Category Archives: Politics

The housing crisis and how to solve it

Robert Henderson

The housing crisis in Britain is becoming so severe that radical measures are needed. There are three general issues which need to be addressed:

a. How to bring  rents  to a level which will allow those on a full time wage in any occupation, no matter how menial that occupation be,  to rent somewhere to live without state assistance.

b. How to produce a housing market where the price of  flats or houses  is at a level which permits someone on average full time  wages  to buy a property.

c. How to house people until a. and b. have been accomplished.

To attain c. this should be done :

1. A massive programme of social housing building by the state. In an ideal world social housing would not be needed because there would be sufficient housing to keep rents low enough to be met from  any  wage paid for a  full time job, no matter how menial, while those who could not work  would also be able to find private housing at a cost which did not impose hideously on the taxpayer. But we are where we are,  which is in truly frightening  circumstances  with huge numbers of people  in full time work who are  unable to meet the rapidly rising private housing rents. In addition,  even those on incomes well above the average cannot  get on the housing ladder and those wishing to trade up  from an existing property cannot do so because of the difficulty of obtaining  a mortgage, being in negative equity  or simply not having the wherewithal to pay all the rapidly rising costs of moving such as stamp duty.  Consequently, a massive building programme is urgently needed to  house people now in the places where they are needed, both  as workers and to maintain local communities.

2. An annual tax on land that is being hoarded and not built on by developers. This would both encourage developers to build houses and to sell  land at a reasonable price to the state for social housing.

3. An end to buy-to-let mortgages. This would ensure there are more properties at the lower end of the price range to buy.

4. Levy capital gains tax on all homes including primary residences, the money being used to fund in part the increase in social housing expenditure.  This would be fair because those owner occupiers who have benefitted from the massive capital appreciation of their properties have done so not because the market has dictated the pric, e but as a result of government policies over the past 30 years which have resulted in greater competition for housing with a resulting ramping of the cost  of both rents and purchase prices. These policies have been (1) too tight planning controls,  (2) a failure of governments to build anything like enough social housing, (3) the heavily discounted sales of social housing  which has reduced the stock of social housing, (4) the removal of credit controls on mortgages to restrict what people can  borrow in relation to their income and the absence of a minimum deposit, (5) lax fiscal and monetary policies and (6) mass immigration.

5. Substantially increase  council tax on homes other than the primary residence.   The tax should be a percentage of the value of the property not a multiple of the present CT  bands.   This  would give multiple  home owners a powerful  incentive to sell and a disincentive to other people who wish to have second homes to buy. In principle this should make such properties not only cheaper but increase the probability of locals buying the properties.   If a property owner could not sell

6. Greater security of tenure  for renters on the German model. At present most private  tenants have minimal security of tenure – six month contracts are common – and no guard against huge rent rises.

7. A restriction on rent increases to the rate of inflation for at least a number of years. There is a potential problem here where the rentier has obtained the property to rent by taking out a mortgage, particularly a buy-to-let mortgage.  While interests rates remain low – and the BoE governor Mark Carney has signalled that they will probably remain low for two or three years – the uprating of rents by inflation only should mean the mortgage can still be paid. When interest rates rise, it might be necessary to produce some form of taxpayer support , for example, by reducing tax on the rental earnings with this reduction offset by the state taking a stake in the rental property which would be realised when the rental property was sold.

8. An end to further mass immigration.

9. The removal to their own countries of immigrants who are here illegally, incapable of work or doing work which could be done by native Britons and for which native Britons are available.

10. Social housing to be denied to anyone not born British.

11. An end to Right to Buy.

12. The re-imposition of  credit controls.

13. The restriction of any new  purchase of residential property in the UK to British citizens by birth.  This would also mean banning companies and suchlike buying residential property unless the properties purchased are rented out.

14. Where residential property is already owned by someone who is not a British citizen by birth, they may retain ownership but if they wish to sell it may be only to a British citizen by birth.

There will be those reading this who will recoil at the idea of ending mass immigration, sending some immigrants home, denying social housing to those not born British and restricting the purchase of residential property and its sale . Let me put this those readers: would you be willing to stand in a public meeting  or before TV cameras and oppose such rules or write in opposition to them for public consumption?  I rather suspect you would not , because to take that position would be to say foreigners may have social housing before those born British citizens; that much of the existing social housing  will continue to be occupied by foreigners while Britons left bereft of decent housing, that rich foreigners may purchase property in places such as London and by doing so inflate prices beyond the reach of Britons on salaries which are  multiples of the average British wage.

Had immigration been kept within reasonable limits and adequate levels of house building, both social and private, been maintained since the mid 1980s, such radical measures might not be needed, but the position is what it is and the problem  requires such policies.

People need to understand exactly how serious things are. We have reached the state where millions of people, both employed and unemployed, lack decent accommodation or indeed any accommodation at all.  So dire is the housing shortage that we have reached the point where the ordinary person is struggling to live a normal life, because without a secure home how can anyone plan for the future, to have children, raise a family.  The government’s policies are truly nihilistic.

Would a libertarian society deprive individuals of cultural roots and collective identity?

There are many rooms in the libertarian  ideological house.  That fact often derails rational discussion of libertarian issues, but it need not be a problem in this instance because the question being asked is most  efficiently  examined   by testing  it against  the flintiest wing of libertarian thought.   If  that pristine, uncompromising  form of libertarianism is incompatible with the maintenance of cultural roots and collective identity, then  all other shades of libertarianism will be incompatible to some degree. 

The pristine libertarian has no truck with  any form of government, believing that  personal relations  between individuals  will adequately order society no matter how large or complex the society,  and that such ordering will arise naturally if  only the artificially constraints on human behaviour such as governments and laws are removed.   Such a society  would supposedly  work along these lines.    If the society is threatened by an invader,  individuals will join together to defend it out of a sense of self-preservation.  To   those who cannot work for reasons of sickness, injury, age or innate infirmity,  compassion and a sense of duty will ensure that private charity is  extended  to relieve the need. If  public works such as roads and railways are required, self-interest and reason will drive individuals to join to together to build them.   Matters such as education may be safely  left to parents and such charitable provision as arises.   Above all the individual is king and personal choice is only circumscribed if a choice involves the imposition of one individual’s will on another.   You get the idea.  The consequence is a vision of a society not  a million miles away from  Rightist  forms of anarchism.

This concentration on the individual makes for a fissile society. If each person  is to follow his or her  own way  without any requirement to believe anything other than to respect the conditions necessary to realise libertarian ends , that in itself  would definitely weaken  collective identity and probably affect cultural unity.  Nonetheless in a truly homogeneous society, especially if it was small, the probability is that cultural weakening would not be great and the absence of a conscious collective identity would not present a difficulty provided the society was not subject to a serious threat from outside.

Serious problems  for the pristine libertarian  arise if the society is heterogeneous,  because  then there is a loss of collective unity. If the heterogeneity comes from class,  the cultural roots may  be largely untouched or at least develop in a way  which ensures that there is still much cultural  uniformity  and that uniformity is clearly an extension of  past cultural traits. It is also true that in a racially and ethnically homogeneous society, a sense of collective unity will be easily rekindled if the society comes under external threat.

The most difficult society for libertarians to deal with is one which is ethnically divided, especially if the ethnic divide includes racial difference. There a society becomes not so much a society but a series of competing racial and ethnic enclaves.   In such a situation,  it is inevitable that both  cultural unity and collective identity is undermined because there is no  shared general cultural experience and this plus racial difference makes a collective identity not merely impossible but absurd even in concept.

The brings us to the most obvious threat presented by pristine  libertarians to the maintenance of cultural roots and collective identity. That  is the idea that national boundaries  should be irrelevant with people travelling and settling wherever they choose.  This presumes human beings are essentially interchangeable and in this respect it echoes  multiculturalism.  The consequence of such a belief is to greatly increase the heterogeneity of a society through the mass immigration of those who are radically different from the native population.  We do not need to guess what the result of such immigration is because it  has happened throughout the western world in our own time. More specifically, it has happened in those  countries whose populations which are most naturally sympathetic  to libertarian ideas: those which may broadly be described as Anglo-Saxon; countries such as Britain, the USA and what used to be known as  the old white dominions.

The influx of millions of people who  see themselves as separate from the native populations of the countries to which they had migrated has resulted in the Anglo-Saxon states gradually destroying their tradition of freedom. Driven by a mixture of liberal internationalist ideology and fear, their  elites have severely restricted by laws and their control of the media  and public institutions  what may be said publicly about immigration and its consequences.  In Britain it is now possible to be brought to court simply for saying to someone from an ethnic minority “go home”, while any allegation of racist behaviour  – which may be no more than failing to invite someone from an ethnic minority  to an office party – against a public servant will result at best in a long inquiry and at worst with dismissal.  Nor, in practice, is application of the law or the  witch-hunts  directed equally against everyone for it is overwhelmingly native Britons who are targeted.

