Majorityrights Central > Category: European Union

The polls are open.  Today, the electorates of all the member states of the EU will elect their 751 members of the talking-shop which is the European Parliament.  The performance of Front National, Golden Dawn, Jobbik, Vlaams Belang, and Gert Wilders’ Freedom Party, among others, will create much interest for nationalists.  In Britain, too, the politics of dissent is the chief talking point of an increasingly desperate and totally unprincipled press.  There is a sense that the electorate has handled the smears maturely and, by and large, has not been swayed.  The pollsters report a settled feeling that, in England, at least, something big is about to happen.

Something so big, in fact, that I thought I might jot down some observations together with a very few markers for how we might assess it:

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Not sure how happy this is going to make all of MR readership, but as I saw this just a few minutes ago and it showed a public display of awareness of the JQ in relation to The US and The EU, I thought I’d put it out there, even if the timing is in someways bad - not a diplomatic time to ruffle feathers with Polish patriotism using rhetoric correlating The EU - Germany - Nazism. Nevertheless, it is anti-EU, anti-US and its Israeli master, thus I believe we will have some, pardon the expression, solidarity.

http://epoznan.pl/forum-topic-51897?page=1

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In the immediate aftermath of last week’s initial debate between the Deputy Prime Minister and LibDem leader Nick Clegg and UKIP’s Nigel Farage, an easy victory for the former was swiftly declared by the entire media Establishment – only for a snap poll by YouGov, conducted for The Sun, to prove them painfully wrong.  57% of the thousand-strong panel thought Farage won.  Only 36% thought Clegg had emerged victorious.

There followed a lot of very rough changing of journalistic gears, along with several admissions of Westminster village behaviour.  The underlying inference, though, remained that Farage’s views were “populist”, ie, not the sort of thing that interests the cogniscenti (they being far above the infirmity and fickle affections of the public Mind.  Naturally.)

Anthony Wells at YouGov – a left-leaning polling company if ever there was one - made the point that just finding a thousand people who would listen to the LBC Radio broadcast was a challenge in itself; and took months to achieve.  He seemed not to have great confidence in the sample at all.

Everything, then, hung on the second of the debates last night - an hour-long joust between Clegg and Farage on the benefit or otherwise of EU membership, to be broadcast live on BBC2:

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My friend Tadeusz Korzeniewski has suggested that we engage in an exchange of letters, by way of exploration of one another’s views.  I have no idea what will come out of that, if anything.  But it is too interesting a prospect to be neglected.  So here is my opener, on the subject suggested by Tadeusz.  Replies will be added to the page, not to the comment thread - that is for readers with their own thoughts on the matter at hand.

Dear Tadeusz,

Your suggestion is that we choose as our subject the appearance of a Polish diaspora in Britain.  A brave choice.  I certainly don’t have a great number of positive things to say about it.  I don’t think you will find many patriotic Englishmen who do.  But there are those among the bien pensant classes and, of course, the shrinking band of Europhiles and outright devotees of libertarianism and economism, as well as the usual haul of thoughtless little sleepers who parrot any media mantra, who will tell you that east European immigration (because, obviously, all east Europeans are Poles) is “not a problem” and even “a benefit”.

Well yes, east Europeans are, at least, white and Christian (nominally, anyway).  They seem refreshingly, unusually like us.  And some of the girls can be very appealing.  They drink and swear and dance, and then they can be laid.  To the English ethnic sensibility, this is an understandable species in a way.  They can “assimilate”, in a way. 

Obviously, as a matter of ethno-nationalist principle, it’s very different.  All our peoples must live sovereign and free, and that means alone, on their own ancestral soil.  Europe’s peoples must grant one another this most essential collective freedom, because sovereign possession of territory is, and has always been, the guarantor of life itself.  We have no business in each other’s lands.  Is not Polish history a long and painful testament to that?

The present-day story itself is lacking in Polish tragedy, but it has its victims.  The million-fold young Poles and eastern Europeans generally who, since 1st May 2004, have come to Britain, and travelled in even greater numbers to Germany, have deserted their own needy economies and treated ours like some low-rent, mud-free Klondyke.  They have created enormous resentment in East Anglian towns such as Peterborough and Boston.  They frequently live in gang-houses provided for them by migrant-worker agencies.  Rumours abound that they sleep several to a room, and know nothing of the always rising costs of owning an English house and raising an English family.  English workers simply cannot compete on the subsistence earnings the incomers are so willing to accept.

