What Yet Could Be

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our regular corespondent, Terry Field of England, France and Florida, seems to have taken a lead from the Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge in this epistle, perhaps having awaken from a restless sleep to pin the following vision of what yet could be. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, above, awoke in 1797 from a dream and quickly recorded Kubla Khan, an imaginary world of a massive Pleasure Dome.  

Understanding Mr. Field's vision does require an extensive knowledge of British and European politics and history.  And a willingness to let one's imagination float a bit under what, a 'Pleasure Dome'?- GNH

Let’s be chipper about Brexit. It COULD all work out well !!! by Terry Field

The dream of success goes something like this.

The mechanisms for leaving the European Union have been prepared in advance with care and cool deliberation by highly talented political operatives. It is probable that there will be a declaration of a general election on the day in October that offers an election date of 1^st November.

In the count-down to that election, there will be no Brexit intervention by the government. None. The clock will tick down, since it was set in motion by the May Government and ratified by parliament. In the interval of 25 days between declaration and election, only the clock will act, The Johnston Junta – for elected by 100,000 unrepresentative Antiquities, makes it just that – is driven by a considered response long ago structured by the very talented Mr. Cummings and a small number of others. Most of them in Trumpies in Washington.

There will be attempts to stop this. In the courts. In the Parliament. Perhaps involving the functioning of the monarch.

BUT

If this process is stopped half way through the election period ending on the 1^st November, then the entire body of the Brexit Party, the present Conservative Party voters, a proportion of the Labour vote, and the DUPers will all vote to reinstate the exit process. And they will all vote within the framework of and directly for the ruling Conservative Party. 

No other choice offers the prospect of effective exercise of power.

 The Greens, the communist party aka The Labour Party, the assorted lost folk of the ‘no-particular party but I am ever-so Politically Correct’ voters will fragment into their little tribes, and proceed to wipe each other out in the election – this is a first past the post system. Ruthless and effective in dumping the duds and no-hopers. Only focused strength and tactical voting will win. And the Tories have that in their grasp. Farage will be the only one voting Brexit Party.

Johnston will walk it.

Then, here will be a real choice, and it will be his to make.

At that point he needs nobody at all. He dumps Dominic Cummings; he has served his purpose.

Does he need no-deal?  Not at all. The election is his. He commands the stage like a colossus.

But then, even though Britain is weaker than America, that slow moving behemoth wakes up to the fact that Perfidious Albion HAS NOT LEFT YET!. It was stopped by the heroic opposition of left-leaning Tories in the last parliament.

Britain therefore still functions in the EU, as the process was stopped, by order of the courts and by Parliament taking control of the agenda in the last moment and executing legislation via its control of  the business of the house. The naïve folk who stopped it thought they were thwarting Johnston, but they were in fact giving him electoral success and  the future. Johnston did not try to stop them.  He was secretly banking on it.

In a flash, they won him the election, smashed the Brexit Party, neutered Lib Dems, marginalized the communists aka The Corbyn Labour Party.

Now, in early November, he is a man with infinite possibilities.

He has a comfortable majority. He is clear of the flatheads from the DUP. He sees an eviscerated Labour Party before him on the opposite benches. He sees a bunch of- as ever- infinitely malleable Lib-Dems – gushing rage and impotence – and the odd Green from the never-never-land of Brighton and Hove. The ERG simmer and bubble, but his parliamentary majority of the fully corrupted consign them to insignificance.

In America, the Plan cobbled together by Trump and the man he thought he could control, Johnston, for smashing The EU via the British trojan Horse has entirely unraveled. Britain – those perfidious swine – they have NOT LEFT!! And they show no sign of so doing.

Johnston, being an Oxford Educated classicist, read Cisero and the fate of Catilina – he knows JUST how fast things can change. And when he sees an American  ‘friend’,  arrive from Washington, he well knows the short sword is there to one day open his political viscera when his guard is down. And leaving the EU is not just dropping one’s guard to America, it is helping them point their sword at the British jugular and pulling the blade to the national neck for them.

When compared to the United States, outside the EU Britain has in real effect the fire power of Zimbabwe on a bad day now. He thought of that when the American mustachioed lunatic Bolton (a man who makes Herman Kahn look cuddly) visited offering ‘sector by sector’ deals in the twinkling of an eye – just as long as the UK dumps its entire foreign policy and inserts the Foreign Office into a cobwebbed annex of the State Department.