At the same time as native Britons are being silenced and intimidated, an incessant tide of pro-immigrant and multiculturalist  propaganda is pumped out by government, the public organisations they control such as the civil service and state schools and the mass media , which is overwhelmingly signed up to the liberal internationalist way of thinking.  The teaching of history has been made a non-compulsory subject in British schools after the age of 14 and such history as  is taught  is next to worthless in promoting a sense of collective unity,  both because it fails to give any chronological context to what is put before the pupils  because it concentrates on “themes”  rather than periods and because the amount of British history that is contained within  the syllabus is tiny, often consisting of the Tudors and little else.  The consequence is that the young of the native British population are left with both a sense that their own culture is in some strange way to be valued less than that of the various immigrant groups and the lack of any knowledge about their country’s past.

The most  and sinister  consequence of  post-war immigration and the British elite’s response to it  is the development within Britain of  a substantial number of Muslims who not only do not have any sense of belonging to the broader society in which they live, but who are actively hostile to  Britain and its values.  But if this is the most dramatic example of the fracturing  of British society, it is merely symptomatic of the separatist attitude of  ethnic minorities in Britain generally, especially those from radically alien cultures allied to racial difference.

All of these developments are antithetical to pristine  libertarian ideals,  both because they  undermine  shared values and because they  result in actions to control friction between competing racial and ethnic groups which in themselves undermine the conditions in which libertarian ideals  flourish.  That libertarians so often subscribe to the ideal of open borders despite the overwhelming evidence of  its counter-productive effects for libertarian ends is indicative of the blinkered nature of much libertarian thinking.

The fundamental weakness of pristine  libertarianism is its complete  failure to take  account of  human psychology  and the way humans behave as groups.  This is unsurprising  because of the central position given to the individual.  But by doing this pristine  libertarians  ignore the central fact of being human: we are a social animal. Being  a social animal entails two defining behaviours: all social animals  produce hierarchies  and   all social animals place limits to the group.  Homo sapiens is no exception.

Because hierarchies in the human context arise not only from the personal efforts, qualities and talents of each individual, as is the case with animals,  but from the  position  each individual occupies through the accident of birth, this raises two difficulties for libertarians.  The first is there is not a level playing field and without that the pristine  libertarian ideal of society organising itself through freely  entered into relationships is severely distorted because it is clearly absurd to say that a man born poor is freely entering into a master-servant relationship with a man born rich when the poor man needs money simply to feed himself.  The second difficulty is that the very existence of an hierarchy,  whether or not it is based on merit, undermines the notion of free choice because once it is established different power relationships exist.

The question of hierarchy becomes more complex as the heterogeneity of a society grows whether that be ever deeper division into classes or increasing ethnic and racial diversity . All social animals have to have boundaries  to  know where the group begins and ends.  This is  because a social animal must operate  within a hierarchy and a hierarchy can only exist where  there are  boundaries.   No boundaries,  no hierarchy, because  no  individual could  ever  know what the dominance/submission situation  was  within their species or at least within those members of the species with whom they interact.

The need to define the group is particularly important for libertarians.    Above all libertarianism requires  trust. In the pristine libertarian society this means each individual believing that other people will keep their word and generally behave honestly. But as we all know only too well  people cannot  be trusted to observe societal norms and a society which is fractured by class, race or  ethnicity  is the least likely of all to have a shared sense of what is right.  Therefore,  libertarians need to recognise that however much they would like to believe that each human being is an individual who may go where he or she pleases and do what he or she pleases, the sociological reality precludes  this and that the only sane ideological course for a libertarian is to advocate closed borders and the preservation of the homogeneity of  those societies which are most favourable to libertarian ideals not because the society  consciously espouses them,  but because the  society has evolved in a way which includes libertarian traits.

There will be libertarians who find it immensely difficult going on impossible to accept that the individual must in some respects be subordinated to the group.  They will imagine, as liberal internationalists do, that human nature can be changed, although in the case of libertarians the change will come not from re-education but the creation of circumstances propitious for libertarian behaviour to emerge.  Let me explain why this is impossible because of the innate differences between  human beings and the effects of cultural imprinting.

Because Man is differentiated profoundly by culture, the widely accepted definition  of a species – a population of freely interbreeding organisms sharing a common gene pool –   is  unsatisfactory,  for  clearly Man is  more  than  a brute   animal  responding   to   simple  biological   triggers.  When   behavioural differences  are perceived as belonging to a particular group  by  that group  as differentiating  members of the group from other  men,    they perform the same role as  organic differences for  they divide Man  into cultural species.

An analogy with computers can be made. As hardware,  a particular model of  computer is  practically identical to every other computer which  is classified  as  the same model.  But the  software available to every computer of the same model is not identical.   They may run  different operating systems, either completely different or different versions of the same program. The software which runs under the operating system is different  with different versions of the same program being used.  The data which is input to the computer varies and this in turn affects the capabilities of the computer.

It  clearly makes no sense to say every computer of the same  model  is the same even if the computer is loaded with the same software.   But of  course  not  all  computers  are  of  the  same  model.  They  vary tremendously  in  their  power.  The same software  will  run  at  very different  rates  because of this.  Storage and memory size  also  vary tremendously. Some computers cannot run programmes because the programmes  are too large.   We  may call all computers computers ,  but that is to say little more  than that  all  animals are animals,  for  computers  range  from  the immensely  powerful super computers – the homo sapiens  of  the computer  world  as it were – to the amoeba of the  simple  chip  which controls  lights  being put on or off in a room  depending  on whether someone is in it.

Are the circumstances of computers  not akin to those of  Man?  Do  not the racially based  differences in IQ correspond to the differences  in power  of  older  and  newer computers?  Do not different  languages  represent different operating systems? For example, think how different must be the mentality of  a native Chinese speaker (using  a language which  is entirely  monosyllabic)  to that of a native English speaker  (using  a polysyllabic language) simply because of the profound difference in the structure  of the language. A language will not merely impose limits on what  may  be  expressed it will affect the  entire  mentality  of  the individual,  from aesthetic appreciation to  social expression. Is not the experiential input analogous to the holding of different data?

But the most potent of human behavioural triggers are racial differences,  for they exercise the strongest control over the group in a territory where different racial groups exist. Race trumps ethnicity where the ethnic clash is one of people of the same race but different ethnicities.  Place a significant population of a different race into a territory where ethnicity rather than race is the cause of unrest and the ethnic factions of the same race will tend to unite against those of a different race.

To argue that racial difference is  not important to the choice of a mate is as absurd as arguing  that the attractiveness of a person is irrelevant to the choice of a  mate.

In  Freakonomics  Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner  cite a study made of a  US dating site (the full story is on pp 80-84).  The site is one  of the  largest  in  the US and the data examined  covered  30,000  people equally  divided  between San Diego and Boston.   Most were  white  but there was a substantial minority of non-white subjects.

The  questionnaire the  would-be  daters had to  fill  in  included  a question  choice on race as “same as mine”  and “doesn’t matter”.   The study  compared  the responses  by white would-be  daters  (those  from non-white were not analysed) to these  questions with the race of  the emails  actually  sent soliciting a date.   The result  in  Levitt  and Dubner’s words was:

“Roughly  half of the white women on the site  and  80  percent  of  the white men declared that  race  didn’t  matter to them. But the response data tell a different story  The white men who said that race didn’t  matter sent  90  percent of  their e-mail  queries  to  white women. The  white women who said race  didn’t  matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men.

“Is  it  possible that race really didn’t  matter  for  these  white women and men and that they simply  never  happened  to browse a non-white date  that  interested them?”

Or,  more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter  because they wanted to come across  especially  to potential mates of their own race as open-minded?” In short, around 99% of all the women and 94%  of all men in the sample were  not  willing  to  seek a  date of a  different  race.   How  much stronger  will  be  the tendency to refuse to breed with a  mate  of  a different race?

If sexual desire will not commonly override the natural disinclination to remain racially separate nothing will.

Because the tendency to mate with those of a similar race is so strong  and universal,  both in place and time, it is reasonable to conclude  that the  behaviour  is innate and that cultures  necessarily include  the requirement for a member of the society to be of a certain racial type. The  consequence of this is that someone of a different racial type  is effectively precluded from full integration because one of the criteria for  belonging has not been met.  That is not to say,  of course,  that many  of the habits of mind of an alien culture may not be  adopted  by someone  of  a  different race.  What is withheld  is  the  instinctive acceptance  of the alien and his or her descendants  as members of  the society. Just as no human being can decide for themselves that they are a member of this or that group, no individual can decide that they belong to this or that nation because it is a two-way process: the other members of the group they wish to join have to accept them as a true member of the group. (Stephen Frears the English  film director once wryly remarked that he had known the actor Daniel Day-Lewis “before he was Irish”).

Where does this leave us? In its present form libertarianism is a most efficient  dissolver of cultural roots and collective identity. It is this because it ignores the realities of  Man’s social nature.  This results in the  creation of the very circumstances which are least conducive to the realisation of libertarian ends.  If libertarians are to realise those ends, they must recognise that the society  most favourable to their beliefs  is one which is homogeneous in which the shared values create the platform of trust which must underlie libertarian behaviour.   Of course, that does not guarantee a society favourable to libertarians because  the shared values may be antithetical to them, but it is a necessary if not sufficient condition for libertarian ideals to flourish. To that libertarians must add a recognition that there are profound differences between ethnic and racial groups and identify those societies which are most worth protecting because they have the largest element of libertarian traits within them.

