brussels and in Westminster, that the centrepiece of our energy policy must now be to build even more windmills.

The report that drew most media attention was that from a Scottish environmental charity which focused on the fact that last year, despite our building yet more turbines, the lack of wind meant that they operated, on average, at only 21 percent of their capacity – the lowest percentage ever. Several times, when demand was at record levels, the contribution of wind to our electricity supply was virtually zero.

Less attention was given, however, to figures put out by the Department for Energy and Climate Change, showing that the 3,168 turbines we have built, at a cost of billions of pounds, contributed on average, if very irregularly, only 1,141 megawatts to the national grid last year – less than the output of a single large coal-fired power station. From the DECC figures it is possible to work out that, for this derisory contribution, we paid through our electricity bills a subsidy of nearly £1.2 billion, on top of the price of the electricity itself.

Thus, in return for less than three percent of our electricity, nearly seven per ent of our billls were made up of hidden subsidies to the wind developers, a percentage due to treble and quadruple in coming years as the Government strives to meet EU "renewables" target by building up to 10,000 more turbines, at a cost of £100 billion. The dream of using the wind to keep our lights on is being shown by reality to be one of the most absurd fantasies of our time.

Booker then moves on to what he argues is, in its own way, an even greater fantasy. This is that colossal project taking shape over the past 50 years to take away the power of the nations of Europe to govern themselves and to hand it over to a weirdly dysfunctional new system of government centred in Brussels. No single element in that project was more ambitious or seen as symbolically more crucial than the wish to integrate Europe's economies around a single currency.

Back in the 1970s, when this was first talked of, Sir Donald McDougall, a senior Treasury official, was commissioned by Brussels to produce a report on "The Role of Public Finance in European Integration". He warned that economic and monetary union could only work if Europe was in effect given an economic government, with the power to dispose of between 25 and 40 percent of Europe's GDP.

This was because, as he foresaw, one of the core problems would be that if weaker countries were deprived of the power to set their own interest rates or to devalue, they would require a massive injection of resources from richer countries. Which, of course, is just what we now see being acted out in the desperate efforts to bail out Portugal, following in the wake of Greece and Ireland – with Spain, bigger than all three put together, possibly to follow.

As McDougall and many after him warned, the single currency could only work on conditions which the builders of a united Europe blithely chose to ignore, in pursuit of their make-believe. As a result, its collision with reality is now coming about, threatening a disintegration of the eurozone that could tug much of the European dream after it.

Thus speaks Booker. But what he and I talk about constantly is the ability of the current class of politicians to evade reality. By now, it should be self-evident to even to dimmest of brains that the global warming scare is idiocy, and the obvious inadequacies of the European Union should have long ago secured its demise.

The trouble is the very forces that brought these fantasies into being have also insulated the politicians from the consequences of their actions, not least with the suspension of democracy. Reality, therefore, is held in check, while the politicians continue to indulge in their fantasies long past the point when the cycle has moved on.

You would think that reality would force its way through, when people started getting killed but, in a third example of the conflict between fantasy and reality, Booker writes of the tragedy unfolding in the past few days in Camp Ashraf in Iraq. There, Iraqi and Iranian terror squads "have finally moved in to crush the 3,400 defenceless Iranian exiles who in 2003 gave up their arms in return for written personal guarantees of their safety by the US government".

Since Thursday night, more than 30 Ashraf residents have reportedly been killed and hundreds injured. This may, Booker states, be only a small example of the price so many others have had to pay for that act of folly when Bush and Blair sailed into Iraq like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza charging windmills.

But, he concludes, "our adventures in Afghanistan and Libya still have to unfold to the point where we are forced to recognise that yet another vainglorious act of make-believe has collided with reality". And, on that latter point, where the majority of British voters are against the mad project in Libya, it continues apace, with the support of the vast majority of MPs.

One could suppose that reality has simply been deferred, but the great genius of the British establishment has always to bend with the wind, changing gradually and thus avoiding catastrophic, revolutionary events. To bottle up reality, therefore, is not such a good idea. It can be deferred, but not denied. And the longer it is left, the more violent the collision.

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A shining symbol of incompetence - by Richard... Saturday, April 09, 2011

The EU's largest civilian mission, Eulex-Kosovo, was meant to prove the possibility of an effective common foreign policy. An excessive expectation, perhaps, because the EU has always been divided on Kosovo – five member states did not recognise its controversial independence, declared in 2008, and this mission became the substitute for a common policy, says The Guardian. It then goes on to add:

Still, Eulex – which costs about €100m a year and fields almost one policeman, judge or prosecutor for every 1,000 residents of this small territory – could strengthen the rule of law in Kosovo and the stability of the Balkans, and be a powerful symbol of the EU as a peaceful, rule-based force.

In three years it has achieved little. Few prominent investigations have been opened, and the local judiciary has not improved appreciably. The difficult context partly explains this failure, but the main causes are internal – incompetence, weak management and possibly even disloyalty to the mission's mandate.

When we get the Europhile Guardian saying such things, we have reached something of a milestone. All it needs to learn is that incompetence is the default value for the EU. Then, perhaps, it will realise that the only sensible option is to arrange our departure as soon as possible.

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Bye-bye democracy - by Richard...

Portugal will be offered a bailout worth €80bn (£71bn), European Union finance ministers meeting in Budapest agreed yesterday, but only if the parties contesting the country's general election in June agree to a package of austerity measures and reforms. So, the set up is that the politicians decide between them what the voters will be allowed to vote for, and only then does the election go ahead – with no choice offered on the substantive issues.

Does this sound terribly familiar?

UPDATE: And his Grace gets the point:

The EU is one great quango: it is a democratic scam which permits the politicians of each member state to promise the earth to get themselves elected, and then blame "Europe" that their manifesto pledges could not be fulfilled. This then permits each political leader to stare their electorates in the face and say, quite truthfully, "Our hands were tied; we could nothing about it; we were bound by our treaty obligations, etc., etc".

This is the point which the Little Englanders and the dyed-in-the-wool UKIPites simply do not get. The European Union is not a conspiracy of foreigners, to take over and rule Britain. It is a conspiracy of the ruling élites, on a European scale to by-pass democracy. Our leaders are part of it, it is them, the British political élites, doing it to us.

And this is, of course, why the élites love "Europe" so much. His Grace has got it absolutely banged to rights. The ritual "washing of hands" about "Europe" is all part of the act.

That is how scum like Cameron can prattle on about regulation, knowing full well that nothing substantive can happen, because most regulation is made in Brussels. But as long as he can go through the motions, with his patsies in the British Chamber of Commerce, the CBI, the Federation of Small Business (all of which were suborned long ago), and the media pretend everything is normal, then he can get away with it.

In our book, The Great Deception, Booker and I wrote of the slow-motion coup d'état - which is precisely what has been happening – and why the book is routinely ignored by the "great and the good". Slowly, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the organs of states, and the most important institutions such as the BBC, have been taken over. Our democracy has been stolen from under our very noses, not by those ghastly foreigners or the filthy Hun, but by our own élites.

A while back, I wrote:

We are a satellite state of the Greater European Empire, ruled by a supreme government in Brussels. We owe this government neither loyalty nor obedience. It is not our government. It is theirs. It is our enemy.

That is my "signature" on the forum. I left it deliberately vague – but the "government" to which I referred was not the one in Brussels. It is the one in Whitehall. We have been taken over. It is the enemy. We are its foe.

At least now, it is getting obvious. And at least now, more people are being to understand what is happening. At least now, we can start the recovery process.

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