How France was secretly Troika’d at the deficit summit
Across the EU, the measures necessary to control our money, medication and freedom of speech are being quietly put into place. For the more pea-brained among Labour’s core bourgeois fanatics, to be anti EU is to spew out ‘vile xenophobia’. The more idiots that trot out this baseless mantra, the sooner it will be too late to stop the Orwellian superstate.
Some of you may have read the accounts two days ago about new restrictions on money (especially large amounts and cash) being withdrawn in France. That is to say, the customer being told that the money he lets the bank keep for him – which is his and not the bank’s – being severely rationed in future. This is especially true of cash, where the Trésor Publique will be granted access to any account withdrawing cash in large amounts regularly. All payments above €6,000 will require notice (a lot of notice) and the right to refuse withdrawals over €10,000 will be introduced. Cash payments over €1,000 to anyone for anything will be illegal – the current limit is €3,000.
There are a number of points to make here:
1. My account is not the official one you read at Mish or in the Spanish Press on Wednesday, because it would’ve sounded too draconian. But it is the real version. Major hat-tip to Mish for spotting it in the first place, because I certainly didn’t.
2. Most of it is already happening. Some of you may recall a Slogpost from last year in which I described the problems encountered when, with €65,000 in a Credit Agricole account, I tried to withdraw more than €1,000 a week. Having 1.3% liquid access to an account paying 0.5% interest is not that good a deal. At the time, I was told informally that the Trésor was “sniffing around” my account. This new law is merely a legalisation of what’s going on anyway.
3. The official account – that this is all part “of a global attack on money-laundering” – I simply do not find credible. Crooks placing their money with them is the least of any bank’s problems right now….as of course Baron Green of HSBC could testify. (For anyone interested, he finds himself ‘deeply regretful’ about what happened at his former employer. But his collar will not, natch, be felt).
4. Part of the reason is to do with tax evasion via cash (“le noir”), and I have been assured that it is to do with France’s deficit issues. The Hollande government is trying to keep it quiet, but over the last two months it has been Troika’d to the extent of an insistence by the usual suspects that tax evasion must be stamped out. Anyone who knows anything about French culture will tell you that this is a bit like trying a stamp out a fire on the sun.
5. The other reason is one of liquidity. There are rumours that this diktat is also from the Troikanauts in the ECB, who have interests – as we’ve seen – in both encouraging and discouraging bank runs, depending on the nature of the prey. It’s only a rumour, and I don’t have a single source who can confirm it. But you will recall that two years ago, Holland passed a law forbidding the reporting of French bank instability whether it was true or not. I am, however, allowed to remark generally that certain financial institutions in France would get less than 100% in a US Fed exam.
So anyway, this means that two vital necessities of life in the EU – money and free speech – are already “on the ration” as we used to say in 1950s Britain. But there’s also another one: medication.
I won’t bore you with another account of my struggle to join the French welfare system via a Carte Vitale: suffice to say that I’ve now ordered new S1 forms from the DWP in Britain. But this – and the sudden retirement of the gp who lost the forms – means I’ve been paying top wack for my medication for some months. Now I need a new gp to even get a prescription.
Until very recently, the Pharmacies in Greece were deregulated – that is, you could get anything over the counter – very cheaply – without prescription. While there, I used to take the precaution of stockpiling…not illegal, as it happens. This has now suddenly come to an end…and the prices have gone up. Initially, I assumed it was a first shot by Syriza at closing down corruption. I’m now informed that it wasn’t: it was a Troika demand from the previous Samaras administration.
Nor is this just a eurozone thing: across the EU, all sorts of spurious “reasons” are being advanced by health professionals as to why ‘you should only be on this drug for a limited time’. It is happening in the UK and Italy for certain, and also I understand in Ireland. The simple truth is that – as in Britain prior to New Labour’s landslide in 1997 – covert drug rationing and higher charges are once more becoming the order of the day.
The final stage of this, of course, is privatisation of medical services.
As a man for No Side, I think it a disgrace that nobody on the Left is applying greater pressure on the Labour Party to rethink its unquestionning support for a thinly veiled mobster-banker-illiberal-unaudited trading partner across the Channel. But as always, the Left simply won’t engage….other than to scream paranoid insults at those who question their religion:
Everyone wants to be a Jihadist today.
The Slog 