Written for entry to  the 2010  Chris Tame prize

Sorting out the mess after the Euro collapses

Robert Henderson

17 of the 28 EU states make up the Eurozone. If the Euro collapses 17 new national currencies will have to be established. A conversion rate for Euros to each re-established national currency will have to be agreed.   The weaker a country’s economy,  the less favourable the conversion rate.

That  will be painful for the weaker Eurozone economies, but it will be administratively relatively simple because the transaction can be made  bilateral,  just as the assimilation of the East German Ostmark into the Deutschmark was accomplished at the time of German re-unification, although this would be more complicated.

The bilateralism would  have to come through a system something like this:   the Euro coins and notes issued in each country’s name  and the Euro bank deposits of each country held at a certain date would be convertible only into the re-established national currency.  For example, this would mean that those holding Euros issued by France and Euros in French bank accounts  at a designated date,  would have their Euros converted to Francs at whatever the agreed rate was.

Unless such a system was adopted almost everyone holding  Euros would  demand that their Euros were converted to attractive currencies  such as a re-established Deutschmark rather than a new drachma or escudo, regardless of how attractive the conversion rates were for the weaker re-established Eurozone currencies.  This would happen because the weaker re-established currencies would be viewed by most as potentially worthless at worst and likely to devalue severely and quickly at best.  There would also be no guarantee that all the newly established currencies would be freely convertible.

The domestic administrative complications will be daunting enough,  but  they will be nothing compared to those that arise for  those holding the Euro as a reserve currency.  As the Euro is a supranational creation,  there can be no neat conversion of Euros held as a reserve currency to another currency as there was at German re-unification. Instead, each holder of Euros as a reserve currency would probably  have to receive a basket of currencies made up of all the 17 Eurozone’s new national currencies with the amounts  of each currency determined by some criterion such as the size of population of each Eurozone country. This would mean substantial losses for Euro reserve currency holders,  because most of the basket of 17 currencies they received to replace the Euros they held would be currencies which were weak and hence undesirable internationally.  Only the new Deutschmark would probably be considered genuine  reserve currency material.

In 2011  currencies held in reserve throughout the world amounted to about $10 trillion (http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/13/reserve-currencies.asp). The Euro makes up just under a quarter of that, say $2.4 trillion.  The effect of a Euro collapse would be massive, not just on the EU or even the developed world generally,  but on the entire world because the developing countries hold around two-thirds of the $10 trillion, much of which will be Euros.

The potential damage the collapse of  the Euro would wreak may be the primary explanation for the ruthless treatment of Eurozone countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal in the struggle to maintain the Euro, although the contemptible desire of the EU elites  to save face at any cost  is  doubtless also in play.

A subsidiary problem is how  non-reserve currency holders of Euros (individuals, business, other corporate bodies) outside the Eurozone would be treated. It would scarcely be a practical proposition to hand them a basket of currencies like the reserve currency holders because the vast majority would be holding only a small or relatively small number of Euros. For those holding just coins and notes there would not be a problem because those notes and coins would be identifiable as having been issued by a particular state and could be converted at the agreed Euro/re-established currency of the particular country rate just as the notes and coins held by those living in Eurozone countries could be converted. Ditto any Euros held in banks in Eurozone countries regardless of the nationality of the holder or their place of residence, the state in which bank account is held being the determining factor.

But a  severe problem would arise with those holding Euros in bank accounts outside of the Eurozone. How those Euros could be allocated to any Eurozone member by any rational or objectively fair scheme  I frankly cannot see. I suspect that they might have to settle for either  a basket of  Eurozone re-established national currencies as the holders would do (impractical for small amounts) or whatever (almost certainly decidedly penal) conversion rate each ex-Eurozone member might be willing to offer.  For example, France might offer a better rate than Germany. The foreign holders of Euros in bank accounts   could of course  simply be cut adrift and lose the entire value of their Euros.

Then there is the problem of what to do with contracts drawn up in Euros. What value would be put on the Euro cost of the contract?  I suppose it might be dealt with by using the conversion  rate  of the Euro to each Eurozone ex-member’s  re-established currency  with the place where the contract was to be carried out  determining to which newly  re–established currency  the contract would be converted. Or perhaps the contract could be converted to another currency such as the US dollar or pound sterling with payment either being made in that currency (which the contracting party doing the paying  would have to purchase using their own currency or any other foreign currency reserves) or in a newly re-established national currency at whatever  the exchange rate  between  that currency and  what might be termed the third party currency was at a moment in time. For example, suppose the third party currency was the US dollar and the ex-Eurozone state was France.  Francs would have to be given to the value  of whatever the exchange value of the Franc against the dollar was,  either at ts value at a given date or at an agreed conversion value.

The potential mess is colossal. What if a newly established currency is simply too weak to be able to either buy sufficient of a currency such as the US dollar or to make payment  in a new re-established national currency because the exchange rate was so penal it made the completing of the contract impossible?  What if  the contractor who  is  to be paid refused to complete the contract because they had no faith in  the newly re-established national currency? What if a newly  re-established currency was not strong enough to be fully convertible?   The outcome could be very severe because of the potential for a large shrinkage of economic activity across a  healthy slice of the world’s economy. What will happen generally if the Euro collapses?  The stark  truth is that no one knows because there is no historical example of a currency union on the scale or type of the Eurozone  failing .  The nearest example is the Latin Currency Union which lasted from 1865-1927, but that was small beer compared to the  Eurozone ,based on precious metals and not involving a reserve currency. Nor of course was international trade and finance developed to anything like the extent  it is today.

The architects of the Euro, whether intentionally or not, have behaved with a criminal recklessness in venturing where no one had gone before.

Bruges Group meeting 23rd April 2013 – Immigration: Can we control it?

Robert Henderson

Speakers: Sir Andrew Green (MigrationWatch UK)

Philip Hollobone (Tory MP for Kettering)

Gerard Batten (UKIP MEP for London)

This was a meeting truly remarkable the vehemence and explicit nature of the anti-immigrant feeling which was put forward not only by members of the audience during questions but by the speakers.  Some made s show of a few token gestures towards fitting their complaints within the pc envelope but most were explicit in their recognition that what matters is the qualitative societal change mass immigration brings.

Sir Andrew Green

Green performed as he usually does, sticking in the main to statistics. Nonetheless he was more forthright than he used to be in his language and statistics alone can be very telling.  These quotes will give a flavour of his talk:

“I would suggest to you that the present scale of immigration represents the greatest threat to our social cohesion we have ever faced and I would further suggest that the failure of the political class to address this issue has undermined confidence in our entire political system. “

“ The public are not in the least convinced   by nonsense they are told about this being a country of immigration.  We are not and never have been.  The number of net migrants in 2010 exceeded the number between 1066 and 1950. “

(Green’s  assertion that more immigrants arrived in the UK  in  2010 than came between 1066 and 1950 is very plausible,  even if  the  figures have to be guesstimates because of the  lack of adequate  records before the 19th century. We can be pretty sure that there was little immigration because populations in Europe were very small by modern standards at the beginning of the period and were reduced dramatically by  the Black Death in the 14th Century which is generally reckoned by historians of the period to have  carried off a third to half of Europe’s inhabitants.  Tellingly, there was a lack of serious riots in England  against foreigners simply because they were  foreigners or against what would now be called ethnic minorities between the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 by Edward I and the arrival of  Protestant Huguenots,  who  arrived  from Catholic France after the revocation of the Edict of Nante in 1684 removed the limited toleration they had been given by the French monarchy.  Their  numbers were not great because they cannot have been great because the population of France was still overwhelmingly Catholic and was probably only 15-20 million during the period in question.  They were followed by an influx of  Jews in the 18th century and bursts of Jewish immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as they fled first the pogroms of eastern Europe and then Hitler.  The numbers involved were very small compared with the vast numbers who have arrived since 1945 and particularly in the period since 1997 (tens of  thousands compared with millions in the modern period).

Green made these statistical points:

–          Most of the immigration to the UK comes from outside the EU. Therefore, the UK should be concentrating on reducing that while we remain within the EU.

–          If net immigration  continued to run  at 200,000 pa, the figure which it has averaged for the past ten years, the UK population  would reach 70 million by 2027.

–          The Coalition has managed to make significant progress towards  their target of reducing net immigration to tens of thousands by 2015. However, the right to free movement granted to Romania and Bulgaria from 1 January 2014 could easily undermine these efforts.

–          The Coalition may fudge things by not including the 2014 Bulgarian/ Romanian figures in the immigration statistics before the next general election.

–          Very large numbers of Bulgarians are already in Spain and Italy and may well move northwards to escape the difficult  economic circumstances in those countries.  Green also mentioned that there are 1.5m Roma in these countries.

–          The official immigration figures massively understate the true level of  EU immigration, perhaps by 2-3 times.

Green raised the question of leaving the EU but did not explore it, although he stated .  He suggested instead that when the proposed renegotiation with the EU  took place,   access to benefits by EU migrants should be one of the prime subjects for Britain to put on the agenda.

