A Morning Conversation with Mr. Field of France

This morning the wide-ranging mind of Terry Field, an Englishman who divides his time between France and the USA, provides one with a plethora of provocative assertions and stimulating comments.  Imagine yourself on his back patio which is bedecked with flowering scrubs, the sun creeping higher in the Normandy sky and you with a cup of coffee and a hour devoted to good conversation.  - Glenn N. Holliman

Questions, Questions

by Terry Field

What is globalisation doing in the Old World? How will brexit and the French election both respond to it, and be affected by it? Why is the Old World fundamentally different to the New World?

The effect of globalisation on Europe

Europe appears to be experiencing mixed fortunes in the face of the globalisation of capital.

Where Germany appears to be succeeding, indeed where the countries surrounding the eastern and southern sides of the North Sea appear to be succeeding, with sustained industry, reasonably available tax revenues, and social provisions not under mortal threat, other countries - the Latin states, France and most of the eastern accession states - are in considerable stress. The western Latin states have seen and continue to see their industrial, assembly and distribution base being eroded, often devastating the revenues, social fabric, and quality of life.

The devastation of the industrially collapsed regions cannot be overstated. In the United States, the Rust Belt felt a similar collapse of hope, but the effect on people of living in a capitalist economy like the US is quite different to that felt in a socially managed society. And the differences are not as one would imagine.

The intention of social intervention in socialist Europe is to help people overcome temporary disadvantage, whilst intensive retraining provides an avenue into new work.

At the outset, it needs to be observed that conditions arising from globalising capital and labour competitiveness removes from many – maybe the majority – of the unemployed and retrained even the remote possibility that new industries will come in, offering these ‘retrained’ people proper work with good incomes.

Why socialist labour intervention is self-defeating

The real effect of socialist intervention is to keep people on state subsidy, leading appalling lives, in the regions, the towns, the places where they lost their jobs. Of course some people relocate, but very many do not, and to make matters worse, political corruption by socialists has actively (they would of course deny this but no matter) sought to keep-and-trap those poor hopeless people in the dead regions precisely because they see them as a passive pool of socialist voting self-abusers.

These hordes of the hopeless have, in effect, actively voted against their own interests.

This malign contract between corrupted politician and abused unemployed lasted in England for three or four decades. How did that happen?

There was hope for the future, that these people would find a ‘way out’. The politicians know perfectly well there was no such real hope. But of course they stayed silent.

What is new now?

Now, the spell is broken; UKIP did it. I always felt and said that as soon as a charismatic, intelligent, persuasive nationalist, who also appeared to offer protection and radical change, then these hordes of the desperate these would desert the fraudulent socialists in short order.

This has now happened in Europe.

The Labour Party is disappearing

Labour in Britain is fallen to pieces; the destroyed regions are moving quickly to the clarion call of a new nationalist protector - a certain Theresa May, who gets the need to both protect but also radically redistribute not just incomes by taxation, but also the potential that people may have to succeed. She understands the need to free up opportunity, as well as shrink the welfare culture.

This also applies to Europe. In a nutshell, the politicians in Europe who succeed in the future will use more of the US approach.

How will these changes be felt?

People will be encouraged to move to where the work is, and the civic support payments to the devastated regions will be redirected to the growing regions where hope and activity blossom.  Vote and region buying will and must end.

One of the mechanisms that will accelerate this process will be the election of newly created city mayors, controlling large budgets, and zones that include both devastated areas as well as growing areas. These mayors will ruthlessly direct resources to growth, and force relocation.

This will be very much easier to do in Britain, at the political level, on a regional rather than a national level. Newly elected mayors in, for example, the north of England, or Wales, or Manchester and Birmingham will cause a failed squalid city or town to die through removal of all manner of subsidies. Resources will be redirected to growing towns and cities in the mayor’s region.

Notwithstanding these changes, there is a likely still to be growth in absolute poverty, of extreme distress, of illness, psychological collapse and early death, in many regions of the United Kingdom. The state has no resources other than those raised by taxation. That is a new experience for post-imperial Britain.

What does globalisation do to European and British capacity to buy what it needs?

The relative decline of currencies in the failing Old West is causing food cost stress, in a way not seen since at the very start of the move from the land to staff the new factories of the industrial revolution. Of all the nations in Europe that will experience this most acutely, Britain is far and away the leading candidate.