Now the fully empowered and totally unencumbered Johnston looks benignly on Brussels, and EVERY Tory MP short of the headbanging ERG needs HIM in another five years’ time!!! He is electoral gold. He is their pimp. They will do what he wants, where he wants it, when he wants it. He OWNS the Tory Party.

They – the Tory MPs - all know the moment of nationalistic madness has passed. Farage has left the country and taken up a roll in Mississippi running a radio station  called Darkbart. The Tory ranks now all look to five years’ time and a re-run of the gravy train.   

Below Nigel Farage, a Brexit leader

They will follow Johnston ANYWHERE!!!

Even up and into the Berlaymont Building and never leave it!!!!!! Oh those Crepes Suzette!!!

SO NOW the real agenda begins. Europe is stuffed. Deflating and shrinking, very fearful, assaulted by both America and China, full of race competition violence, full of mutual suspicion, trying to form a European Army but incapable of forming a brigade, with NO direction, run now by a clearly somewhat deranged blond female German failed political nonentity with a nice line in power-haircuts and hordes of children by NO political sense at all.

Thus now Johnston then approaches his real target. NOT powerful, always-dangerous Washington keen on using Britain to smash the rival EU; no, he approaches both Russia and Brussels via Berlin at the same time to forge the only rational European structure and one that should have been done LONG ago. Meanwhile Germany and Russia have taken about all they plan to from Trump. They are open to offers. Any offers. And Johnston has the offer of the millennium for them. Which they accept as though it is Christmas. Which, happily, it actually is.

He invites Europe – in reality Germany (The Frogs always do what they are told) - to reconstruct its democracy with looser outer ties to the stragglers – the lazy latins and the dreamer British. BUT he also invites Russia in. IT oozes raw materials, space, brains and many good Germans there since the 18^th century pretending to really be Russian. Germany wanted to do this for decades, but it had and has NO political legitimacy to propose this. IT thought Britain opposed it, as indeed it did, before America went away and Trump cut the mooring line for the British once ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’. Germany of course  also  risked American anger with French rage were it to openly contemplate Russia as a part of the European scene.

Yet now all has changed.

America is gone to Trump Heaven, China is run by a new Stalin-like figure, and Johnston is free to re-forge the European Great Game. He alone can do so. He can bring ALL the parties together in the European continent including Russia – now to be fully together and unified in a grand bargain. Remember; Britain has NOT left the EU yet. France sits in the corner steaming. China is mad as hell with Russia at this unanticipated development,, but in one bound Russia is now free of both the fear of China in the Pacific east; and it can relax entirely about America.

Johnston has recreated 1913 all over again.

Only now with a love fest between Russia and Germany that will endure and grow. 

The REAL Europe, of Britain, Russia, Germany fully co-operative  -  are united as was always the dream and ALL others are out of the picture.

Above, Terry and his wife, Fina, spend their summers in Normandy, their own Pleasure Dome not far from the sea.

The United States is where it was before the First World War. Nowhere at all. Just very big, isolated and self- obsessed. It really has become a nowhere in the new Johnston-designed now. It can buddy up to Japan, suffer from the Yellow Peril for all of eternity, but the action – the real action - is once again in the full and complete Europe. The vitality of 19^th century Europe is here once more. The concentration of synergies commands the world.

Britain of course will then have returned to be itself. A political free-radical, doing its own thing. There is no transaction charge in the capital markets in London. It sails free and vigorous to endless commercial opportunity. In a flash, across Europe, socialism, the infection of the 19^th century injected into the twentieth, is now dead, buried, and gone. Germany and Russia command Poland far more profitably than they did when they tried it with tanks and there is no mess to clean up. Indeed, there has never been a better time to live anywhere between the Rhine and Moscow.

And Johnston, the lightweight, reviled liar, cheat, leaver-of-wife man-we-love-to-hate, has changed the world entirely.

And with no help at all from Dominic Cummings. who now passes his time in an asylum in Surrey, where through the haze of drugs he wonders just what happened to his version of reality. - Terry Field

Political Collapse in the U.K.?

By Glenn N. Holliman

Since businessman and economist Terry Field wrote this article, the Prime Minister, Teresa May of the United Kingdom, has given her resignation notice.  The Conservative Party, the oldest continuous political party in history, is in disarray divided over how best, if at all, to leave the European Union.  Many suspect that May's successor will have no more success guiding a 'soft Brexit' than Ms. May has attempted.  Below is Terry's latest analysis of the whys and wherefores of the situation. - GNH

Political collapse has arrived in England. Where can it lead?

