Thoughts in a Conflicted Europe

by Glenn N. Holliman

Regular columnist Terry Field writing from his home in Normandy, France shares his latest thoughts on Britain, Europe and the forth coming collapse of the middle class.  At the end of his disturbing assessment, he was informed of the terror attack on a near-by Roman Catholic congregation at mass. The priest was savagely murdered by ISIS supporters. - GNH

Terry Field declaims....

It is an opportune time to comment on events transpiring around the globe, and looking to try to discern meaning, and the possible direction of events.

The decision by Britain to exit the European Union is a few weeks old now. Little has happened of note, save the decline in Britain's' credit rating, the reduction in its currency's value, an slowing of investment a slowing of commercial and retail activity, and a little shuttle diplomacy by Mrs May.

The unseen activity is in the political establishment, the civil service, the holders of influence.

A sign of this can be seen in an article in a British newspaper today by the one-time Foreign secretary and author, Mr Hague. In his article he refers to the intention of the British Prime Minister to provide for the needs of the ordinary people. A recognition of the extreme inequality that has come about from the effects of globalising economics and the juxtaposition of a rich London - in effect a world city - and the rest of the de-industrialised, deskilled, and largely impoverished country.

In his French kitchen when not keyboarding thoughts

on the challenges facing western civilization, he gathers 

vegetables from his garden and garnishes them with

local herbs.  Of course, gladiolas accompany his

culinary creations.

Across Europe and the entire west, and particularly in the United States, the life chances of people have become so diverse as to make life a lottery. If you are clever, educated, in the right job, in the right place, with the right contacts, you thrive and become enriched. Without those personal attributes and advantages, you probably sink without trace into poverty, violence drugs and despair. 

It used to be a white/black divide in the US. No more. The scythe of economic fortune cuts you down or elevates you irrespective of desire, needs, dependents or human worth.

The remorseless effects of direct labour competition is felt by nearly every person - including the prosperous, since they have failing children and relatives, and they feel the same insecurity and fear for their continued stability.

This force is accelerating in power and reach. It excluded, and it alienated. But now, the alienated are finding a voice. In Britain, they found the brexit voice, in the US, they may choose the Trump voice, and in France, particularly in the light not just of the German hegemony and a cripplingly overvalued currency, but of the slaughters, they may choose the Fronte Nationale and Madame LePen.

Europe, unlike the United States, is strategically exposed. It has little energy and must import for its needs. It has Russia under Putin in the East, and a swathe of Mediterranean states taken over by versions of Islam that sees its opportunity. Militarily, Europe is weak, and the United States is now semi detached form the region. The high-functioning liberal democracy of Europe is under direct threat. France is reeling from the state of emergency and the security services are said to be exhausted keeping a lid on the threats bubbling up across the country. The atrocities are the ones who succeed. The other - so many of them - grind the security system down.

The Hague article refers to the impending removal of vast swathes of the middle class by digital expert systems. This is gathering pace, but is held back for fear of the consequences. But it cannot be any longer avoided as the commercial imperatives are overwhelming. This will add the technical middle classes to the ranks of the poor, as their blue collar workers were so consigned a generation ago.

I have long been of the view that it was not the democratic system and the universal franchise that caused the flowering of the universally encompassing industrial economy. The reverse is the case. The inclusive modern economy spawned the modern democracy. I suggest that the new, exclusive economy, the impoverishing economy will be a powerful agent to cause democratic life to wither. That is happening as the 'centre cannot hold' across the old First World. Remember that? The 'First World'. Gone now- or almost gone.

What symptoms do we now suffer from, and what can we expect?

The West is like Eastern Europe under the old Soviet system. We, as they did, try to maintain a structure and values that can only survive in isolation. In isolation from billions of cheap workers, in isolation from a violently aggressive and competitive alternative civilisation -Islam - and in isolation from the attractions of populist forces who capture the hearts of the hordes of the vulnerable, by offering radical, 'strong' direction away from the present heartache.

What can we expect for the future.