Although Green did not wholeheartedly go for the policies which would allow Britain to  really control her borders such as leaving the EU and repudiating any other treaty which restricts Britain’s ability to control her borders,  both he and MigrationWatch have  come a long way in the past ten years. There was a time when Green would have disregarded the EU dimension and spoken only about restricting immigration from outside the EU. Nor would you have heard him using such blunt language and sentiments as those contained in the two passages I have quoted above.  The movement of Green and MigrationWatch (most of it in the past five years) is emblematic of a general movement in the rhetoric if not the action of the mainstream British Parties and the British elite in general in recent years.

Philip Hollobone

For a Tory MP, indeed for any MP,  Holbone was startlingly frank.  He is a member of the “Better off Out” group  and maintains  that the demands of EU membership is “not a price the British people wish to pay”. This allowed him to embrace the idea that the UK could only regain control of its borders by leaving the EU.

While the UK remained within the  EU he advocated that the Government should (1) challenge the EU by refusing  to accept the lifting of the transitional rules  for Bulgarians and Romanians and (2) do what other countries in the EU such as Spain and officially register foreign workers and keep tabs on them.

Hollobone also railed against the pressure immigrants  brought on  infrastructure and  the crime they committed,  declared that the NHS was “ the National Health Service not the World Health Service” and stated  that UK  citizenship was granted far too  easily and should require 15 or 20 years  of well behaved residence in the country before someone was considered for citizenship.

All well and good, but sadly and pathetically Hollobone tried to excuse himself and other politicians from not speaking out until recently because it was only the advent of white immigration from the EU which had “given permission”  to the British to complain about immigration.  He needed to be “given permission” before speaking  out? That is the problem with mainstream British politicians in a nutshell: they have not got an ounce of courage.  When it comes to emotive and serious subjects, what counts is speaking when it is dangerous not when it is safe.

 Gerard Batten   

Batten was even franker than Hollobone. As a UKIP member, he is of course in favour of leaving the UK, (which he stressed was the only way to regain control over the UK’s borders), but he also favours withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act, making over-staying a visa a criminal offence and only allowing visitors into Britain if they either have health insurance or the UK has reciprocal medical arrangements with the visitor’s country.  Batten also suggested that immigrants  whose status could be illegal should be forced to  register with the government  if they wanted their cases  investigated.  Failure to register should, he said,  result in expulsion from the UK  without any chance of appeal.

Batten  slated the great increase in immigration from the Blair government onwards , an increase which he attributed to a deliberate Labour policy designed to change the ethnic make-up of the UK.  (The grounds for  this belief is the Evening Standard article by Andrew Neather in 2009 in which he claimed that “mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural”  (http://www.standard.co.uk/news/dont-listen-to-the-whingers–london-needs-immigrants-6786170.html).

Batten derided the British MEPs other than those from  UKIP who had recently voted  in the EU Parliament for the adoption of a report advocating the entry into the EU of Turkey, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo, countries with a combined population of 80 million.

The importance of breaking the liberal censorship

The vehemence of many of the audience was considerable. Not only were  very strong opinions against the politically correct  status quo expressed, the tones of voice and the  body language were both extremely animated.

Although there was no effing and blinding or crude racist language,  the ideas being put forward by both the speakers and the audience  were far more inflammatory in their implications  than many of those  who have been charged in recent times with  being “racist” because of what they have said or written in public.   Take  Green’s “the greatest threat to our social cohesion we have ever faced” or Batten’s belief that Blair had used immigration as an instrument of policy to fracture the ethnic solidarity of the UK.   Is that really different in sentiment from the white working class Englishwoman Emma West who is charged with a racially aggravated  public order offence for saying in a public place things like  “‘You ain’t English. No, you ain’t English either. You ain’t English. None of you’s ****ing English. Get back to your own ****ing… do you know what sort out your own countries, don’t come and do mine.”?  (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state/).

The audience questions were heartening because they  were based mainly on the social rather than the economic impact of immigration.  The competition for jobs, housing, medical treatment, education and welfare is of course important,  but the primary objection to mass immigration is the general change it brings to society. Mass immigration which results in numbers of particular nationalities, races and ethnicities arriving which are sufficient to permit the development of settlements with separate ways of living  from the host population is a covert form of conquest.  Mass immigration of the unassimilatable is an act of the most profound treason by those with political power who permit it, and, in the case of the Labour governments of  Blair and Brown, made doubly so by those who positively encourage it as a matter of policy.  It is treason  because the effect of such immigration is to effectively allow the unassimilatable to colonise territory by settlement.

I attempted without success to be called to put a question. Had I been called my question would have been “Before there can be proper public debate about immigration and its consequences the restrictions on free expression which result in people being charged with criminal offences, losing their jobs or being the subject of a media hate campaign when they speak honestly on the subject must be removed. What will the speakers be doing to remove those restrictions?” Unfortunately no one else asked the question so it went by default.

There is undoubtedly a changed and  changing public rhetoric on race and immigration, but it is still being controlled by those with power and influence. To get the change on immigration policy which is required – an end to mass immigration and the policy of multiculturalism – the general public must be able to express their views as they choose without fear of prosecution or other penalties such as the loss of employment.

This question also has serious implications for those who wish to leave the EU. Immigration is the prime driver of anti-EU sentiment in the UK. If the present straitjacket of fear  about expressing non-pc views on immigration remains,  the politically correct can stifle and manipulate debate on not only immigration  but also EU membership by  representing those who wish to leave the EU as xenophobes at best and racists at worst.

Emma West’s trial scheduled for the sixth time

Robert Henderson

Emma West was due to stand trial at Croydon Crown Court for  two racially aggravated public order offences  arising from her complaint about  mass immigration and its effects made on a Croydon tram  in November 2011 . The trial has been delayed yet again and she will now (allegedly) stand trial on 10 May.[1]

The authorities are extracting the bodily fluids if they expect the general public to believe there is a legitimate reason for the delay.  The 10 May will be the sixth (yes, that is the sixth) trial date Ms West has been given since she was arrested .  By 10 May she will have been waiting to be tried for just short of eighteen months. The delay  is patently unreasonable.

The latest  excuse  given for the inordinate delay are “legal reasons”.   The only likely reasons are political ones, namely, her trial will challenge to politically correct status quo. This is because unlike virtually everyone else who has been charged with these type of offences she has made it clear she will be pleading NOT GUILTY.   The authorities simply  do not know what to do with her.

There is an added complication. When the previous re-scheduling happened the charges of assault against two police offices during the investigation of her case were also delayed  -they were originally due to be held on 3 March and were re-scheduled for 15 April.[2]

It will be interesting to see if these cases (to be heard in a magistrates’ court) go ahead on the 15 April or are put back yet again.   The authorities may have decided they want these cases to be heard before the racially aggravated public order offences. That could be to her disadvantage not just because it would taint her with  a criminal conviction before her Crown Court trial, but even more  dangerously because a criminal conviction for violence could provide the local social services with grounds for removing or threatening to remove her young son.  That might well be used as a lever to persuade her to plead guilty.  It is all too easy to imagine the cant the social services could come out with: “If you show remorse, Emma,  it may be possible to let you keep your child because it shows willingness to change. But if you stubbornly stick to your  not guilty plea we may have to take your son away from you because you are an unfit mother.”

The other possibility is that if the assault charges  are heard on  15 April and she is found guilty, she might be sent to prison. This would be very unusual for common assault cases, but the fact that the alleged victims are police officers might give the magistrates grounds for doing so. If that happened her son would probably be taken into care.  Whether she would ever get him back is a moot point. This scenario could of course also be used to frighten her in pleading guilty.

Margaret Thatcher: the most useful of idiots is dead

Note: Undoubtedly a gigantic political personality, but that is disastrous if the politics and understanding of what she was doing are missing. One of her favourite claims was that she had been “badly advised”.  Just what you don’t want as PM.  What is needed is someone who understands the consequences of what they are doing. RH 