The British Prime Minister has strained her arm muscles this morning. She has shoved the sofas in front of her cabinet office door, to prevent any further remaining cabinet members from entering the room and suggesting yet again that she should go. Thirty-six resignations down the line, no agreement to settle with Europe in sight, and the politics of the street dominating and overshadowing a Parliament worse AND probably more anarchic and more incompetent than any since the one Cromwell broke up. 

What is happening in England is not inconsequential. Indeed, it is a part of a set of changes that rips the country from over two centuries of its past – a successful past until the dread decision to join France in 1914 and the gross impoverishment that followed on the Hitler war.

Left, Barb Holliman points out an 'item' that Terry, in his dark glasses, has overlooked in their discussion on the collapse of the British Empire. 

The first, obvious change is the collapse of the mechanisms of wise government. For centuries, Britain, beneficially isolated by the navy, both safe and able to range across the seas to gain opportunity was sheltered by the comparatively wise and benign government and guidance of an enlightened aristocracy, whose structure, stable as a result of primo geniture, was able to act as a ‘guardian’ to the progressive developments of commerce, of trade, and later of industry and the linkages to the vast colonial empires – the first being in North America, and later in India and the eastern and African countries.

As the franchise was extended progressively through the reform acts of 1832, 1867, 1884 and then into the first decades of the twentieth century, the guiding hand of the commercial interests and the aristocracy, in the form of the Whigs and the Tories, facilitated a near continuous beneficial growth in all aspects of life in the empire and at home in the British isles.

Even as the franchise broadened, as the effect of industrialization generated the Labour Party, and as power moved from landed interests to trade, commerce and the cities, the power and authority of the aristocracy and the great commercial interests, functioning on inherited power and the eternal sense of duty – noblesse oblige – maintained a ready ear to hear the complaints and aspirations of the people. 

The country changed to the benefit of the population. All understood the sense of place, but they also knew what to expect from each other – and from the classes they could see but were not members of.

In short. The system worked, and the politics reflected that and reinforced it.

Then came 1945, universal education for all to 16, later 18, and the maturing of the effect of the universal suffrage as all began to seek representation from those who would prosecute their own class- or sectarian – interests.

As this full-hearted sectarian engagement of all possible interest groups gathered pace, in the wider world, Britain was becoming relatively – and in many parts of the countries that composed the whole – absolutely poorer. The great cities fell to pieces and the inhabitants suffered deprivation, isolation and poverty, despite the post war recovery, whose effect was to greatly advantage the non-industrial south over the dying industries of the north, great social fractures opened up, and the class divides widened. The parties of the left became more vocal, would-be radical, and aggressive with demands, 

The conservatives postured that they were now ‘of the centre’ – Harold MacMillan famously saying that ‘we are all socialists now’ and their memberships began – horror of horrors – to accept those who were state educated, and elevated to civilization by acceptance – albeit in small numbers – into Oxford and Cambridge.

The line held from 1970 until recently, with all pickled in aspic as the left controlled the media and the civil service, the European Union commanded the broad integrationist agenda, and the right was marginalized to being viewed as close-to unhinged.

Then came 2008. The collapse. The evacuation of surplus funds, of easy state borrowing, the impoverishment of state debt exploding to guarantee the foreign bond holders of the City mega-banks that Brown and Balls had willfully created, to milk of mis-stated profits to buy votes by the million. 

The party was over. And it never started up again. Meanwhile, China and India began their remorseless rise to gigantic power. China is well on the  way, India is slower but will undoubtedly get there. In the west, most commentators in England consider the United States as being in decline and perhaps approaching internal instability.

The psychological effect of this in England is very profound. More so than in continental Europe. Why so? Well, since 1940, England has well understood that its physical survival has depended upon sheltering under the American power’s wing. That to be alone a second time would tempt fate that another Himmler may one day in the future – from some place as yet unknown and not even considered dangerous – stamp his psychopaths on the people of the islands from which there would be no escape. SO America was essential. And like a father standing guard over a child, it is both resented and loved.

Yet now it (America) declines. And into what? And how long will it take before senility and ineffectiveness takes over there. We in England know how fast collapse from immense power to nothing-at-all can take. It is lightning fast; and it happened – quite directly, and quite recently – to us.