Britain’s history, land-mass, island condition and tentacles of old trade connections ensures that what happens in the world for food supply, food reliability, food prices critically affects its condition. An example - after the brexit vote, the UK currency fell precipitously; food inflation has begun, and more and more people live – and I mean survive – on food distribution that is gifted to them free. The cost of food, the collapse of work, the impoverishment of the State, all forces millions to rely on freely given food in order to avoid starvation.

Such a state of affairs would have been unimaginable in a western state prior to globalisation.

Why? Because globalisation is the mechanism that imports every stress point the world experiences, directly into the lives of the newly impoverished in the exposed Old World. Climate change, population excess, drought, political disruption, increased local demand for foodstuffs, pressure to discontinue cash crops all make the experience of the poor Old World ‘consumer’ increasingly desperate.

Europe can, in general, feed itself.

Now in Poland, Bulgaria, Germany, etc., food security experience is totally different to that of the UK.  The Europeans consume, in general, their own food production; as indeed they do all of their output, whatever that may be. That softens the blow, but price pressure from, for example, semi-starving cash croppers in Africa still closes down farms in Europe. Price competition is ultimately potent. Factories and fields are equally vulnerable.

Is France protected from these pressures?

Why does France, with massive agricultural output, have foodbanks? Simple. Globalisation. The Polish send their cheeses, their milk products to France. Normandy stops as a result. Southern Italy and Spain sends its hams and pastas. More expensive producers in France close, or just hang on.

Wines? Everyone makes wine, but in a French supermarket there is only French. No matter, the world buys from everywhere. The result – tens of millions of litres of grapes are dumped, or the wine turned to industrial alcohol.

Below, Russ Hoover of Pennsylvania examines

Terry's wine cellar.  Later they sampled a few

bottles just to be sure it had not gone vingery!

Poverty and failure on the other side of the fence of Chateau Lafite is not imagined, these days.

SO Brands are everything!

Establish your goods on a world stage – be they agricultural industrial, ‘artisanal’, whatever, and your wealth will take off. But do the reverse, stick to the local, be a shrinking violet, and your children will enjoy a mean time.

In the United States, the history of ‘ruthless’ (not really, in reality just ‘accepted and applied’) capitalism forces the individual to try, fail, try again, maybe try again and again, finally fail, finally succeed.  If he or she has the ‘spunk’ to do so. France does not operate on this basis. It tends looks on such a life as barbaric.

Does Europe embrace the danger of effort?

Nowhere near as much as it does in the US. Part of the consequence – almost no new globally dominant industries coming from Europe. There, the educated failed (and there are an enormous number of them in France, and other European regions) fume with rage, and vote communist, nationalist, fascist, but never economic rationalist. More and more they vote for the world to stop so they can get off.

A wonderful example of this happened last week in Northern France.

The recent National Front leader, Le Pen, visited a Whirlpool tumble dryer plant to speak to the workers on the picket line protesting at the down-sizing of the plant as activity is moved to cheaper Eastern Europe. She rallied them with ‘I will tax imports, and, by State direction, I will stop factories closing. I will save your jobs’.

At the same plant, at the same time, the socialist-globalist Macron told the jeering workers ‘I cannot stop globalisation, nobody can.  The destruction of remaining industry is certain if a protectionist nationalist regime is elected, and you will be able to buy your dishwashers from wherever even as globalising change happens’. They no longer jeered.

They were now silent and looked lost; unsure, frightened, but facing reality.

They told him they could not afford tumble dryers.

Now here is the rub

Most say Le Pen would bring fascism and a hate-regime. Macron is the preferred ‘safer’ candidate.

But Globalisation will not stop. He seems to have NO answers – France redistributes 57% of the entire GDP to the poorer and the poor.

After five years of more of the same from Macron, France will be a worse powder keg, if it does not disintegrate during his tenure.

SO if not Macron, then what?

I predict a fascist state in France in four years’ time if Le Pen is not elected now.

I do not like Le Pen. I loathe her values; I think she is all but insane in her misconception of the world.

BUT She must be seen to fail whilst the crisis of social division, and Muslim violence, is containable. Soon it will not be.