Mr Malthus has been laughed at for many decades now. His prescription for a world oversupplied with humanity is simple. 'Emiserisation'. A colourful and Dickensian word, at odds with our candy-coated smiley world of the wonders of the Great New Tomorrow.

But he is now being proven correct.

The dots are being joined up. Economists have long understood the 'technology effect' was losing its potency to keep output increases ahead of the numbers of human consumers. Now that effect is leveraged by a shift of wealth from the West to the East. That accelerates, and the resources consumed from the earth are far greater than this sole planet can continue to sustain.

Climate change, rejected by many who like to ignore science and 'elites' when it suits their fragile emotions will rip through productive capacity, food supply and resources, flood coastal areas and cities, and kill enormous numbers. we do nothing to stop this.

I trust ( but do not expect that) some actions to reduce this mortal threat will be undertaken, but the measures now required will result in great reductions in personal and national wealth in the advanced nations. SO more stress.

There are NO forces acting on the advanced nations to improve the lot of the 'average' person. Work intellect thresholds are rising and vast numbers are excluded. That will accelerate as digital expert systems raise the intellect threshold further.

Our western civilisation now stands at a crossroads. We have a set of binary choices, and they are of such moment as to merit considerable attention.

Politically, the liberal elites have lost relevance. The illiberal, ill-educated, caste-adrift, slightly-working and lightly-paid majority neither understands the values of liberal inclusive social order, nor would have any sympathy for it were they to comprehend its nature. For them, life is primal, often tribal, essentially local, economically eternally constrained and altogether pretty brutal. Many of them reflect that brutality in their natures, although many do not.

Globalisation, having created a universal, globally based plutocracy, a vast, everywhere-to-be-found proletariat of ill-or-nil-educated urbanised, ex-industrialised 'peasantry', and local, highly insecure, and much smaller 'middle classes' is faced with a decision. DO we continue to allow the political process to include the whole adult population in future-defining decisions, or do we 'invent' a new politics to effectively exclude the hordes?

Brexit raises this question in bass relief. of course the basic vote to leave the European Union is being dissected by the entire power elite, in all countries in Europe, including Britain. All parties understand the implications. The economic dislocation, rejected robustly by the 'brexiters' is increasingly fully understood by those staring down the barrel of 'Article 50' ( the 'notification to leave', for those of you blessed to be a long way away from the scene of the agony). The populists for brexit sneered at 'elites' who counselled remain.

That is as one would expect, since they appealed directly to those disconnected hordes I describe above.

The elites, however, still exist. They wish to act to stabilise what they see as a threat that, together with the murderous onslaught of Islam, and the threat from Putin's Russia, could drive the peoples of European countries into the hands of exactly the same sort of forces that ripped the continent to pieces in the 1930s and 1940s.

The common causative thread between then and now? In the 1930s, a financial collapse caused vast impoverishment, and desperation made people believe the simple powerful tribal and visceral promises of a group of thugs, 'chancers' and clever political opportunists. Now globalising forces rip buying power from the populations of the west. A 'compression of demand' is how economists describe it. Bloodless description for misery and hopelessness.

Britain chose exit, an attempted political 'putsch' (failed, thanks to the strange Mr Gove), and the adoption of a dream that the past could live again, and glory would shine around on a free-trading British wonderland. No matter that there never was 'free trade' but highly structured 'Imperial preference' ( let's not allow reality to impinge on a daydream, eh?)

It does not get it. The country does not get it. The EU is irrelevant. It is globalisation that is the force that has caused local difficulty. Combined with a lunatic desire by the elite to maintain a mirage of power, military reach, 'influence abroad' and puffed-up 'significance' and 'punching above our weight'. great if one lives in the guilded wonderland of Kensington, Chelsea, Oxford, and the like. Hell if you live in Barnsley or Middlesborough.