Margaret Thatcher: the most useful of idiots

Robert Henderson
With his mixture of vaulting intellectual ambition and howling mediocrity of mind, Lenin is the MaGonagal of philosophers. (Connoisseurs of intellectual incompetence and pretension should browse through Lenin’s ‘Materialism and Empririo-Criticism’ for an especial treat). Nonetheless, like Hitler, the man possessed a certain low animal cunning and a complete absence of moral restraint, which qualities permitted him to make a few acute psychological and sociological observations. Amongst these is the concept of the useful idiot.
For Lenin this was the role to be played primarily by simpleminded bourgeois dupes who unwittingly aided the movement towards the proletarian revolution, a revolution utterly antipathetic to the ideals and aspiration of the simpleminded bourgeois dupes. But the concept is of general political utility. The useful idiot is any person who acts in a way which unwittingly promotes political interests which are opposed to his own political ideals.
The best of all useful idiots are those in positions of the greatest political advantage, both because they have power and their propensity to be deluded by their egos into believing that they are utterly beyond manipulation or mistaken in their policies. They also display a serious want of understanding of the probable consequences of their actions.
It was this combination of circumstances and mentality which made Margaret Thatcher so potent a useful idiot in the liberal internationalist cause. As I wrote that last sentence, I saw rising up before me the opposing hordes of her admirers and haters, singularly united in a ghastly embrace of disbelief. Was she not the Iron Lady, the Hammer of the Left, the destroyer of union power, the slayer of the socialist dragon? Did she not speak of turning back the tide of immigrants? Was she not the rock from which the European Leviathan rebounded? Did she not ensure that Britain was respected in the world as she had not been since Suez? Was she not a mover and shaker in the nationalist cause?
In her own rhetorical world Mrs T was all of these things, a veritable Gloriana who enchanted some and banally persuaded many more, but in practical achievement she was none of them. This discrepancy between fact and fancy made her an extraordinarily potent tool for the soldiers of the ascendant ideology of the post-war period, the sordid bigotry that is liberal internationalism.
The hard truth is that she allowed the primary British political corruptions of the post war period – immigration, multiculturalism, “progressive” education, the social work circus, internationalism, the attachment to Europe – to not merely continue but grow vastly in scope during her period in power.
A harsh judgement? Well, at the end of her premiership what did Britain have to show for her vaunted patriotism, her wish to maintain Britain’s independence, her desire to drive back the state, her promise to end mass immigration? Precious little is the answer.
Her enthusiastic promotion of the Single European Act, which she ruthlessly drove through Parliament, allowed the Eurofederalists to greatly advance their cause under the guise of acting to produce a single market; her “triumph” in reducing our subsidy to Europe left us paying several billion a year to our European competitors whilst France paid next to nothing; our fishermen were sold down the river; farmers placed in the absurd position of not being allowed to produce even enough milk for British requirements; actual (as opposed to official) immigration increased; that monument to liberal bigotry, the Race Relations Act was untouched, the educational vandals were not only allowed to sabotage every serious attempt to overturn the progressive disaster, but were granted a great triumph in the ending of ‘O’ levels, a liberal bigot success amplified by the contemptible bleating of successive education secretaries that “rising examination success means rising standards”; foreign aid continued to be paid as an unforced Dangeld extracted from an unwilling electorate; major and strategically important industries either ceased to be serious competitors or ended in foreign hands; the armed forces were cut suicidally; the cost of the Welfare State and local government rose massively whilst the service provided both declined and Ulster was sold down the river with the Anglo Irish Agreement. Most generally damaging, she promoted internationalism through her fanatic pursuit of free trade.
At all points Britain was weakened as a nation. Such were the fruits of more than a decade of Thatcherism. Even those things which are most emblematic of her – privatisation, the sale of council houses and the subjection of the unions – have had effects which are contrary to those intended. Privatisation merely accelerated the loss of control which free trade engendered. We may as customers celebrate the liberation of British Telecom and BA, but is it such a wonderful thing to have no major car producer or shipbuilder? The trouble with the privatisation of major industries, which may be greatly reduced, go out of business or be taken over by foreign buyers, is that it ignores strategic and social welfare questions. Ditto free trade generally. Both assume that the world, or at least the parts which contain our major trading partners , will remain peaceful, stable and well disposed towards Britain for ever, an absurd assumption.
Margaret Thatcher also engaged in behaviour which led to a corruption of public life which undermined and continues to undermine her intended ends. Politicians should always think of what precedent they are setting when they act for bad precedents will be invariably seized upon by later governments. She consistently failed to address this concern. Take her attitude to privatisation and the unions. In the former case she displayed a contempt for ownership: in the latter she engaged in authoritarian actions which were simply inappropriate to a democracy. Such legally and politically cavalier behaviour has undoubtedly influenced Blair and New Labour, vide the contempt with which parliament is now treated, constitutional change wrought and incessant restrictions on liberty enacted.
There is a profound ethical question connected to privatisation which was never properly answered by Tories: what right does the state have to dispose by sale of assets which are held in trust on behalf of the general public and whose existence has been in large part guaranteed by taxpayer’s money? This is a question which should be as readily asked by a conservative as by a socialist for it touches upon a central point of democratic political morality, the custodianship of public property. The same ends – the diminution of the state and the freeing of the public from seemingly perpetual losses – could have been achieved by an equitable distribution of shares free of charge to the general public. This would have had, from a Thatcherite standpoint, the additional benefit of greatly increasing share ownership. By selling that which the government did not meaningfully own, she engaged in behaviour which if it had been engaged in by any private individual or company would have been described as fraud or theft.
The breaking of union power was overdone. As someone who is old enough to remember the Wilson, Heath and Callaghan years, I have no illusion of exactly how awful the unions were when they had real power. But her means of breaking their abusive ways, particularly during the miners’ strike, were simply inappropriate in a supposed democracy. Passing laws restricting picketing and making unions liable for material losses suffered when they broke the rules were one thing: the using of the police in an unambiguously authoritarian manner in circumstances of dubious legality such as the blanket prevention of free movement of miners, quite another.
The Falklands War displays another side of her weakness in matching actions to rhetoric. Admirable as the military action was, the terrible truth is that the war need never have been fought if the government had taken their intelligence reports seriously and retained a naval presence in the area. The lesson went unlearnt, for within a few years of the recovery of the Falklands, her government massively reduced defence expenditure.
But what of her clients, the Liberal Ascendency? Would they not be dismayed by much of what she did? Well, by the time Margaret Thatcher came to power liberals had really lost whatever interest they had ever had in state ownership or the genuine improvement of the worker’s lot. What they really cared about was promoting their internationalist vision and doctrine of spurious natural rights. They had new clients; the vast numbers of coloured immigrants and their children, women, homosexuals, the disabled. In short, all those who were dysfunctional, or could be made to feel dysfunctional, in terms of British society. They had new areas of power and distinction, social work, education, the civil service ,the mass media to which they added, after securing the ideological high ground, the ancient delights of politics.
Although the liberal left distrusted and hated Margaret Thatcher (and did not understand at the time how effective her commitment to free trade was in promoting internationalism), they nonetheless had the belief throughout her time in office that Britain’s involvement in the EU and the Liberal Ascendency’s control of education, the media, the civil service and bodies such as the Commission for Racial Equality would thwart those of her plans which were most dangerous and obnoxious to the liberal.
Margaret Thatcher greatly added to this wall of opposition by her choice of ministers. Think of her major cabinet appointments. She ensured that the Foreign Office remained in the hands of men (Howe and Hurd) who were both ardent Europhiles and willing tools of the FO Quisling culture, the Chancellorship was entrusted to first Howe and then Lawson who was also firmly committed to Europe. The Home Office sat in the laps of the social liberals Whitelaw, Hurd and Baker, Education was given to Baker and Clarke. Those appointments alone ensured that little would be done to attack the things which liberals held sacred, for they were men who broadly shared the liberal values and who were opposed to Thatcherite policies other than those on the economy, which of course was the one Thatcherite policy guaranteed to assist liberal internationalism. By the end, she was so weak that she was unable to prevent the effective sacking of a favourite cabinet minister, Nicholas Ridley, by the German Chancellor.
The constant cry of Margaret Thatcher after she left office is that she did not understand the consequences of her acts. Of course she does not put it in that way, but that is what it amounts to. She blames Brussels and the Foreign Office for the unwelcome consequences of the Single European Act. She readily admits that this minister or that in her government proved unreliable or treacherous, but does not conclude that her judgement in choosing them was at fault. She blames the Foreign Office for the Falklands War. But nowhere does she acknowledge her fault.
In her heart of hearts, has the second longest serving and most ideological prime minister in modern British history ever comprehended, however imperfectly, that she was a prime mover in the Liberal Internationalist cause? I doubt it, because self deception is at the heart of what makes a useful idiot.

The EU IN/OUT referendum: strategy and tactics for those who want to leave the EU

Robert Henderson

The general strategy

A) How to leave

Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty states

1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.

2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement shall be negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.

3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.

4. For the purposes of paragraphs 2 and 3, the member of the European Council or of the Council representing the withdrawing Member State shall not participate in the discussions of the European Council or Council or in decisions concerning it.

A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

5. If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49. (http://www.lisbon-treaty.org/wcm/the-lisbon-treaty/treaty-on-european-union-and-comments/title-6-final-provisions/137-article-50.html).

The OUT camp must make it clear that  it would be both damaging and unnecessary for the UK to abide by this Treaty requirement. It  would allow the EU to inflict considerable damage on the UK both during the period prior to formally  leaving and afterwards if  the price of leaving with the EU’s agreement was  for  UK to sign up to various obligations, for example, to continue paying a large annual sum to the EU for ten years . It would also give  the Europhile UK political elite  ample opportunity to keep the UK attached to the EU in the manner that Norway and Switzerland are attached. More of them later.

There is also the danger that the stay-in camp could use Article 50 to argue that whether the British people want to be in or out, the cost of leaving would be too heavy because of this treaty requirement.

The Gordian knot of Article 50 can be cut  simply by passing an Act of Parliament repealing all the treaties that refer to the EU from the Treaty of Rome onwards. No major UK party could  object to this because all three have, at one time or another,  declared that Parliament remains supreme and can repudiate anything the EU does if it so chooses.

If the stay-in camp argue that would be illegal because of the  treaty obligation, the OUT camp should simply emphasise  (1) that international law is no law because there is never any means of enforcing it within its jurisdiction is a state rejects it and (2) that treaties which do not allow for contracting parties to simply withdraw are profoundly undemocratic because they bind future governments.