Just as Germany needed to understand it could not continue its super violence, and the mechanism was the Allies’ requirement of unconditional surrender, so the neo- national socialists in France must be given the opportunity to try, and to be seen to utterly fail.

National socialism is a recipe for complete collapse in the face of globalised capital and competition.

The result of Le Pen will be extreme impoverishment, but the arrogance of the liberal urbanised elites in France will be cowed by terror, so shattered, that the rural and small town excluded will establish a political position of equality.

That seems to be a message also alive in America since the election for the demagogic Trump showed a support in the poor countryside, and not much in the rich liberal coastal cities.

SO what for France?

The level of hopelessness in France is fundamentally greater than in Britain; why?

French society is very deeply fractured, it does not understand economics, it is an antique society masquerading as modern. It is many places in one territory.

Thus, even if Le Pen wins, there will be no radical business-like reallocation of state resources to productive activity; France is far too hidebound, to deluded about its culture, to elitist, even after a Le Pen full-term disaster, to reallocate resources to force a reasonably level social playing-field.

Macron cannot succeed.

On a personal level, I have lived in that country for many years. I love it. I love its sophisticated variety; its firecracker intellectualism. But I am increasingly desperate at its prospects for chaos. I have never felt personally fearful of the future before as I now do in France.

The geopolitical tightrope

Europe, and Britain are extremely energy poor. What they have - coal, some oil, a little gas, is now unusable. Climate change makes this so.

By political mismanagement, European climate change avoidance activity is driving energy costs there through the ceiling. This results in the elimination of whole swathes of labour-intensive low-tech activity. All of that goes to China and India, where coal is burned, and the people are little more than wage-slaves.

This policy is insane, and I say this as a full believer in the horror of climate change to come. Only a detached liberal elite could raise net taxation via an energy policy.

Really totally insane.

What should have been done? Well for starters, the tax raised from carbon taxes should have been offered IN FULL as credits to European businesses on a basis of their usage of energy. Thus a steel foundry would experience a tripling of its energy input, but the equal credit would be unconditionally paid to the company’s bottom line.

The replacement of energy supply from carbon to non-carbon would happen by application of the price mechanism – oil gas and coal suppliers would have to price higher in a rigged market than wind and solar – but the effect upon the businesses would be neutral. A steel foundry CEO would of course rationally choose the lowest energy supplier – renewables – independent of the credit back he would receive from the state. The receipt of the credit back would, however, allow the foundry to survive and thrive in Europe.

Socialist Europe decided not to do this, used carbon taxes for corrupt purposes, and  to simply accept the closure of vast swathes of old industries. They still need steel, aluminium, chemicals, oil fractions, etc., but they simply import them now.

Such price distortions and much more much more like them come from doctrinaire European state socialism. That feeds awareness by the British, via UKIP, of the lunacy of undemocratic Europe.

That causes what we have seen last year.

 An open air fromage (cheese) market in Caen, France

The contrast with the USA

In the USA, energy price distortion via punitive taxation in energy has not happened – it has not been needed – since fracked gas and the discovery of the scale of the accessible Permian gas basin in Texas – and much more besides – has allowed the supply from a resource sufficient to meet the entire (and cheaply priced) energy needs of the USA for some 30, 000 years.

Europe is critically energy poor. The USA is energy rich. In a globalising world that gives a long term problem to the Europeans.

It is a factor that the Japanese have had to both contend with and incorporate in every aspect of domestic life. Japan designs everything from the viewpoint of energy efficiency for internal use – but often designs and ships relatively energy  inefficient products for markets such as the United States.

Not so the best of the European competitors.

The destructive nexus of European State power and its industry

Often, Europe offers inappropriately designed products to penetrate the US market; the diesel cars shipped from Germany – belching Nox as a result of a squalid statist agreement to both use diesel cars and fix the tests to pretend they are not dangerous to life. This is the European corporate state at work. With consequential self-destruction.

SO – in Brussels, make automotive drive-train products to deal with energy poverty – but pretend you are actually working with high principles to counteract climate change.

Statist Europe has become a past master of these mega-lies.  The Statist mentality is reinforced by educational aimed at social thought management there.

The British see every day. They do not like it at all.

What is the future for exposed Europe?