Thus the first reaction in Britain – it being pragmatic- is to see if its new uncle in the east is likely to be beneficial as its father in the west has been. So we court China. We flatter it; we eschew the Dalai Llama now, we pitch for their ‘investments’, we invite their unsmiling Head Man to address our parliament (where he reminded us what parvenus we are) and hope to enter some of their highly controlled ‘markets’.

And yet there is a nasty reality we cannot shake off. That we are weak, unskilled, poor and alien to the new eastern Uncle. Who we now fully understand cares entirely for himself and not at all for us. Our friendly father (America) in the west, still affectionate to us (why I simply do not understand now save for history and sentimentality) may be ‘in decline’ but by any reasonable expectations is still unlikely to ‘decline’ to anything less than an immense power, if not any longer the sole global power.

All this has de-stabilised England. It has entirely lost a sense of place and a sense of safety for the future. The ‘austerity’ following on 2008 caused generalized discontent, and the parties moved to the margins – the Labour Party to a retro-socialist obsession, with a mini-Lenin type at the head, and the Conservative Party sought to find the centre-ground in partnership with the Liberals. The depth of the impoverishment of the state following on 2008 was such as to doom any such centre -politics from doing other than enraging a population drunk on decades of state largesse provided on the back of ruinous state and private borrowing.

The centre in Britain has collapsed. With England split between the socialists on the left, and a new form of English Nationalist party that is emerging before our eyes in the form of the moth emerging from the chrysalis of the old one-nation, aristocracy-led, socially only lightly-engaged Conservative Party. May was the last attempt to sustain a Eurocentric, essentially centrist, ‘managerialist’ Conservative Party. It is no coincidence that May is a Grammar School product, taught to ape the mannerisms of the old aristocracy, but on a pathetically modest scale.

SO what is happening now to that political dispensation – a dispensation that is the latest iteration of a party over 200 years old? The new party (Conservative) emerging from the old one is becoming a very different creature indeed. This new party rejects everything that has gone before, even as it claims to being intent on reviving it. This new party is at its heart a true reflection of the contemporary England – an essentially working-class, total work state, where the vast majority of the population is functionally educated, disconnected from the world in a way their antecedents were not for centuries past. These people live and breathe their little island. They have entirely forgotten their imperial past (save for a periodic dollops of deliberately out-of-context emotional gloop served up as socialist ‘social cement’ by the profoundly unhelpful BBC).

In less than half a single lifetime, the entire world view of their grandparents has been destroyed, thrown into the trash can, and replaced by a sort of anarchy of disconnected newness, intended to both serve the needs of local commerce, and to deconstruct the class and other social inter-relationships that both grew out of the past, and offered sophisticated connections to it. The citizen is entirely cast adrift, made new, made isolated, turned into a socially compliant consumer unit, but with a quality of life and a sense of security and happiness worse than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution. 

In this condition, all must work all the time. As in the former Soviet Union, children are farmed out to care agencies as parent work from youth to decrepit old age – and they are taught that this is the only way to live, that anything else is unimaginable and undesirable. To sustain this absurdity, the people are subjected to a level of conditioning and psychological management from the earliest years that Dr Goebbels would simply marvel at for its extent and it unyielding continuity. Winston Smith in 1984 observed the poisonous lunacy. I doubt such awareness is available to the inhabitants of England now.

The extent of disconnection is perhaps greater in England than in any country on earth. And into that comes people like Nigel Farage of the Brexit Party, and Boris Johnson and the like in the Tory-Conservative party.

Out of this free-floating condition comes Farage and Brexit. The simple solution to remove fears, recover what is lost, shine a light on a bright new future. In all humility the writer understands how the uneducated masses can be so taken in, but it is still, after all that happened in the 19^th and twentieth centuries, a simple wonder that the level of naivete required to facilitate such potent but grotesque politicking is so readily available. To be sure, the depredations of gross amoral and atheistic state socialism has accelerated the disaffection, compounded with the ‘no more money’ sign going up outside the British exchequer, but something far darker has taken over. And that thing is the collapse of the western perspective on how to command a state and an economy. 

Watching China, the monolith full of what looks so often like clever ‘clones’, the direction of societies in America and in Europe looks amateurish, chaotic, and worse, ineffective. We are invited observe the stupefying achievements of the communist party in China, the vast new cities, the 1200 km long artificial river to take water from the south to the north, the ‘belt and road’ system connecting them to the world of the east, Europe and Africa. And against this we have nothing but obvious indebted tiredness. Only tiredness, and the rage so many special interest groups, all ripping the body politic apart for personal advantage, with mutual suspicion and open hatred everywhere. In America look at how Democrat voters absolutely hate GOP voters and vice versa. A vision of insanity.