The OUT camp should press the major political parties to commit themselves to ignoring Article 50. If a party refuses that can be used against them because it will make them look suspicious. Before the vote

B) The parties’ plans of action if there is a vote to leave

It is important that all the parties likely to have seats in the Commons after the next election are publicly and relentlessly pressed to give at least a broad outline of what action they would adopt in the event of a vote to leave.  Left with a free hand there is a serious danger that whatever British  government is  in charge after a vote to leave would attempt to bind the UK back into the EU by stealth by signing the UK up to agreements such as those the EU has with Norway and Switzerland which mean that they have to (1) pay a fee to the EU annually, (2) adopt the social legislation which comes from the EU and (3) most importantly agree to the four “freedoms” of the EU – the free movement of goods, services, capital and  labour throughout not merely the EU  but the wider European Economic Area (EEA).

It is probable that the Westminster parties will all resist this, but that would present them with two problems. First, a refusal to do so would make them seem untrustworthy; second, if one party laid out their position but the others did not, that would potentially give the party which did say what it would do a considerable advantage over the others which did not.  If no party puts its plans before the public before the referendum, there should be demands  from those who want the UK to leave the EU that  any new treaties with the EU must be put to a referendum and, if they are rejected, the UK will simply trade with the EU under the WTO rules.

C) Repudiate re-negotiation before the referendum

Supporting the negotiation of a new relationship between the UK and the EU before a referendum is mistaken because it would seem to many to be giving tacit approval for renegotiation and legitimise the possibility of the UK remaining within the EU.  It is also rash  because  the likelihood  of the EU giving nothing is probably very small.  Indeed, they might well  give something which is substantial,  because the UK leaving the EU would be a very great blow to the organisation. The UK is the country with the second largest population within the EU with , depending on how it is measured,  the second or third largest   economy  and the country which pays the second largest contribution to the EU budget.   For the EU to lose the UK would not only be a blow in itself, it would also create a very strong precedent for every other EU state, especially the largest ones.  If  the UK left and prospered the temptation would be for other EU states to leave.

But even if negotiation  produced  nothing of substance as Harold Wilson’s “renegotiation” did in 1975, it would be a mistake to imagine that it would not influence the referendum result. The electorate is divided between the resolute come outs, the resolute stay-ins and the wavering middle.  A claim by the stay-in campaigners that something had been conceded by the EU, however  insignificant,  would provide the waverers with an excuse to vote to stay in because they could convince themselves they were voting for change.

It would be also be a mistake to see the EU offering  nothing  at all as a gift for the OUT camp. This is  because the waverers might simply see that as evidence that the EU was too powerful to oppose and shift their votes to staying in.

Those who want the UK to leave should unambiguously put the case for no renegotiation.  Dismiss anything Cameron (or any other PM) brings back from the EU by way of altered terms as being irrelevant because the EU has a long record of  agreeing things with  the UK and then finding ways of sabotaging what was agreed. In addition, a future British government  may agree to alter any terms offered at the time of the referendum.  The classic example of this changing of agreed terms happening in the past is Tony Blair’s  giving up of a substantial amount of the Thatcher rebate in return for a promised reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a promise which was never met.  That episode produced my all-time favourite amongst Blair’s penchant for lying. Two days before he went to the EU meeting at which he  gave away a  substantial part of the rebate he declared during Prime Minister’s Questions  that  the rebate  was “non-negotiable – period”

It is difficult to envisage any British prime minister not trying to  negotiate with the EU before a referendum, but it might just  happen if whoever is in power when the referendum is announced were to be told privately by the  major EU players that nothing will be given and the prime minister of the day concludes it would be best to pretend that a decision had been made not to negotiate rather than risk the humiliation of getting nothing, perhaps not even a pretence of negotiation before nothing is given.  Why would the EU do this? They might calculate that it would be a gamble worth taking to send a British PM away  with nothing  whilst hoping the referendum vote would be to stay in because then the power of the UK to resist further integration would be shot.

If the EU offer nothing, the OUT camp should welcome the fact and stress to the public that if the referendum is to stay-in the EU could force any federalist measure through because not only would any British government be much weakened in its opposition to more federalism, the UK political class as a whole would more than willing to go along with it because of their ideological commitment to the EU.

D) After the vote

Ideally the government which deals with the EU after a vote to leave will have committed themselves to a plan of action before the referendum vote.  However, as described above,  it is quite possible that this will not happen because  the UK’s overwhelmingly Europhile political class will try to re-entangle the UK with the EU. To prevent them doing so there should be a concerted campaign after the vote to ensure that the  British public understands what is being done on their behalf with a demand for a further referendum to agree any  new treaty.

The terms of the debate

It is essential that the Europhiles are not allowed to make the debate revolve around economics.   If they do it will effectively stifle meaningful debate. As anyone who has ever tried to present economic ideas to an audience of the general public will know it is a soul-destroying experience.  Take the question of how much of UK trade is with the EU. The debate will begin with the stay-in camp saying something like 45% of UK trade is with the EU. Those wanting to leave the EU will respond by saying it is probably less than 40% because of the Rotterdam/Antwerp effect . They will then be forced to explain what the Rotterdam/Amsterdam, effect is. That is the point where the general public’s concentration is lost and the debate ends up proving nothing to most of the audience.

But  although nothing is proved to the general audience by detailed economic argument ,  the audience will remember  certain phrases which have considerable  traction.  In amongst the serious debating on the issue of trade there will be phrases such as three million jobs in Britain rely on the EU and dire threats about how the EU will simply not buy British goods and services any more.  This is nonsense but fear is not a rational thing and many of those who vote will enter the voting chamber with fear of losing their jobs  in their heads regardless of what the OUT camp says if the debate is predominantly about economics.  Shift the debate away from economics and the fear inducing phrases will be heard less often.  If the BIG LIE is not repeated often enough its potency fades.

National Sovereignty

How should those wanting to leave the EU shift the focus of debate? They should put the matter which is really at the core of the UK’s  relationship with the EU  – national sovereignty – at the front of the  OUT camp’s referendum campaign.   Campaign under a slogan such as Are we to be masters in our own house?

Making national sovereignty the primary campaigning issue has the great advantage of  it being something that anyone can understand because it is both a simple concept and speaks directly to the natural tribal instincts of  human beings.   Being a simple concept readily  and naturally understood,   it is a far more potent debating tool than arguments attempting to refute the economic  arguments  beloved of the stay-in camp.  The fact that the natural tribal instincts have been suppressed for so long in the UK will increase its potency because most people will feel a sense of release when it begins to be catered for in public debate.

The appeal to national sovereignty has a further advantage. Those who support the EU are unused to debating on that ground.  That is because uncritical support for the EU has long been the position of both the British mainstream political class as a class and of the mass media.  That has meant that the contrary voice – that which wishes Britain to be independent – has been largely unheard in public debate for thirty years or more. Where it has been heard the response of the pro-EU majority has not been rational argument but abuse ranging from patronising dismissal of a wish for sovereignty as an outmoded nationalism to accusations that national sovereignty amounts to xenophobia or even racism.   These tactics – of excluding those who want to leave the EU from public debate and abuse substituted for argument – will no longer be available to the  pro EU lobby.

Immigration

The most threatening and energising subject relating to the EU for the general public is immigration. The public are right to identify this as the most important aspect of our membership of the EU because immigration touches every important part of British life: jobs, housing, education, welfare, healthcare, transport, free expression  and crime besides radically changing the  nature of parts of  the UK which now have large populations of immigrants and their descendants.

The public rhetoric of mainstream politicians and the media is changing fast as they begin to realise both what an electoral liability a de facto open door immigration policy is  as the effects of mass immigration become ever more glaring.  The argument is shifting from the economic to the cultural.  For example, here is the Daily Telegraph in a leader of  25 March:

“The fact is that, for many in Britain (especially those outside the middle classes), it is not just a matter of jobs being taken or public services being stretched, but of changes in the very character of communities. Those changes may not necessarily be for the worse: as the Prime Minister says, Britain’s culture has long been enriched by the contributions of new arrivals. But as long as ministers treat immigration as a matter of profit and loss, rather than the cause of often wrenching social change, they will never be able fully to address the grievances it causes.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/9952717/Immigration-and-the-limits-of-the-possible.html)

This new frankness in public debate means that the OUT camp can use the immigration argument freely provided they keep the language within the confines of formal politeness. The subject will naturally dovetail with the emphasis on national sovereignty because the most important aspect of sovereignty is the ability to control the borders of the territory of a state.  Judged by their increasing willingness to talk publicly about immigration, it is probable that the mainstream UK parties will be content to go along with  ever more frank discussion about  immigration.

The economic argument must be kept simple

It will not be possible to avoid  economic arguments entirely. The OUT camp should concentrate on repeating these two facts:

–          The disadvantageous balance of payments deficit the UK has with the EU

–          The amount the UK pays to the EU

Those are the most solid  economic figures relating to the EU.   There is some fuzziness around the edges of the balance of payments deficit because of the question of where all the imports end up (whether in the EU or outside the EU through re-exporting) ,  while the  amount the EU  receives  is solid but it has to be broken down into the money which returns to the UK and the amount retained by Brussels.  Nonetheless these are the most certain  figures and the least susceptible to obfuscation by the stay-in side.

The best way of presenting the money paid to the EU is simply to say that outside the EU we can decide  how all of it is spent in this country and to illustrate what the money saved by not paying it to the EU would pay for.

