Despite a flurry of confident leaks from various Tories as elevated as Oliver Letwin – and the obvious willingness of Theresa May to accept any Labour demand to drag her Merkel Diktat over the line – the general opinion this evening is that Corbyn Labour is not taking the bait.
Rather than indulge in examining the tactics and entrails of these Cross-Party talks, The Slog now opts to update readers on the latest hard evidence of approaching continental anarchy. EU co-founder France is in a fiscal, cultural and political mess that demonstrates precisely why the federalists are doomed.
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I have a strong sense about something, and I am going to risk a prediction based on it: when the external pressure upon (and internal illogic of) first the Eurozone and the EU finally lead to chaos, repression and collapse, there will not be a single British person who voted Remain.
For a time, the denial of anything being at risk by our continued membership or dangerously halfway house Brino will continue….along with everything being blamed on Brexit when cracks do appear. But once Deutsche Bank madness, Italian Banks and French panic get a grip, not even Baron Admonish will be able to blame it on Britain and Brexit. Indeed, he might be better advised to leg it to somewhere else. Cyprus, for example. There, he could learn at last what it’s like to have your economy gang-raped by a Dutch hairdresser, a German spook and an Italian mobster.
I wrote columns about Greece and Cyprus seven years ago because I lived in the region, the Western press gave an obscenely biased view of how the Greek debt had been accumulated, and – on seeing the social devastation in Athens – I rapidly began to realise how and why the Brussels-am-Berlin carpetbaggers were destroying the very fabric of a great country in order to rescue eurobankers from their own compulsively risk-driven greed.
The likes of Verhofstadt, Schäuble and Draghi were up to their necks in this calumny. They lied for money, for Germany and for the bankers respectively, but the brain-shield with which all Leftlib Remainers are equipped simply screens out the mountain of evidence that proves it.
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These days, I write columns on France because it’s where I live and there is as yet no reality of universal voluntary press silence, censorship or propaganda here. The average Brit is woefully ignorant about the EU in general, and almost unaware of the bulging basket case the French hexagon now is. Already – as with the Greeks before them – the neoliberalism of Macron, ambitions of Brussels and control freakery of Berlin are beginning to affect the culture adversely. The difference with the French is, unlike the corrupt haut-bourgeoisie in Greece, the real backbone of the country isn’t prepared to fall into line.
The changes suddenly appear in the most unlikely of ways. Yesterday, I had to send a book to somebody very special in England. It was a slim volume of little weight. I went into la Poste and asked for it to be sent Express. ‘Express’ with snail-mail in 2019 France means 4-5 days. I took out a five euro note to pay. The lady told me the price was €18.30. I looked at her, and said “Vraiment?” – really? She raised her eyebrows, and shrugged. She had no excuse. It wasn’t so much a price-hike as a heist.
This is how Macronisation works: without warning, sotto voce, and frequently against the older, poorer or rural minorities. The taxe foncière, for example is levied upon land – and thus almost 100% paid by the agrarian classes. The vast majority of those asked to pay the charge have land of less than an acre. For over half of these, the land is devoted to subsistence culture involving herbs and vegetables. Since MacroNapoleon came to power, it has doubled in cost.
The price of petrol was handled gradually in small doses, with many citizens at first convinced that rising prices were to do with crude oil supply volatility. But then the autoroute tolls rose alongside them. It was at this point that workers engaged in haulage and related industries got together to kick off the civil disobedience we now know as les Giletes Jaunes – the yellow vests.
Shortly thereafter, the wannabe Emperor fuflilled his election pledge by reducing the non-autoroute speed limit to 80 kilometres an hour. What wasn’t entirely clear at the time (but soon became apparent) was that the law was to be backed up by a massive increase in trunk road speed cameras. The objective, quite obviously, was to raise yet more tax.
The Gilets Jaunes immediately began a campaign to destroy the cameras.
Ever since that point, the French President has been on the back foot. Millions of French citizens totally unconnected to the commercial use of motor car fuel now carry yellow safety vests on their dashboards in an act of solidarity. Immediately adopting the bollocks approach of Blairism – a form of political cynicism he greatly admires – Macron launched his Great National Debate. It would, he said, get every dimension of dissatisfaction out into the open.
He travelled the length and breadth of France, speaking and consulting. Wherever he went, he was hounded by protesters in their tens of thousands. Ten days ago, he gave a televised national address. Voter research afterwards showed that two thirds of the French People thought it was all hogwash.
These recent front pages (left) from a popular tabloid which is, generally, middle-of-the-road record how the President’s discomfiture has continued. He’s been forced to rethink the 80 kph limit (the GJs have destroyed a staggering 60% of the cameras installed to record drivers breaking it) and May Day was this year not a celebration of workers’ rights, but rather a joint GJ + trade union event to make clear their joint determination to protect such freedoms.
Today (bottom headline) La Dépeche makes a stark observation based on the facts, “The real pros and cons of Macron”. On balance (bilan) the paper concludes, France needs less Imperial triumphalism and more substance. It also records the fact that at this, the halfway stage in his Presidency, the Teacher’s Pet has lower ratings than those of Sarkozy – and even Hollande.
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Emmanuel Macron has been found out. He is not, and never was, a “Centrist”. He is a one-time Socialist nonentity revealed as a domestic neoliberal and foreign policy neocon hauled upwards into power….chiefly by the vast sums of money available to his mentor and former employer, Rothschild Bank.
The unpleasant British Left (represented by every kind of crude Stalinist from John McDonnell to Jess Phillips) has always been a sucker for this kind of scam. It fell in line behind the Blair-Mandelson-Campbell vandalism, and – in the shape of professional Grim Northern bigot Paul Mason – fell hook line and sinker for Macrony’s sell two years ago:
Mason sees himself as an expert economist, but is unidimensional in that he can’t see beyond socialism. He is the self-styled expert so beloved of Remainers: those disguised conservative security-blanket huggers so terrified of the Truth, they would much rather embrace a puerile fantasy.
Those open-minded Europeans prepared to live on this, the EU side of the Channel, do not suffer from snowjob blindness. We know that the European Bunion is heading for a painful fall, and so – unlike the Little Leftlib Englanders who cling to ideological hallucinations of eternal peace and brotherhood – we would rather make a clean break with the rich man’s club designed by Monnet, Delors, NATO and the US Big Businessmen behind the Marshall Plan.
We recognise that the club will be used to beat the creative individual to a pulp. We believe that Federica Mogherini’s EU army – so lauded by the bottom-feeder Verhofstadt -will be used to repress the artisans, entrepreneurs and free-speech democrats who support the Gilets Jaunes. We see the forerunners of such Sturm Abteilung thugs in the actions of Macron’s riot police beating the Hell out of peaceful demonstrators.
And we salute the French, Italian, Greek, Hungarian and Polish contrarians prepared to stand up to the European Commission’s twisted mission: the creation of an Orwellian bloc of robotically obedient mobs ever-willing to consume, and hate, to order.
The Slog 