The Europeans depend on resource supply from traditionally used sources; most of these are now in politically unstable, religiously unstable and remote locations. It is more than probable that these suppliers will progressively choose to supply to the new powers in the East. This tendency will intensify as both China and India develop military capacity that completely dwarfs that of Europe.

In effect, Europe is a large, non-homogeneous, relatively unproductive, strategically isolated, ageing and highly vulnerable region that cannot stop predation of markets, resources, and with a customer base that is becoming – really quite quickly – relatively smaller than those of the western hemisphere power, and of China and India in the Eastern hemisphere.

Its politicians seem completely unaware of this; they are obsessed with fantasies of ‘quality-of-life’ and ‘cultural enrichment’, very much as the rear-guard of the Communist Party was during the last days of the Soviet Union. I well recall a sophisticate of The Party telling me that economic and power collapse there mattered not at all so long as high culture - you know – opera, concert-life, writing, athletic prowess could continue unchanged.

Well we all know that power, wealth, money, all go hand in hand.

Culture follows all of those.  And in Russia’s case, it certainly did.

Dutch soldiers at the American Memorial

at Omaha Beach, Normandy remembering a

time of a violent Europe

In all this danger for Europe, is there any enduring success?

Some say that Germany shows what Europe can do. AS an integrated society, Germany has learned from the 1945 year zero; this internal discipline allowed it to reduce its labour costs dramatically over a decade ago, and direct – in a German balanced-budget sort of way - taxation resources to subsidise the newly poor skilled and semi-skilled workers.

Germany worked hard to establish global technical dominance over the world in a dozen strategic industry sectors. Their export surplus to the world – not just to the rest of Europe – amounts to a trillion Euros every four years or so.

They have done so well that their currency has ruined much of Europe. The French Euro (intended to make another power to confront America, Gallic insanity!) was in reality taken over by the Germans. The French have been all but bankrupted by its strength (not weakness, Trump, but strength, old son) and much of Europe half-wrecked by this driest of dry monetary policies.

The world moves on, however, and all technologies can be copied and improved by the owners and controllers of the current destination markets. That applies to the Germans now, just as it did to the British – whose massive industry disappeared in less than fifty years as global power and competition shifted.

Can German prestige carry the day?

In a word, no.

It is interesting that Tesla sells much German technology, and simple-to-copy battery power vehicles to Americans; Ford is worth less than Tesla now – but why? Not because Tesla has a ‘wide technological competitive moat’ as investors like to see – but for other reasons.

One such is the power of local marketing and brand power. In the States, now, BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, Audi, all look less and less competitive; slower on their feet than so many other new competitors, not just Tesla and Elon Musk.

Why? The transferability and speed of transfer of technology is easy and fast now, whereas the accumulation of brand market-presence is geography and culture based. This, and the perversion of political decision making in the European home markets will work purposefully to slow the Germans; and as the Chinese, the Indians, the Americans, all focus on their home products and decide to do-it-themselves, Germany will slowly decline.

Maybe not as precipitously as the British after the loss of the imperial market, but the future will be progressively more and more difficult for them.

The industry of the future now appears to be based on biotechnology, nanotechnology, memory management technology and cell/silicone interface technologies.

The United States has an unassailable lead in most areas here, and the British hope to see this as a key part of their future as well.

Europe is slow, and doing far too little to compete in these areas. As it failed to do also in IT and telecoms in the last thirty years.

Brexit and the revolution it will make

Should Britain leave a slow-mannered Europe and cast off to the world as the UKIP folk say it should?

Now it has no choice. This decision and its consequences must propel the British to searingly rational analyses of every activity and possibility. Action will need to be the result of the elite’s analysis of reality, simply in order to survive, let alone succeed.

The British State is now really quite poor and asset-free.

AN example here is British agriculture. During the 20^th century, all states maintained ‘strategic industries’ such as steel, aluminium, coal, aviation, shipping, and of course agricultural supply.

Protection in time of war.

But times change. Recently British civil servants have from time to time suggested that there should be a closure of agriculture, and its replacement with higher ‘value-added’ activities. The self-interested elites and commercial place-holders have squashed this.

Closure of most agriculture would free up the land for desperately needed housing and commercial building.