It is said that local employers recruit directly in Poland, the jobs never being advertised to prospective English workers; and that whole workforces are recruited and actually paid in Poland, the employers exploiting loopholes in EU law to avoid employment taxes in Britain.  The whole deal is topped off with constant praise for how “polite”, “hard-working” and “skilled” the incomers are, while the English men and women they have replaced are routinely dismissed as “lazy” and “uneducated”, and are left to rot on state benefits.

The underlying narrative is that life in the old Soviet bloc countries of eastern Europe has remained economically harsh, and workers still understand what it means to do an honest day’s work for what, by Western European standards, is a pittance.  They are only too grateful, we are told, to take up “the jobs British workers will not do”.  British society, on the other hand, is written off as having become decadent and uncompetitive in the global economy.  Our people have come to expect the good things in life without having to work for them.  Europhile politicians and financial journalists, whose own jobs are not at risk in the new neoliberal universe, regularly reinforce this message.  Some have the gall to lecture the English unemployed to the effect that if they don’t like it, they are always free to go and find work for slave-labour wages elsewhere in Europe, as if to be decanted from home and family into the life of a characterless economic cypher is an acceptable station for any human being.

It is true, of course, that the eastern European workers are an economically productive cohort.  Migration is a filter for IQ, and the quality of first-generation migrants is higher in all sorts of ways than the average for their country of origin.  Higher, in this case, than the average for the natives too.  But by the same measure the eastern Europeans have come with rather more than the average loading of competent criminal gangs.  The least of it involves metal theft: stealing manhole covers, stripping lead from church roofs and power-cabling from railway lines.  Multiple accident insurance fraud is another little game.  Armed robberies of soft targets like petrol stations and jewellers are also a favoured pick and, naturally, the drug trade has benefited substantially from “skilled eastern European labour”.  The very worst of it has been the smuggling and prostitution - sexual enslavement, actually - of innocent and brutally used eastern European girls hidden away in inner-city whore-houses.  Undoubtedly the most novel and multicultural felony has been the provision of rather more willing eastern European “brides” for the purpose of a passport scam, usually involving Asian fixers and African “husbands” willing to part with a few hundred quid for a quick I do.  Not the hardest work a hard-working eastern European girl could find to do in opportunity-laden Britain.

The whole “hard-working” narrative took a bit of a knock from about the middle of the recession - well, perhaps not the “hard” part.  We began to hear about penniless, unemployed eastern Europeans living rough in parks and public spaces, “skipping” supermarket bins and hunting the edible wild-life to extinction.  The sight of regal swans gracing the urban river landscape has become a thing of the past on some East Anglian rivers.  In contrast, alcoholism, at which eastern Europe has always excelled, has become a rather more commonplace feature of town-centres.

Now we are told the recession is over.  But nine out of every ten new jobs is being taken by immigrants of one hue or another.  Our kids struggle to enter the workforce at all.  Only half of graduates find non-menial work.  Of the others many are serving internships - generally without pay, just to have a chance of a permanent job at some point in the future.  It is, of course, an utter betrayal of the young, to add to the long, long list of betrayals we have suffered in the grand cause of maximum corporate freedom.  The politicians, together with the businessmen who have wallowed in its profits and the liberal Establishment which has found it so convenient and personally inexpensive, can never make amends for what they have done.  Tumbrils and old maids with knitting needles will not make amends.  Only mass repatriation, ruthless and complete, will make amends.

As for the eastern Europeans, they do not escape without a cost to their humanity.  Like all new migrants, they have brought upon themselves and their children a ceasura they do not yet understand.  The subtle rewards of peoplehood, of life among kind, of natural belonging and warmth and understanding have been replaced in them by becoming a stranger in another man’s land, and by the coldness and disinterest he feels for them.  This is the true wage that the neoliberal system pays its migrant workers.  Its materialism has become theirs, and its power to commodify human lives has commodified them.  Until they go home they are merely labour, another commodity to place alongside goods, services, and damned capital.

