Why Wolfgang Schäuble, Ed Miliband & David Cameron are three of a kind

I watched the Berlin Academy’s school sneak Wolfgang ‘Maul’ Schäuble on video last night talking at a conference. I think the CDU may be cloning him, as he appears to be everywhere. Equally it’s possible that, given that since last weekend he is politically nowhere, the German Finance Minister has time on his bloody hands. Or perhaps he is really Wolfgang Bund 007, specially fitted by MI6 boffins with a vertical take-off anti-gravity wheelchair that speeds him from one embarrassed audience to another.

I imagine Herr Schäuble is in so much demand because he is the only person in the eurozone who believes austerity is working. I would say “the only economist” but of course he is ignorant of economics, being more of a Sicherheits Dienst sort of person. Despite this, Wolfie was on top form, explaining how austerity would lead to growth, and trumpeting Spain as the emerging example of this.

Sadly for him, in the 72 hours since his speech, the latest economic data has just emerged from Spain, bringing with it a strong suggestion that Wolfgang Schäuble is a prat. Deflation is worse year on year, and accelerating month on month. Business confidence has declined further. And the day after Schäuble the Scheisskopf spoke, the unemployment figures began going up again. Austerity has cost Spain a staggering 3.44 million jobs.

The truth is that it suits Wolfie Wheelchair to pretend he’s a prat, because he is (like the Draghi he distrusts but supports) in the business of ruining lives in the cause of managing the eurozone’s lavatory paper union.

One can’t pin the same perfidy upon Ed Miliband, for he is – as politicians go – as straight as a die. Mr Moribund is a 100% guaranteed government-tested prat. No pretence is involved in the nature of how his brain works: Ed is a consistently comprehensive prat and WYSIWYG.

One example of what we’ll get was revealed this week by the news that Edward the Mainlybland is going to ban Islamophobia by law. I posted recently about both main Parties doing only the bidding of tiny élites: for the Conservative Party, it’s investment bankers, globalist business and Chinese leaders with tons of dosh. For Labour, it’s the Muswell Hillgate bourgeois metropolitan Common Purpose tendency, the LGBT niche, and the religion of Islam.

In 2005, Muslim Council Leader Iqbal Sacranie came within an ace of getting Tony Blair to champion a very similar Act. His version – astonishing in its breathtaking nerve – was to ban all criticism of Islam whether it could be proved true or not. A week before the London Islamist bomb atrocity, Sacranie told a Daily Telegraph columnist that Jihadism was “an invention…a myth created by atheist western media”. It took the deaths of 55 Londoners at the hands of a myth to convince Labour’s naifs to back-pedal away from the Act. Now it’s back again. But Ed the Nerd still can’t see the hairy, smelly mammoth in the room.

Once again – I do not doubt – this will place me firmly in the nasty Islamophobic camp. But such positioning is just tribal bigotry.

First of all, I am sick to death of the noun ‘phobia’ being used to describe everything from intolerant religions to radical homosexuals. A phobia is an unnatural fear of something. I can honestly say I’ve never experienced an unnatural fear of LGBTs – and by the end of a 35 year career in creative industries, I worked with scores of people whose sexual orientation was varietally different to mine. As for Islam, I have a fear of (1) the empirically proven intolerance of some within the Islamic clergy and (2) Islamics must show us (they being a tiny minority of Brits) that they’re prepared to stop fellow-travelling with Islamists.

I do not regard either of those opinions as either racist or phobic.

It should be clear to anyone who reads The Slog regularly that I despise the BNP, but I distrust certain tendencies within British Islam. And that I find the criminalisation of minority consensual sexual behaviour appalling, but at the same time I see propagandised celebration of it as pointless. Like the overwhelming majority of all gay or straight folks, I would vastly prefer it if sex could return to the private arena as soon as possible. Perhaps I am just an old-fashioned gent, but I didn’t fight for homosexual rights in the 1960s to spend my life listening to jokes about fisting in the Naughties.

The problem with both the “main” Parties as we approach this, by far the most tedious, tribal, and tendenciously denialist General Election in British history, is that they want the mass votes of ordinary citizens, but they are variously in thrall to the approval of precious minorities.

Grounded politics that represent Real People is what most Brits want in 2015. It says a great deal about the LABoraTORY compulsion to ignore Real People that a seedy clown like Nigel Farage is attracting the popular vote he is. Next time around, God knows where desperate and/or discerning UK citizens will be looking. Last time in was Nick the napper Clegg. Next time – I wouldn’t mind betting – it could be Boris the Good ol’ Boy Johnson.

Yesterday at The Slog: In the Spring, a young nation’s fancy turns to Sturgeon.