So in Britain, the response is simply to hell with it, we will look after our own interests, think only of ourselves, trust nobody south of Dover – or west of it now, and thus espouse the safety of nationalism, of patriotism, of the certainty that we can do what we want, and the others had better get out of our way. 

Hence the New Tory Party. Aggressive-assertive, Britain first and last, free to act across the globe, contemptuous of the moderation of its aristocratic past approach, keen to reject European states it sees as the direct inheritors of the chaos of the violent past. For this New Tory Party, economics is trumped entirely by patriotic feeling, by national awareness, by corresponding diminution of regard for ALL others. This latter is the subliminal way the New Tory Party faces up to the recognition of the decline of its American protector.

British humour is always close to the surface but often understated.  This hedge is in Nap Hill near High Wycombe.  The home owner's political beliefs are unknown.  Perhaps the human being consumed is the old Tory Party?

For many of the members of the New Tory Party, their disconnected pragmatism encourages them to accept Huawei and scorn the American reaction. For them, daily commerce and the promise of China trumps all else.

For them there is NO cultural continuity in the west that matters – that is for them simple sentiment and of no worth. They never understood what the Reformation, the Renaissance and all that followed on actually meant – for them it is French flummery – so moving society to China and bending the knee to the Chinese state so long as there is a yen or two to be gained is exactly the same as their grandparents taking the Yankee dollar after 1945.

Cultural values, civilization, commonality is nothing to them. Only the daily trade gain is of moment. And those people are the ones who drive the New Tory Party now. They are driving the future. And the amusingly bumbling Labour Party run by a bunch of whining dysfunctional superannuated Leninists are nowhere in the national conversation.

Of course the BBC gets NONE of this. Nor does the rest of the local hack media.

Britain, via the New Tory Party, kicked into action by the oddity that is Farage, is comprehensively rejecting the enlightenment and all that came from it in the west, to replace it with whatever works, however totalitarian, however alien, however dangerous in the long term, however likely to cut the West adrift from its points of origin, of its origins from Greek classical luminosity so searing it lasted for two and a half thousand years

Make no mistake, Britain is at the start of a deep revolution. One that is cutting the past away. Hacking at it with machetes and letting the people move without any sense of direction to new and never-before-experienced shores. It is the  New Tory Party, at present engaged in formulating a potent poison to dispatch the unimaginative and heroically timid May. - Terry Field

Some Thoughts from England

David Lott is no stranger to these pages.  For several decades he has argued consistently that the United Kingdom should go it alone without membership in the European Union. Last year, the members of his party, the United Kingdom Independent Party, helped lead the charge for Brexit.  In this tome, David, a founding member of UKIP, a veteran of the Royal Air Force and a son of a Battle of Britain hero, reflects on why the current state of Western politics seems to be trending toward populism, or some would argue a return to democratic nationalism. - Glenn N. Holliman

Thoughts on Populism

by David Lott, Englishman

Since the beginning of civilisation there has been rebellion against civil and military governments. The populist uprising in our times is certainly not new and common throughout history. Each authority whether Empire, Nation or even Tribe come to live in fear, sometimes paranoia when a threat from within appears inside their horizon. There are such a remarkable variety of examples of rebellion that there is a danger in being selective as it can be the enemy of objectivity. I will try my best to be fair but brief in order to avoid boring you.

The reaction by rulers to rebellion is mostly authoritarian leading frequently to tyranny. Those in charge convince themselves they are behaving reasonably and their idea of the status quo is sound. They tell themselves the troubled protesters are either mad, simple or a deplorable destabilising threat, whilst fear courses through their veins and colours their response. Occasionally enlightened rulers perceive merit in their opponents’ arguments or perhaps they are simply pragmatic but in both cases upset and violence are avoided. More often than not the Authority has a mindset that cannot be changed which is, in the majority of cases, at the root of protest in the first place as rational argument simply cannot prevail.

Members of David's family take a spring walk amongst the English bluebells!

Protest comes in many forms with many perils. Some are led by the evil as in the rise of Adolph Hitler and his Nazis which was avoidable had not France determined to beggar Germany with its insistence upon unpayable reparations. A little magnanimity would have done wonders.

