What Will the Islamo-Fascists Use for a Ladder if they Realise Their Dream

Interesting isn't it how the Islamo-Fascists find it essential to use Western democratic freedoms as a stepping stone to pursue their dream of re-building the Caliphate and - ultimately - destroying Western democracy. What will they use for a ladder if they ever achieve their dreams? Or do they seriously believe that the world will then be so perfect that they will then never need to fight for or run from anything again? Do they seriously believe that the non-Islamo-Fascist part of the world is just too dim to see what they can see - that life can be made just perfect by killing anyone who can't see it?

It's Not as Simple as That Vincent

Vincent Cooper writes today for The Commentator asking, essentially, whether Enoch Powell was right, and whether we should be outraged that a European bien pensant elite is showing contempt for democracy by inflicting mass immigration on national electorates who do not want it. This is a bit too simplistic for two reasons.

The first is that electorates are free to vote for parties that promise to stop immigration, but consistently fail to do so, presumably because they sense either that the ones who do offer it are dangerous people or that they lack the ability to govern well across the spectrum.

The second reason is related to the first one. One European electorate once did vote in a party that promised to protect the national ethnic culture from alien incursions - Hitler's Nazis - and look what that resulted in. If Vincent Cooper is right that the policies of Europe's political elite reflect distrust of national democracies, they might well say that it is not without good reason.

Vincent is also wrong in his assumption that there is anything new in the distrust of electorates by political elites. It is surely precisely because unrestrained democracy can be extremely dangerous that it is accepted throughout the western world that the will of the majority has to be subject to constitutional restraints. The US founding fathers recognised that and went to great lengths to build the necessary checks and balances into their constitution. The really tough questions therefore are not whether the democratic national will should be constrained, but exactly how, in what way, and by whom should it be constrained.

It's not just about immigration - massive though I agree that issue is and urgent thought the need to address it is; it's just as important, surely, to find some way of forcing politicians to stop shamelessly buying votes by handing out cash not on the basis of need or of objective justification but on the basis of voting power - e.g. Cameron's refusal to stop giving handouts to people just because they are old regardless of how wealthy they are. I agree with Vincent that democracy is in grave danger, but not only because voters are often ignored; it's just as often because they are too much pandered to against the national interest.

Working out a system which gets only the juice out of the democratic orange without squeezing out the blood too is the greatest challenge of our age.

I do agree with Vincent though that handing the power over to the tossers in Europe is not the answer.

2DayFM: Morons Broadcasting to Morons

When radio stations target morons as their audience and employ morons to provide them with the kind of moronic crap that appeals to morons, sooner or later intelligent, sensitive people get destroyed by it.

Hindsight Shows that Monet was Wrong Even in His Premis

We hear a lot now about how the attempt to achieve European Union has ended up being more likely to cause another European war rather than prevent one as it was designed to do, but surely the very idea that the nations of Europe are intrinsically likely to go to war unless they unite is itself completely without foundation.  It might have looked that way to Jean Monet and co in the immediate aftermath of WWII, but what they failed to take account of was the fact that WWI and WWII were basically the result of imperialism: of European nations each determined to have their share of the global imperial cake.  European imperialism is now stone dead, and nothing is going to bring it back.  The Cold War could of course have become another hot European war, but Soviet communism is also now stone dead and it was NATO, not European Union, that killed it (indeed, given that the Cold War was always at its heart Russian imperialist ambition with a communist mask, its end too was the spluttering out of the last ember of European imperialism).

The threat in Europe now is not of general war but of localised ethnic conflict caused by cross-boarder racial and cultural admixtures resulting from earlier imperial episodes going all the way back to ancient times, the Balkan wars being the latest and nastiest examples.  European Union does nothing at all to reduce that threat - indeed, by opening boarders and making the admixtures even more widespread, it ramps it up considerably.  Yes, it can be argued that ambition to board the EU gravy train might persuade some states with ethnic-bashing tendencies to behave themselves and improve their democratic and human rights credentials to gain admission, but events in Greece suggest that in the absence of German willingness to keep pouring them vast amounts of free gravy for eternity the lid is likely to be blown off the pot with even greater violence and should never have been put on in the first place.

In short, the very idea of an intrinsic European tendency to war requiring elaborate supra-national structures to suppress it is itself surely plain wrong.  Had Monet lived to see the end of the Cold War he might well have come to recognise that himself and abandon his crazy idea of European Union.