Within Europe, the subsidy system has made agriculture worthwhile, and this has supported it in Britain, but now that must end – and an opportunity for the country arises.

The case against agriculture in Britain

In truth, the idea of a strategic agricultural supply in a small cold island group now with 70 million inhabitants is patently absurd.

Below, the English countryside in August

The UK nearly collapsed, even under rationing in 1940, – with close to half the present-day population – after the U-boats disrupted supply for only 6 months.

The dreadful reality for Britain – and others like it – but here I am dealing only with

 my dear homeland – is that it must rely on food supplies from overseas.

Failure of supply over extended periods will unavoidably result in the British population crashing, by desperate emigration, by death, by failure to adequately reproduce, and a combination of the three.

In the 18^th century, Ireland had a larger population than England. Now, for well understood reasons, England has ten times the Irish population.

These depopulation horrors can and do happen, but the country cannot generate any agricultural strategy and a resource-allocation strategy of domestic production that would have any significant effect in modifying such traumatic events.

It simply lacks the means now so to do.

The unavoidable imperatives Britain must embrace

The conclusion is inescapable. Close British agriculture that requires not just subsidy. Close also that which is protected by land not being taxed on the basis that it generates an adequate real yield.

 Accept the need to contain the population growth by interventionist taxation and social-attitude policies, whilst entirely removing the state from burdening new industries and activities.

The size of the British state in the wake of the huge reduction in corporate activity and tax take consequent upon even a moderately hard brexit must greatly shrink. Intervention to protect the poor must be less accented than the freedom to create new activity.

Economically dead towns must physically die.

The pressures on individuals in this new harsh Britain demands state-mandated fiscally neutral German-style redistribution, on a larger scale than hitherto. This is a break with the debt-fuelled British socialism that has died after inflicting so much damage.  

State planning of industry in an open, globalised, exposed Britain simply has no intellectual foundation.

Remember, if you are British, the funny but sad ‘Failed in Wales’ song.

 

Where does populism fit in Britain now?

Very simply, it has no place.

The present tendency to panic, in a political sense, at the thought of the hordes of the poor and unskilled rioting or voting for rabble-rousers is hard to overcome; but the hope of Britain is its relative toughness when compared to France.

The only enduring answer is to allow a raw, free economy to quickly generate activity for the laid-off. May is suggesting she will start to control activity – price control energy supplies, etc.

This is a category error; it shows a complete failure to start to understand the extreme peril of leaving a Europe which trades 80% of its GDP internally, of facing a world of mega-states in the East where workers are often little more than slaves, and where climate change will start to rip through reliability of all supplies, including food.

Britain looks to the USA as an emotional rock, and likes to think it is a close cultural cousin; yet both countries inhabit entirely different universes.

The extreme vulnerability of Britain means there can be no more wasted statist activity, be it subsidy for the idle, excessive support of dead zones, inward-looking metropolitan elitism, cultural snobbery, educational apartheid via ‘public (private!) schools, apartheid in health – where the rich buy excellence, the rest get much worse, - and the domination of the financialised economy that channels wealth to those allowed to consume and waste on a monumental scale because they are either possessed of upper-class accents, or they are smart foreigners who act like hoovers of national treasure and savings.

Brexit must sweep away the grotesque inequalities, the lunacy of a capital city behaving as though it has a massive imperial support structure, the politics of division.

Yesterday I heard a Tory say ‘housing is tribal, people who own their homes vote Tory, those who rent vote Labour’. From what I have said, I think you will readily appreciate that I consider the electric chair to be a light punishment for such social vandalism.

To survive under brexit, Britain must pull off the hard task of becoming fair, behaving much more like Denmark than the USA, and at the same time must remove EVERY constraint to intellectual activity being transformed into productive enterprise.

So the socialist Civil Service will have to go.

As will, the corrupting QUANGOs, and the vast numbers of the hangers-on, consequent upon a new relationship between monarchy, political representation (PR please) and a MUCH better educated population.

Redistribution will have to be much greater in Britain than it is now to avoid social schism. BUT the incurring of debt to finance living standards by socialist politicians to buy votes must be gone forever.

And in all this, the element in the population – I call them the slobs – who choose idleness or low-grade functioning, financed in their self-destruction by a socialist interventionist state, and who voted brexit out of simple race and culture hatred and foul self-interest – need to be cut off without a penny.