It will also be necessary to address the question of protectionist measures the EU might take against the UK if the  vote was to leave.  It is improbable that the EU would place heavy protectionist barriers on UK exports because:

1.   The massive balance of payment deficit between the UK and the rest of the EU which is massively in the EU’s favour.

2.  Although the rest of the EU dwarfs the UK economy, much UK trade with the EU is heavily concentrated in certain regions of the EU.  The effect of protectionist barriers would  bear very heavily on these places.

3. There are strategically and economically important joint projects of which the UK is a major part,  for example, Airbus, the Joint-Strike Fighter.

4. the Republic of Ireland would be a massive bargaining chip for  the UK to play.  If the UK left and the EU rump attempted to impose sanctions against Britain this would cripple the RoI because so much of their trade is with the UK  The EU would be forced to massively subsidise the RoI  if protectionist barriers against the UK were imposed.  The EU could not exempt the RoI from the sanctions because that  would leave the EU open to British exports being funnelled through the RoI.

5. The EU would be bound by the World Trade Organisation’s restrictions on protectionist measures.

The economic  issues which are not worth pursuing in detail because they are too diffuse  and uncertain , are those relating to how much the EU costs Britain in terms of  EU-inspired legislation. It may well be that these load billions a year of extra costs  onto the UK  but they are not certain  or easily evaluated costs, not least because we cannot in the nature of things know what burdens an independent UK would impose off its own bat.   Getting into detailed  discussions about such things will simply play into the hands of  the stay-in camp because it will eat up the time and space available to those promoting the OUT cause.

Other Issues

Apart from the economic issues the stay-in camp will use these reasons for staying in:

–          That the EU  has prevented war in Western Europe since 1945.  This can be simply refuted by pointing out that the EU was not formed until  twelve years after WW2; that until 1973 the EU consisted of only six countries, three of them small,  and  of only nine countries until the 1980s. Consequently it would be reasonable to look for other reasons for  the lack of war. The two causes of   the peace in Western Europe have been the NATO alliance and the invention of nuclear weapons which make the price of war extraordinarily high.

–          That nation states such as the UK are too small to carry any real diplomatic weight in modern world.   That begs the question of whether it is an advantageous thing to carry such weight – it can get a country into disastrous foreign entanglements such as Iraq and Afghanistan – but even assuming it is advantageous , many much smaller countries than the UK survive very nicely, making their own bilateral agreements with other states large and small.   It is also worth remembering that the UK has such levers as a permanent seat on the UN Security  Council (which allows the UK to veto any proposed  move by the UN) and considerable influence in institutions such as the IMF and World Bank.

Robert Henderson

1 April 2013

Crime, punishment and public confidence in justice

Robert Henderson

The ex-minister Chris Huhne and his erstwhile wife  Vikky Pryce were sentenced to 8 months imprisonment for perverting the course of justice (http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/chris-huhne-and-vicky-pryce-jail-sentences-not-unduly-lenient-8546334.html).  No, hang on, they have really been sentenced to probably two, possibly  three months inside  with perhaps a month or two  with a tag and a curfew. This fudging of reality   is undermining the English justice system.

The fact that  a  headline prison sentence is wildly different from the time actually served  is probably the main  reason why public confidence in the justice system is so weak.  It is not that the public necessarily want  longer sentences. Rather, it is the effect of judges saying, for example, five years when what they probably mean in practice is  two  years  in prison that makes the public think that the criminal is getting away with it.  Much better to say the sentence is two years because then there is no sense in the public mind of any discount on what should have been given.  Nor would the public be confused as to what a sentence actually was, something which is the case now with members of the public very often being unsure of how much time is remitted from the headline sentence.

The objection normally given to the headline sentence being the actual sentence to be served is that there would be no incentive for  prisoners to behave whilst in prison. This objection does not hold water. If prisoners commit a criminal offence whilst in prison they can be tried for that which is a pretty big incentive for most prisoners as they will not be serving long sentences.  Even for long term prisoners  there is a good deal of leverage  for the staff because they hold the threat of the withdrawal of privileges as penalties. It would also be possible to create a new criminal offence of persist refusal to obey orders for prisoners who are the most wilfully disruptive.  There would be nothing novel in the idea of persistent  behaviour being required for a criminal offence.  There is no  absolute requirement on a police officer to take any action if a minor offence is committed, for example, a police officer  will often tell someone to stop disturbing the peace and if they do that is the end of the matter.  Some laws, such as those dealing with harassment require repeat behaviour for an offence to be committed.  There really is no reason to believe  prison staff would be left without enough leverage to ensure good  prisoner  behaviour.

Using the Huhne/Price case as an example,  the judge to be able to say  when giving sentence “You will serve 4 months in prison conditional on your good behaviour whilst there. Any misbehaviour may  result in loss of privileges or in extreme cases a criminal charge resulting in  further time served.”

It is possible that there might be some increase in the length of time prisoners’ served under such a regime, but that is unlikely to be a  massive problem for short term prisoners (the vast majority) because you can put them in  an open prison and most will stay there because it is just not worth  escaping. Open prisons are cheap to create and run: closed prisons are the reverse.

I cannot really see any alternative to prison in terms of convincing the public that crime really does not pay. Polls consistently show the public have contempt for non-custodial sentences and it  is hard fact that fines frequently remain unpaid [1] and community work sentences undone[2] or are ineffective in reducing further offending[3]  .  As things stand the non-prison penalties given out by the English justice system is too complicated and bureaucratic for most people to understand or,  even if they do understand, to have  much credence to as a punishment. Anything other than prison is generally viewed as a soft option.

The way to tackle the general problem of a large prison population  is to reduce crime. This could be done in half a dozen ways.   Removing the mentally ill from prison and treating them as ill rather than criminal would be a good start. Legalising all drugs would reduce the prison population radically (in 2002 the Audit Commission estimated that  half of all crime in England Wales was drug-related  including drug related offences or offences committed to gain money for drugs[4]); ending immigration would cut off another large slice and  deporting immigrants who have committed crime would remove many offenders. Ensuring all children of normal mental function had mastered the three Rs by the time they had left school so they were employable and creating a high wage economy by tightening the labour market would reduce the need and temptation for crime.

 

PC World: Playing a little game with the politically correct

Robert Henderson

I have recently had an interesting experience in  a university chat room.  As might be expected in these pc times, the contributors are overwhelmingly “right on”, positively dripping with mantras about the joy of diversity and the blissful wonders of internationalism and multiculturalism, especially as this affects  the university..

When the  conversation turned to food served at the university over the past 50 years, a number of non-pc comments unexpectedly appeared.  I decided to play a game with the politically correct to demonstrate how oppressive the political correctness has become. Here are a couple of the exchanges I had :

  “the reverse was equally felt when you went in a kitchen to find a chinese student had boiled their noodles in the kettle, and/or the kitchen reeked of chinese food”

  RH Dearie me, that’s the sort of critical comment about ethnic minorities which can get a criminal record these days….RH ‘

and this

 ” Internationalisation is taken very seriously here – not just for the fees – but to create a genuine global community that “caters” (as far is possible) for all….  ”

How wondrously pc…. But from the same person…

“It is a common sight for thirty (we’ll, it looks like thirty!) Chinese to squeeze into one kitchen to boil rice together…”

RH Hmmmmmm…RH’

Such offerings had two effects:  they reeled in both those who purport to be politically correct but have made distinctly non-pc comments (you could almost smell their fear) and those who are willing to point at the non-pc culprits and shout the modern equivalent of “heretic!”  The finger-pointing and denials are still rattling happily along.  Most astonishing, many of the chatroom participants are vehemently denying  my charge that they are politically correct, including the person who wrote ” Internationalisation is taken very seriously here – not just for the fees – but to create a genuine global community that “caters” (as far is possible) for all….  ”  . It is a very, very  strange world we are living in.

The comments I reproduced above might be thought harmless enough  and in a sane world they would be.  But in the mad world we live in they could easily come to the notice of employers and  state authorities and be deemed racist.

Take first  this “the reverse was equally felt when you went in a kitchen to find a chinese student had boiled their noodles in the kettle, and/or the kitchen reeked of chinese food“.  Imagine a white working-class family living in, for example,  east London in a tower block where they were the only white family with the rest of the block drawn from those whose ancestry lies in the Indian sub-continent . (This is a very  plausible scenario today).  Imagine further  that they complained about the smell of curry being regularly cooked.  Would anyone want to put money on that complaint not being judged deeply racist by politicians, police, the CPS and the media with a strong likelihood of the white family being evicted and criminal charges being brought against one or both of the parents?

Then there is “It is a common sight for thirty (we’ll, it looks like thirty!) Chinese to squeeze into one kitchen to boil rice together…” This  comment could easily be interpreted by the university authorities and the state agencies to be racist because  whatever its author’s   intentions it could be seen as a way of saying “My, aren’t they different from us” or even  “We are being swamped by them”.  It is not utterly fanciful to imagine the writer  losing his job, being labelled a racist which would prevent future employment in his chosen field and being the subject of a police investigation if someone complained about his words   to the university authorities and the police.

If readers  think  that those scenarios are unrealistic I suggest they  reflect on the recent case of Conservative MP Tim Loughton’s treatment by the police  for calling a man ‘unkempt’.