Other rebellions begin with the best of intentions led by the high minded against oppression or simply poor and/or corrupt government but these idealists are regularly thrust brutally aside by sly selfish and greedy conspirators lurking in their midst. The most recent example of a just rebellion being usurped by evil was that of the the Arab Spring which was traduced by religious fanatics. The desire for democracy was overwhelmed by carefully placed religious freaks from within. 

Unfortunately, political leaders in the West, since the outrageous tragedy of 9/11, have been painfully blind to the forces of evil that circumvented the Arab Spring’s desire for secular change. The financiers of religious extremism subsequently, in an act of madness, became our allies in the Middle East. As a result, we created a state of affairs that fuels hatred, violence, gruesome brutality and servitude that should have no place in the ‘enlightened’ West’s foreign policy, a policy which results in terrorism at home and death by drowning for the thousands in the Mediterranean seas.

Some revolutions simply exchange one set of tyrannical leaders for another as ideals become corrupted by power as in the communist revolutions in the 20^th century.

The perils of revolution were very much in the forefront of our minds of those of us who struggled for over 20 years to free ourselves from the tentacles of the European Union and break free to once more have the freedom to govern ourselves.  

Just because there have been examples of tragedy following the usurped intentions of various uprisings of populism in the last century it does not mean to say it always leads to disaster or regression, far from it. The US War of Independence followed a successful uprising against the arrogant and inflexible British leading to the creation of the greatest nation on earth. What a wonderful achievement, you wished to govern yourselves and you succeeded brilliantly.

Oliver Cromwell’s uprising led to civil war and victory over monarchical rule. His rule, though austere, allowed Britain to transition from a largely autocratic model of government to that of a democratic kind subsequently adopted throughout much of the world.  Many would argue that the outcome ended better than the bloody French revolution 150 years later. It certainly ended better than Wat Tyler’s peasants’ revolt in 1381 which so very nearly succeeded when his force occupied London. He was too easily appeased by a deceitful King and paid the ultimate price. Yet another example of the perils of rebellion.

Today’s rise in populism in the West is not happening because all is fine and dandy with the governing class.

The reasons are highly complex but in very general terms faith has been lost in the veracity of the ruling elite who seem to believe their corruption, their abuse of privacy and a telling air of superiority has not registered with much of the electorate. Many on the liberal left too often despise the merit within their own country’s culture and nationhood. The preservation of which seems unimportant to them. Much better that home culture is watered down with mass immigration, as immigrants can be used as voting fodder. Hillary Clinton to her credit was openly honest about watering down national characteristics in a drive towards global governance during her campaign for the presidency. Today’s President elect in France holds the same beliefs.

None but the most dyed in the wool supporter of the current rulers can say there is no reason to protest. My worry is that there are a huge number of such leopards that cannot change their spots who simplistically see the populist opposition as anything other than a deplorable threat to their power. Populism thrives does it not, when poor, deaf, arrogant, deceitful, corrupt and undemocratic politicians rule? And boy is it thriving.

Today people have woken up to the Globalist agenda that thwarts democracy through corrupt malleable politicians and waters down distinct and admirable civilised cultures. War has actually become a method of distracting people from the underlying agenda. Thanks to social media the people no longer buy the established line and the press is losing the battle of information. Social media has more factual credibility than mainstream media with the ordinary man and woman on the street. We now see government trying to influence the organs of the social media such that they deny freedom of speech. It is a sterile unimaginative approach that will be scorned.

In Europe the EU provides profoundly undemocratic, corrupt and incompetent government. Its only policy body, the European Commission, is not even elected. Its ability to take decisions requires 28 once sovereign countries of very different viewpoints and cultures on geopolitics to agree! If they do not comply, they can be, and sometimes are punished. It is no wonder this process leads to paralysis when negotiating trade agreements. And always Germany lurks behind the scene pulling their puppet strings. The EU will fail, the leaders may hold hands after a terrorist attack but any real solidarity is dissolving rapidly as the tide of independence swells.

I have mentioned corruption being rife. There are 30,000 lobbyists in Brussels entertaining officials in every field with flattery, nice lunches, holidays and finally juicy jobs when their time is up within the institutions. The situation in Washington is not dissimilar.

EU and German leaders are deaf to the cries of Greece, now governed in terrible austerity linked to an overvalued Euro that denies any escape from penury.Germany’s unilateral opening of EU borders, automatically supported by the EU directly leads to the cries of alarm from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Holland, Austria, Italy, France, Sweden and Poland on the subject of mass Islamic migration. The culture of these people is perfectly easily absorbed into our own when small numbers are involved. 