For the valueless idle, then the requirement is simple; work, or die. 

Care more for the very unintelligent, the ill, the disabled. Cut off the slobs.

Pour encourager les autres.

And will all this rigour offer Britain a good future?

In a global trade world, with developing climate change, protectionism by the great powers, and Europe now our competitor not our colleague, very probably not.

This is not intended to depress; rather I am flagging up the extreme danger for Britain in behaving emotionally, overtaken by nationalism.

Return to the Ancient Regime

Terry and his wife Fina have left their winter home in Florida, USA and have returned to their four acres and a restored farm house in Normandy, France.  Both are English who have taken up residency abroad for the past decade or so.  Terry, a retired business executive and very well-read, once more takes to his keyboard and dashes out his views on the USA, France, the French election and in general the peculiarities of human cultures.  Yes, with a splash of humor.  Yes, he spells in British English. - Glenn N. Holliman

A return to France
and not a confirmation of the superiority of its culture over that of the United States
by Terry Field

Well, here I am. The last six months in America have flown by, and – after the required jet lag, and the unpleasant experience of rapid eye movement at 8 am French time on waking, I am slowly adjusting to the deep cultural shock of being immersed in a continuing 18th century France masquerading as a half-way modern state.

The first thing that hits one in the nose is the stench of diesel fumes. Suddenly, the outline of my lungs becomes a conscious experience. The eyes water a little, and one has this sense of passing one’s life within a combustion chamber. Asthma re-establishes itself. I have recovered my Ventolin, and have used it, together of course (Doc, are you reading this?) the obligatory Beclomethosone ‘preventer.’ Note – French vehicles are predominately fueled by diesel. 

The Ancient Regime re-establishes itself once more. 

In my local town, I decide to go shopping; the fridge is empty and we have little to eat that is fresh (save quantities of purple sprouting broccoli in the potager that has survived the winter). I drive in to the local fuel station to ‘tank up’.

I offer my French euro debit card. It is refused by the bank. Curious - there are adequate funds in the account. I offer as security my watch, refused by the clerk, who demands I return with payment or ‘the gendarmes will be called’!

I drive to my bank; the plump, dozing clerk rises to full consciousness and tells me my card had been ‘blocked’ for security reasons since it had been inactive for three months or more. Is this usual? I ask, since there are funds in the account. ‘It is normal, monsieur’ he whines.

The card is unblocked, and I retrieve cash to buy fish, meats and vegetables in the market place. As I proceed past the home-made jams, my telephone wheezes. (it is the selected ‘tone of the French ‘phone company – I have tried to change it, without success, maybe they set it that way because they think that, as an asthmatic, I will appreciate the sound).

It is my dear wife, in a state of agitation. The fuel company clerk has called her, demanded immediate cash payment from her, or the gendarmes will be called within the hour – not within the day that I had been originally threatened with. She is, quite reasonably, ‘in a state’; that transfers seamlessly, and with amplification, to me. I reassure her, recount the ‘story’ and tell her I will go and pay on the way home, which was my original intention, in cash.

Approaching the fuel station, I suddenly feel, just a little, homicidal. I see the offending clerk and it occurs to me, that, in order to call my wife, she has in some way called my bank, said a non-payment was experienced, and that they have given out our personal telephone details, thus breaking confidentiality, with no reference to legal protections. Had this happened in the US or the UK, they would be open to litigation; not so in France, a land where rights are spoken of reverently but trampled regularly.

My desire to inflict personal damage is enhanced when I actually engage with the creature. She looks like so many women do in this part of the world – after a certain age they visit a hairdresser who makes them look just like the chickens that dot the farmhouse gardens across Normandy. Arrogant, rude, so quintessentially French after the pleasant politeness and relatively extreme consideration for the person I have bathed in during my time in America.

This contrast of obnoxious after pleasantness is really too much. I do something I have not done in well over twenty years of close engagement with L’hexagone (France). I swear at the chicken-faced hag in my very best Anglo-Saxon. ‘Speak in French’ the half-woman-half-chicken says. So I do. I furnish her with a full, unvarnished translation – peppered with a few additional, and I pride myself, highly-creative froggie phrases that not even the robust English are generally aware of.