Britain has tried to be like a Little America. But dirt poor and without resources of almost any kind. All it has achieved is to become repulsively unequal. To get close to the scenario whereby Mr Hague's warnings are heard and averted Britain will need to become an entirely different place. It will have to become precisely like the countries of Europe it so violently appears to wish to flee from. It needs to become Denmark. Much flattened differences between incomes, socially inclusive for ALL citizens, and all decisions taken to provide a physical environment that offers safety and comfort to all citizenry. A tall order when the basis of broad-based economic prosperity is in headlong retreat.

The same applies the the entire West. All western countries have protected asset owners at the expense of the working population. There has been little attempt to protect those on the sharp end of labour un-competitiveness. The economic model of eternal high tech is lunatic if it does not also encompass low in intermediate tech to use the talents of the ordinary citizen.

Interestingly, rather than address this requirement, the dead hand of the liberal left in Europe now considers throwing away free movement of peoples, and is rumoured to be offering Britain a 7-10 year 'closed border' status to migration.

This solves nothing. The British will still lose their jobs; they will solve none of the unequal life chances. The right wing rubs its hands in delight. Poverty is what it feeds on.

The right - the populist - like Trump and Le Pen would simply become arch-protectionists. 'Protect France' she cries.  'Tax imports' he shouts. This sounds great if you happen to be stupid, or an economic illiterate, or simply venal. It is, however, no solution to the direct threat to western lives. 

Why? simple, well comprehended by the hated 'elites'. Protectionism simply causes all business caught up in it to invest NOTHING for the future. The enterprises are simply run down, and capital goes elsewhere even more quickly. Remember the thirties? Remember British 'nationalised' industries (a form of protectionism and labour hording). The Soviet Union was a gigantic State protectionism.

No, the alternative to the Winston Smith future of right -wing coercion and socio-political violence is almost too late now to be employed. It is a fragile plant when compared to the jackboot and the thug. It is a local, low, and intermediate technology economy, structured to survive despite world competition and itself dependent upon some form of economic 'coercion'. High tech certainly where possible, but as  part of the mix.

The dream of 'sovereignty', 'independence', 'self-determination' with global 'free trade' is just so much eyewash. The reality will be decades of ratcheting decline, isolation and cultural exclusion. The gung-ho brexiters dream a dream. Not a new one.

The world now is one of high degrees of inter-dependence. NOT individual isolation and cultural arrogance. 

It seems probable that the populist right wing will succeed in the United States if the Trump momentum continues and the numbers indicating his success are correct.

In France, the slaughters and the population schism between Muslim and French indigenous will likely propel LePen to the presidency next year. That will be the end of the European Union. Hoorah say the brexiters. 

Yet the crushing vice of the economic failure of Europe in the face of China, India and the rest is the real cause here. Destroy the potential for an integrated Europe, and the continent will collapse when  faced with the super powers of America and Asia. It will be over. The individual countries will become poor, politically broken, subject to demagogy and brute populism. Putin, so admired by the new right, will predate the eastern European states, and his violent lawlessness will extend at will with no possibility of American help. 

Indeed, were I in Peking, and were I to see this, I would be tempted to join forces with Russia to finally see off America and rip the resources I want and need from the old trade relationships built on western maritime commerce.

Changes happen very quickly when internal instability happens. The dreamers of brexit, the new right in Europe, the local racist and fascists who are creeping out of the shadows across the continent will become agents to offer the world to the new competitors in the east, and the old competitor in Moscow.

Brexit is a dream dreamed by the desperate. It is the hole in the dyke. Dykes give way, and then everything is washed away.

Post script -

I hear now that an eighty four year old priest has had his throat cut during Mass in a little church in Upper Normandie.

Muslims did it. Known to the police - indeed 'tagged' to control movement from prior violence.

I expect the left will abandon their pretence that Islam is acceptable as a partner to European civilisation. If that is not done by the mainstream 'liberal left' political class, then at least in France, LePen will win by a landslide.

We are now in the last chance saloon.

The difference between brexiters and myself?  They look forward to the robust solution of the right.

I look at it in trepidation and despair. - Terry Field, 26 July 2016