Spring in England can be chilly, but what would England be without lovable dogs and the early bluebells of the season.

But many within this tsunami bring a different legal system of Sharia and refuse to integrate which generates fear from north to south and east to west in Europe, especially in the case of female safety from molestation, grooming and rape. Many individual governments are refusing to dance to the German tune played dutifully by the EU’s orchestra.

Time is so ripe for rebellion that of course there are populist groups rising, as so many criteria for their existence are met and the only answer seems to be more faceless Globalism and more EU forced integration. Unless EU leaders take note opposition will grow and grow.

Interestingly in the UK the government of the day seems to have listened (but I am wary and only time will tell) to the voice of the people who, I am proud to say, have been provided with populist leadership that has prevailed in its intention to leave this failing institution of the EU. Let us all hope that populism has done its job in the UK. The people seem to think so at the moment. As I write this there has been an extraordinary protest at the England and Wales local elections in favour of a government determined upon its course to leave the EU.

The UK Independence Party, under the leadership of the charismatic Nigel Farage, of which I am a part, brought about our successful result in a referendum and the application by the UK Government to leave the EU. This was achieved completely from outside the Westminster arena. It was an extraordinary example of popular uprising and it looks at the moment that the General Election is turning into a second referendum upon our EU membership with those advocating to remain in the EU losing massively. Our Ukip vote has collapsed and gone to those with the task of implementing the departure from the EU; the Conservative party.

This is a real worry as we got where we did through honest toil and dedication spanning more than 20 years of superhuman effort sustained by conviction and iron determination. Prime Minister May will need the same qualities to see this through. She voted to Remain in the EU so it is only natural we suspect some backsliding as she is unlikely to have our conviction – how could she?

The Labour Party is collapsing and may split, the Liberal Democrats as a pro EU outfit will remain in limbo. The last Prime Minister the pro EU David Cameron was forced from office and all this achieved through populism led by the UK Independence Party. This was an immense and unprecedented victory for the people and an underpinning of democracy with huge political realignment bringing change to our country.

You see folks it can be done if you are determined enough, without bloodshed and within democratic parameters, but I can assure you it was very hard work!

Some say that in reality Mrs. May is the new Ukip Leader! However, there is much water to still flow under the bridge and our Party will continue ready to surge forward again should this Conservative government fail to deliver. Unlike Wat Tyler we have learned the lessons of not being too easily appeased. - David Lott

The British Exit from the E.U. - To Be or Not to Be?

Here in the USA the most vicious presidential election of the 20th and 21st Centuries is blessedly closing.  It has been the most horrid in my life time with Trump supporters chanting at his rallies that Hillary Clinton be locked up for her email controversy. It has been a toxic campaign, and one that will continue to divide this nation.  

So perhaps our American readers have not noticed that a British court this past week stated that only the House of Commons can initiate Article 50 to allow the U.K. to exit the European Union.  This Kingdom, so vital to the world as a bulwark of civilized behavior, is now engaged in bitter, divisive and ugly debate over the validity of that court decision.  Our regular correspondent, Terry Field, a learned Englishman who lives in France and Florida, provides this Sunday morning an article worth your time.  He covers many 'bases' including reflections on his fellow Englishman David Lott's recent views on Brexit and western foreign policy.

I trust our readers welcome this dialogue challenging us to remove ourselves, at least for a time, from our respective 'world view' cultural corners.  - Glenn N. Holliman

Reflections while on a Florida Sojourn by an Englishman - Terry Field

The intellectual violence overwhelming England at present is almost unprecedented. There appears to be a collapse in the cohesion of the mind of the nation. This is new, and not seen before. Certainly not since the 1930’s, when the competition between communism and capitalism for the mind of the nation raged unchecked. Terry Field below right.

The forces supporting brexit appear to be intent on ‘sweeping aside’ those persons – almost an equal number at the point of the referendum – with accompanying violence of language and stridency of attitude that continues to surprise. This form of social violence carried all before it for the months after the vote, and the Houses of Parliament seemed cowed, and unsure of their right to think independently of the plebiscite.

That is how the new unelected Prime Minister Teresa May has characterised that matter. The vote should be the force for total acceptance of a radical break with Europe; Parliament should rubber-stamp it and its potential to limit or modify the process would be removed by dictat.

The court, having decided this to be unsupported by law, the rage of indignation against these venerable judges has been vicious and unconstrained.

