LATEST POSTS Wise men, indeed. Merry Christmas to all my readers. (Hat-tip, Roger Helmer for the image.) According to the BBC, three of the four most watched politicians on YouTube in 2011 were me, Nigel Farage and Margaret Thatcher. It was rather sweet of the Beeb to run the story at all. Still, it seems odd that they managed to report it at such length without considering what the three of us have in common. See if you can spot the connection from the clips below. Turks: on our side more often than not In any spat between Turkey and France, we surely know whom to back. Ankara has recalled its ambassador following the passage of a French law which makes it a criminal offence to deny that the massacres of Armenians in 1915 constituted a genocide. They were tangled and tragic events, and historians have wrangled ever since about precisely what occurred. When the Ottomans joined the First World War, and fighting began along the Caucasian frontier between the two empires, many Armenians threw in their lot with the Russians. The Young Turks, at war on two fronts and foreseeing the overthrow of their regime, feared that their entire Armenian population would rise in revolt. Brutal repressions ensued, with arrests, executions, evacuations, forced marches and at least some deliberate pogroms. No one, not… Read More I'm not sure people have grasped the magnitude of what has just happened. The European Central Bank firehosed €489,190,000,000 at the eurozone banking system. Five-hundred-and-twenty-three banks snatched greedily at the cheap cash. And the markets fell. This blog has been railing for three years against the EU's bailout-and-borrow mania. I am, I realise, in danger of becoming something of a bore on the subject. But these sums are almost literally unimaginable (this might give you some sense of what half a trillion looks like in banknotes). Just think this through. The ECB has no resources of its own: it is backed by the European taxpayer. So the money it has lent to the banks must either be drawn from EU governments or directly from their citizens in the form of inflation. And where is all the moolah to go? Well, the ECB is hoping that banks will buy government debt with it -… Read More Watch this clip of Michael O'Leary, boss of Ryanair, telling the Commission apparatchiks, with pitiless honesty, where they have gone wrong. He's spot on, of course. And, for what it's worth, I think his airline has done more to widen people's opportunities than any number of EU directives. Ryanair has taken me to the places it promised, and at the times it advertised, far more reliably than more expensive carriers. Just one question. Why on Earth did someone possessed of such entrepreneurial spirit, such perceptiveness and such energy pour money into the 'Yes' campaign in Ireland's Lisbon Treaty referendum? Oh yes. I remember now. In Texas, we pay our legislators $600 a month The House of Commons rises today, prompting traditional seasonal whinges. ‘MPs have already awarded themselves a number of bonus holidays this year so they risk looking out of touch by sloping off early at Christmas,’ says the TaxPayers’ Alliance. Hang on a minute. Isn’t the TPA forever complaining that we have too many laws and too much government? Why, then, does it want parliamentarians to linger over their law-making? Surely the TPA, of all organisations, should resist the view that legislating is the only 'real' work an MP does. Wouldn’t we better off with a Swiss model, where national MPs meet only for a few weeks a year and, for the rest of the time, are expected to carry on with their real jobs? Or perhaps a Texan… Read More
No longer at ease here, in the old dispensation
The BBC has difficulty admitting the degree of
public hostility to the EU
Armenians suffered terribly in 1915, but France is wrong to insist on labels
The ECB blew away €500 billion, and the markets still fell
Ryanair boss tells the Eurocrats to their faces what he thinks of them
MPs have extended their holidays. Good!
Sunday, 25 December 2011
DECEMBER 25TH, 2011 7:40
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