Tim Loughton, the ex-Children’s Minister, was interviewed under caution by detectives for 90 minutes last August after he sent a strongly-worded email to Kieran Francis rejecting his complaints about a local council.

Police also interviewed the MP’s staff and trawled through his correspondence before the Crown Prosecution Service finally decided last month that the case should be dropped without any charges being brought, the Mail on Sunday reported.

Mr Loughton spoke today of his “huge relief” that his ordeal was over but said he would be demanding an explanation from the Chief Constable of Sussex Police.

The Tory MP, who said he had no idea of Mr Francis’s traveller background, added: “This has knocked my confidence in the police and made me wonder whether there are certain elements for whom political correctness has become too much of a driving force.

“Because of the merest hint of something to do with racism and the sensitivities about travellers, the police go into overdrive.”

Police launched the investigation after Mr Francis complained about an email in which Mr Loughton said a council official’s description of him as “unkempt” was “eminently accurate”.

Mr Francis said he was disappointed the investigation had been dropped, telling the Mail on Sunday: “What he called me was racist and disrespectful. My mother was from a Romany family and my Member of Parliament basically called me dirty.”

Sussex Police said in a statement: “An allegation of malicious communication was reported to Sussex Police, and was fully investigated in the same way it would be for any member of the public.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/9905488/Police-investigate-Conservative-MP-Tim-Loughton-for-calling-man-unkempt.html ).

The man called unkempt was a gipsy. This was deemed racist despite the fact that Loughton did not know the person was from gypsy stock and had merely agreed with a description of the man given by someone else.  But even if he had known the man was a gypsy so what? It would not change the fact that the man was unkempt if he was unkempt.  Yet the police were willing to spend six months on the investigation. If that can happen to an MP it could happen to anyone.

The primary problem for those living in a totalitarian state is that no matter how hard they try to stay on message, no matter how hard they try to show their loyalty to the ruling power they can never be safe.  This is a constant theme of those caught up in the years of Stalin’s purges.  In 1984 Orwell described the problem neatly with the minor characters Parsons and Syme. Parsons is a dull, stupidly  slavish follower of the party with two ghastly children who  belong to the Spies and Youth League. Parsons  ends up  arrested  because his daughter claims  he shouted in his sleep  “Down with Big Brother”.  When he arrested he is still babbling pathetically about how his daughter’s  informing against him shows how he  “brought her up proper”.

Syme is a different kettle of fish. He is a genuine intellectual who is involved with the development of Newspeak.  He is deeply committed to the Party at both the emotional and intellectual level. But intellectuals are a  problem for any totalitarian state  because they are in love with ideas and who knows where their thoughts will take them.   On day Syme does not turn up for work at the Ministry of Truth.  He is never seen again. No one at the Ministry mention his disappearance or ever refer to him again.

Orwell’s  message is simple: no one can be safe. It does not matter whether you are stupid or intelligent,  eager to tow the party line or rebellious, the outcome is likely to be just the same.

I conducted the exercise not to gratuitously to frighten  those in the chatroom, but simply to illustrate the state we now live in. It is a totalitarian state, a soft form of totalitarianism but totalitarianism nonetheless – at present.  We have not reached the stage where people are tortured  and murdered or vanish anonymously  into labour camps,  but those who breach its rules regugaly suffer loss of  employment,  denial of employment, vilification by the media and politicians and, increasingly,  investigation by the police and prosecution.  Recently, prison has begun to be  used quite freely.  Those “soft” totalitarian measures will become more and more severe as time passes  because that is the way with such things.

This situation has arisen for one reason and one reason only: people have not protested.  That is always why authoritarian regimes survive.  Free expression is the disinfectant of elite misbehaviour.  It was very illuminating (and depressing) that not one person in the chatroom posted to say how disturbed they were by  Tim Loughton’s treatment.

How would most people fare if  they were arrested for  alleged racism? The odds are that if you were arrested for alleged racism (or any other pc “crime”)  you would simply collapse, plead guilty and make a Maoist confession of guilt.  That is so  because almost every case which comes to public has those outcomes.

When faced with the forces of the state (at least in a place like the UK where the idea of the rule of law still has a strong cultural and institutional hold)  it always pays to go on the attack , because the worst thing that can happen is that you cause those with power to  think you are frightened. If that happens they will simply ride all over you. Plead not guilty and make  it clear that your defence will be that of free expression and against the censorship practised by the politically correct elite.  In all probability that will get the charges dropped because the powers that be really do not want their authoritarian behaviour challenged in open court. Even if you are convicted you will have lost nothing important because in the past year or  so those who have pleaded guilty and offered the Maoist apology have still  been jailed.  Moreover, if you plead guilty you will be certain of carrying  the millstone of a conviction for racial incitement or something similar for the rest of your life. That will affect your  employability and travel to many parts of the world.  If you plead not guilty you always have a sporting chance of avoiding that fate.

Youth unemployment: how to cure it

The essay below is my  entry to the HJI-Reed Youth Unemployment Prize – see http://www.henryjacksoninitiative.org/

Robert Henderson

When things change the surest way to identify a cause is to identify all the conditions which obtained before the change and then look for new conditions which have emerged since the beginning of the change.   By this method the rise in youth unemployment on the UK  is  simply explained: it is the result of the great increase in immigration to the UK. [1]

The rise in youth employment started in 2004  long before the current economic woes  began in 2007.  This coincided with the  removal of restrictions on the movement of workers from the new EU states  (Czech Republic Estonia Hungary Latvia Lithuania Poland Slovakia and Slovenian  Malta and Cyprus).   Hence, the rise cannot be blamed on the poor state of the economy.

None of the other explanations offered for the rise in youth unemployment are plausible.  The British education system has not changed since 2004; the attitude of young people as a group towards work cannot suddenly have altered;  contrary to popular myth,  most jobs are low-skilled or unskilled so a skill shortage does not come into it for the vast majority of jobs taken by immigrants; where skills are  needed it is wildly improbable that the skills available dropped off a cliff at just the time immigration rose massively.

If employers could no longer import cheap labour they would be forced to employ Britons (including young Britons) , offshore their business or  cease to trade.  As most British economic activity has of necessity  to take place in Britain, either  because the goods can only be made in Britain (for example, Scotch Whiskey) or the service has to be provided in Britain because it is of a nature  which makes this necessary (for example, virtually all public services and retail, transport and energy businesses) , offshoring is not an option  for the vast majority of British employers.

As for ceasing to trade,  it is unlikely that there would be a large amount of that occurring because the wages paid to adult immigrant workers would be at least sufficient to cover the wages of young  British workers.  As for the idea that young Britons cannot do most of the jobs that immigrants are doing this can be easily seen to be a nonsense. In areas of Britain where there are not large numbers of immigrants the jobs which are supposedly beneath Britons are done by Britons. Moreover, we know that before 2004 British youngsters were being employed in the jobs now being done by immigrants.

For skilled jobs,  there are huge numbers of unemployed British graduates who either cannot get  jobs at all or who are forced to do jobs for want of anything better which do not require a degree.  [2]

The claims by  British employers  that they are  employing foreign workers because they cannot find suitable people is hard to credit.  Even if there was a problem with the attitude of young Britons, for which I see no evidence  as a general problem, it would not explain why older workers with a good work history are being overlooked.   In particular,  it is implausible that foreign workers are better equipped for jobs dealing with the public because  many  foreigners  employed in such jobs have inadequate English and a lack of knowledge about British culture.

It is important to understand that many jobs in Britain are effectively placed  out of reach to Britons of any age.  Foreign gangmasters  are widely used  and frequently only recruit people of their own nationality. British Employers find foreign workers are cheaper to employ,  easier to control and  less difficult to lay off. A  substantial proportion of the jobs, especially the low and unskilled,  are going to illegal immigrants who are even more  vulnerable to demands from employers .   Foreign companies  in Britain bring  in their own people[3] .

When foreign workers gain a foothold in an area of  business they recommend  people they know for jobs .   Being foreign,  the people they recommend will normally be other foreigners, especially those of their own nationality.  It does not take long for a place of work to become largely or wholly foreign staffed with this type of recruitment .  There are also agencies which only  supply foreign workers.   Public service organisations and large companies  are often use such agencies[4].

Sometimes the employer has employment practices which effectively  exclude Britons, for example, Pret a Manger, use as part of their selection process a vote  by the staff of a shop where a potential trainee has had a trial as to whether the trialist  should be taken on.  It does not take too much imagination to suspect that foreign workers will vote  for other foreign workers, especially from their own country,  if there is a choice between them and a Briton[5].

The only way the young in Britain will be able to get jobs is by regaining control over  Britain’s borders so that mass immigration can be stopped.   To do that Britain would have to leave the EU or come to an arrangement with the EU which prevented free movement of labour from the European Economic Area  (EEA) to Britain.   It would also need a government  willing to cancel all other forms of mass immigration from outside the EEA such as family reunification and reinstate the primary purpose rule governing those coming to Britain to marry.

The brutal truth is that if  mass immigration is not ended the situation will continue as it is and quite probably get worse as the Euro crisis worsens.  It is self-evident that if millions of experienced workers willing to work for low wages are imported into a country the size of Britain they will displace the native workers generally and the young and inexperienced native person in particular.