Yours,

GW

Nick Griffin addresses EU Parliament, calling to account criminals behind EU immigration policy and their deceptive terms:

This little video shows Italian police removing their helmets in solidarity with what appears to be an Anonymous protest, but is wider than that.  One of the posters on the YouTube page explains:

The demonstrators are an eclectic amalgamation of Italians, from truckers to students. The origin of the protests stems from the Pitchfork Movement, which began as a group of Sicilian farmers pushing for government reforms but grew into a nationwide revolt against banks, the Italian tax collection agency Equitalia, the European Union, and the Socialist-backed minority government, which is moving to privatize higher education.

People are stirring everywhere.

Free Movement of People: Bulgaria and Romania

From 1 January 2014 the transitional controls on free movement included in the accession treaties and adopted by the UK and seven other Member States when Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in 2007, will end.  From that date Bulgarians and Romanians will have the freedom to live and work in those eight Member States (and in Spain, which has only had transitional controls on Romanian nationals).

… There has been a lively debate in the UK about how many Bulgarians and Romanians will come to the UK after 1 January 2014 and the British Government has announced it is looking at the rules governing social security claims as a consequence of this and future EU enlargements.

Do you want over a million Romanians and Bulgarians moving to crowded, bankrupt Britain?

Spain and Italy have not had restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians. So let’s see what has happened there. Currently there are about 920,000 Romanians and 170,000 Bulgarians in Spain. In Italy there are about 997,000 Romanians and over 70,000 Bulgarians. Britain has much more generous benefits and more jobs than Spain or Italy, So the absolute minimum number that will be moving here will be well over one million. Probably it will be closer to two million.
Now, let’s look at some other figures. Unemployment amongst Romanians and Bulgarians in Spain is 36.4% – that’s about 396,760 immigrants who are unemployed. So we can expect somewhere in the region of 400,000 Romanians and Bulgarians to be claiming benefits for housing, council tax and unemployment here in Britain.

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Well, I didn’t expect it.  Like most people, I think, I had David Cameron down as electable Mr Bland, a wax-work dummy from Madame Tussauds carefully placed in the leadership of the Conservative Party to follow the internationalist, neoliberal script.  And perhaps he would have done so, turning his back on national interest as every other British Prime Minister has, finally, over the last thirty-five years.  But, it seems, Sarko and his mandarins, possessed as they are of a vision for Europe on a Napoleonic scale and a horrible suspicion that Anglo-Saxon skulduggery is undermining it, made it impossible for him, wearing the colours of Arch-Defender of Financial Services, to sign on fiscal Europe’s bottom line.

Now we have a situation where seventeen eurozone states and nine EU member but non-eurozone states are going to make lovebird sounds to another, while totally ignoring the will of their respective peoples.  One other state is, as they say, “isolated”, though it is a rather smug and relieved isolation at the moment.  If Cameron calls a snap election now, or if the LibDems collapse the coalition (which they can’t, of course), he would scoot home.  Even with all the austerity.

But ... what does it all mean from a nationalist perspective?  Has anything changed for us?  Well, two things for starters.

First, the definition of a Eurosceptic has been expanded.  Cameron’s veto has made the beast mainstream.  Meanwhile, the ante has been vertiginously upped for supporters of joining the Euro.  The old argument about being at “the heart of Europe” to protect our interests is defunct – we are not going to be at the heart of Europe ever again.  Now Europhiles have to argue that agreeing to German oversight of UK taxation and spending policy and practise would be in the national interest.

Cameron’s veto will have an immediate effect on UKIP and on British nationalism, forcing a focus on the perfect nonsense of belonging to a club of 27 which 26 have left, and the half-life Britain will now increasingly inherit as the 26 develop their union.  The argument for independence therefore becomes one of re-definition and regularisation.  It has lost much of its power.

Second, notwithstanding our signature to the existing EU treaties (including Lisbon which effectively abolishes the nation state) the intergovernmental process of de-sovereignisation has come to a screeching halt for Britain.  The sole remaining interests for the British government in the EU are the preservation of (i) the Single Market and (ii) the unregulated status of the City of London.  The project has now become a neoliberal one, not an internationalist one, and that will require a more nuanced critique from nationalists.

In this respect globalisation presents a particular challenge.  It continues to exercise its baleful influence upon us and to be fully supported by the political mainstream.  But it is nebulous, and the power of corporations does not pack the same punch as a political target as the power of Brussels.

A lot has changed today.  We do not yet know how all the pieces will fall finally.  But nationalism didn’t make much impact when the ideological times were good.  They just got tougher, and I am none too confident that we can rise to the challenge.