Can somebody please explain to me why Angela Merkel

..... thinks German taxpayers will suddenly become happy to fund the PIIGS eternally AFTER Eurozone fiscal and political union? Like, it's not OK if their own elected politicians decide to give their cash to the Greeks, but it will be OK if an unelected Eurozone quasi-government decides to do it?  Am I missing something here?

Bank Bonus Culture the most God-Awful Corruption on a Massive Scale

It’s a pity that Ed Miliband is seen as the leader of the campaign against the bankers’ bonus culture, because that gets it presented in the media as a battle between left and right, with David Cameron portrayed as just indulging in a bit of tactical banker bashing to avoid losing too many  votes to Labour or the LibDems rather than as having any genuine problem with the bonus culture.

But he should have a problem with it shouldn’t he?  A big problem.  And so should we all.  There is something profoundly troubling about it, regardless of your politics.

Just look at the facts.  The top brass of any big bank are paid huge basic salaries at the end of every year regardless of how well or badly the bank has performed in that year.  Those salaries are so great that after just a few short years they could easily retire with pension pots big enough to allow them to live in total luxury wanting for nothing that any normal person in their wildest dreams would crave for for the rest of their lives.  Jobs paying salaries like that should surely be something that their occupants hug themselves in disbelief at their good fortune in having been able to land, and in which they work like crazy to demonstrate that they are worth every penny of the money and should most definitely never be sacked for less than first-rate performance.

But is that what they do?  No, what they do is persuade their boards to write them quite staggeringly large bonus cheques on top of those mammoth salaries because, it seems, it should not be they who should be worrying about being sacked and losing their huge salaries if they don’t perform, but their boards and shareholders who should be worrying that if they don’t give them surreal bonuses as well they will walk, and the bank will immediately implode for lack of anyone with the right skills to run it.  The board members are only too ready to approve the bonuses because they are all on the same bonus gravy trains and look forward to ever-more obscene amounts of bonus money themselves as they climb up the ladder.  God knows why the shareholders don’t put a stop to it.  Maybe a lot of them, being big institutions, are controlled by people on similar huge bonuses themselves.  And maybe the rest either just can’t get organised about it or have been brainwashed into believing that their investments really are best served by the bonus culture.

The whole thing just stinks of the most God-awful corruption on a massive scale.  What is truly scary about it is the implication that the ability to run big banks successfully is only to be found in people who will not do it unless they are allowed regularly to stuff their fists in their multi-million pound tills and pretty much take from them as much as they like, on top of what are already quite staggeringly generous basic salaries.  In other words, if that is true, it means that our financial services sector on which we have allowed the health of our economy to depend so critically is in the grip of people of extremely dubious morality. 

But of course it cannot be true.  It is a self-evident con.  The people can only carry out their threat and ‘walk’ to other banks if there are out there banks willing to give in to their threats and pay them.  It should be a relatively simple matter for shareholders of the world’s top banks to get organised and call their bluff, leading either to their backing down or to there being one hell of a lot of unemployed former bank top brass forming queues outside head-hunter offices.  In truth, there must surely be no shortage of first-rate people who are both fully competent and prepared to work their socks of as big bank top brass for an extremely generous salary alone, standing ready to be sacked if they do not deliver value for money.  If there aren’t, we are all in deep trouble, for it means we cannot survive without tugging the forelock to a bunch of amoral, ruthless bastards.

If the shareholders can’t or won’t get organised to do anything about it, then governments will have to do the job for them.  Sooner or later, if things go on as they are, the Tory party’s resistance to attempts by Merkel, Sarkozy and others in the EU to do battle with the financial services sector is going to be seen not as defending the UK’s interests but as conspiring to help a bunch of spivs to keep shafting us all.

Today's Sunday Times Leader on HS2 is total bollocks:

Could not agree more with this on-line comment below today's Sunday Times leader on HS2:
The Sunday Times should be ashamed of writing such drivel as a leader. The argument that it only saves 23 minutes to Birmingham is facile; the line has to go through the Midlands to get to the North, where the savings will be far greater. You can't seriously believe the government intends going only to Birmingham.  You say trains are better than cars because you can work on them, then argue that the money should be spent on improving motorways not railways.  You say the money should be spent on a new Thames airport not on HS2, when the two serve utterly different needs for our economy - BOTH essential.  You completely ignore the government's argument that it is IMPOSSIBLE to meet future rail capacity needs by improvements to the existing lines; that only a new line can achieve that.  Does the writer of this tosh possibly live in the Chilterns and is he or she a member of the anti HS2 campaign?