I then demand a receipt as she wobbles in well-deserved shock.

It is thrown at me.

I drive off. 

End.

As I travel along the road, looking for a place to park, I am struck by the French behaviour in their cars, as compared to the Americans. In America, when a pedestrian steps off the walkway and the cars stop immediately and uncomplainingly. A driver drives slowly looking for a turning, or a place to stop – Americans uncomplainingly accommodate this. Not here; they weave past the people, attempting to intimidate them; horns are sounded. They gesticulate if anyone wishes to go slowly, even momentarily. Fingers are raised in a gynaecological suggestion, faces snarl.

The French are being themselves. Just angry. Always angry on their roads. And most other places these days – including in their politics. I am reminded of the observation of a well-traveled American Friend – ‘You compete over trivia and ignore the big stuff; we do the reverse’.

That does seem to sum it up.

I arrive home, and fall on the wine; turning on the television. I am treated to a series of fifteen-minute interviews with the many ‘candidates’ for the upcoming presidential elections. Well, this really is the political equivalent of children dancing round the maypole. A sort of composite lunacy.

The first ‘candidate’ is a communist lady – thin (obligatory for such a presentation), very badly dressed, cropped hair, convict-like, mouthing the sort of humourless economically illiterate platitudes we recall from the odd films of Lenin rabble-rousing in Moscow. She, of course, rages against the ‘imperialists’ and the ‘American imperialists’. She sounds, I fear, a little like UKIP but with garlic overtones.

She is followed by a grey ex-executive who wishes to save the people from the rigours of the EU; he wants reform, and he will get it by refusing to do anything Brussels asks for. That’s it – that is his presidential program.

Then comes a blondish, oldish, smilingish, driven person by the name of Le Pen. She rattles on about migration, turning France into a sort of camp if the others win, and then she says she will protect everyone!

After her a man called Macron who made money with a global investment bank, and wishes to free up taxes for entrepreneurs and make people work. I am reminded of Colbert in the time of Louis Quatorze, who, when asked by Le Roi Soleil how the kingdom prospered, said that everywhere he went, men were at work. That it what the technocrat Macron wishes for, but he is no Colbert, and there is no Roi to impose rogour here.

This is Everyman’s Republic, a kind of Home Depot political state. Subject to periodic ‘remodeling’ when it looks a little too frayed at the edges. De Gaulle was the last ‘fixer-upper’. I fear the Froggies do not wish to comply with his dragooning them into effort – they do 30 hours a week in Paris; 25% of the young are unemployed, and there is no riot or visible objection to speak of. I think they would prefer something more spicy than Macron.

So we move on to ‘candidate’ Mr Melenchon. This chap is a long-in-the-tooth campaigning hard-left socialist, in the mold of The Beast of Bolsover in the British Parliament (a faux-firebrand who spits his rage across the despatch box at whichever poor minister is the cause of his ire). Melanchon wishes to expropriate 100 % of all incomes over 360,000 euros. He wants a ‘peoples’ presidency’, a new constitution, a removal of the EU liberal economic controls, and – yes you guessed it - a protection from the outside world.

Protection from the outside world seems a theme that runs and runs through most of these strange people’s minds and arguments. It really is true that politics is fame for ugly people. And my goodness these people are, in general, extremely ugly, and not just on the surface. The personalities are a condemnation of the social condition of modern France. What a dismal bunch. But one of them will soon be ‘Le Grand Fromage’ and another round of dysfunctional codswallop will be underway.

I go back to my garden, musing.

Thank God. Prime Minister May announces a general Election in Britain for June (and thus lying again, never mind, she is only Prime Minister, why bother with the truth) to free her from the constraints of both the rabid UKIP-right wing of her party on the one hand, and the left leaning House of Lords on the other. Another old country, dreaming with bitter memories of much better times a very long time ago. Both places are prisoners of a perception of a glorious past, which they wish to repeat, or at least recreate in miniature. Poisonous dreams.

The Germans are more sensible. Which is why Germany can do well what the other two do so very badly. And then there is the United States. Now there is a place that really can determine its own future. 

I’m off down to the barn; into the wine cellar. A safe retreat from the intolerable.

Comments?

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