Never mind the sovereignty of the Parliament, never mind the rule of law, never mind wise considered judgment – these lawyers are constraining the ‘will of the people’ and are an enemy to be confronted.

The rage dominates the populist press. The Telegraph – a supposed ‘newspaper of record’ screamed ‘the judges against the people’.

Yet 52% voted to leave; 48% to stay.

After a campaign of grotesque lies and distortions by the Brexit camp; suggesting ludicrous moneys would flow into the bankrupt National Health Service from the funds saved – to be promptly retracted by Nigel Farage (leader of the United Kingdom Independent Party) and others after the vote result.  Nigel Farage below.

This preamble is needed to add context to the article by the correspondent from UKIP.

The article suggests a potentially violent response if the leave group -52% of the vote only – does not get the interpretation its most radical members place on the vote. But here is the rub.

We have in Britain an ancient and respected representative parliamentary democracy, charged with holding in it hands all the legislative power of the State. It is there for correct that Parliament should and has the authority to analyse the entire process of suggested exit from Europe proposed by the new government. It is not to be bypassed. Not to be ignored.

The plebiscite was an opinion, incapable of being interpreted by any faction, and that includes this government, independent of Parliament.

Should the extreme Brexit faction choose the apparently threatened violent response, we have in Britain a police, a judiciary and a prison system that can act to protect the nation from violent insurrection.

The article refers to the continuing failure of the United States to ‘win any wars’ – presumably since 1945.

As I recall, the world was convulsed by a cold war from 1945 to 1986, and it could be argued that is has been re-started in recent years.

I would consider it a gross insult to the dead of Britain and the United States to suggest that the recovery of the Korean peninsula was not both a victory and morally right. I would similarly consider that the support of the nationalists in China and the protection of Taiwan was and is morally right and a limited success.

Vietnam and the Middle East are different categories, and cannot be considered either successful nor morally unstained; yet who when Russia fed arms to Vietnam and the Soviet expansion into Africa was radical and threatening could unequivocally say the war was not an understandable reaction after Dien Bien Phu. Easy to say today it was a dreadful error. Not so easy at the time, and I suggest the writer of the article who so readily dismisses the American actions since the war with such gross contempt had any greater wisdom to offer at the time.

Wars are, in general, not ‘successes’ or ‘failures’. Only a military man of intermediate rank thinks they either should or could generally be so. War is an extension of civil action, and has, normally, limited objectives. That the cold war threw up many ‘proxy wars’ is undeniable. Those wars were dreadful. The assaulted peoples suffered dreadfully, but it does take two to tango. The other sides – China and Russia – were active and violent where it was in their interests to be so. The article seems to suggest there was no such set of adversaries. Bizarre.

As for the Middle East, the changed view was that pre-emptive action to forestall severe near-term threats was the developed view in Britain and the United States.

It may or may not have been a reasonable and responsible pre-conception. The aftermath of the Middle East adventure has resulted in disaster. Is that because the initial analysis was incorrect, or because the extreme over-reaction of the present Administration to act not at all and watch events unfold with other ‘allies’ taking the load on the ground has created such a vacuum that ISIS and Putin have seized their opportunity?

It is a point of discussion, not an excuse – taken by the above writer – to excoriate the United States, and suggest Britain has no mind and slavishly follows it ‘protector.’

Given the commonly received view on both sides of the Atlantic that pre-emptive action against anticipated future aggression and ‘failed states’ would protect the West effectively, the problem for Britain was how to act on this, whilst not appearing to do so.

Hence now, Blair’s agony and Chilcot’s vengeance.

But this present public posturing of squeaky-clean morality does nothing to answer the question – was the strategy, and the motivation behind it, misplaced, or not? It is FAR too early to tell.

Given this, it leaves an unpleasant taste to read a diatribe against the actions, mindset, and by inference the moral worth – of the United States and Britain over a number of decades. I reject, as do many, such a radical characterisation.

The events on the battle field are made harder to bear by the economic trauma experienced by the West, firstly since de-industrialisation (and the appearance of industrial super-productivity, not discussed at all)  followed by the ‘financial crisis’ ( not really) of 2007/8.

The losers - in this tale of massive changes in wealth creation and the raising of 1000 million people out of poverty across the World are – in part by social media, in part by the sort of charismatic leaders we have seen before in the 1930s and in part by the breakdown in the constraints of the social cohesion that came with the militarised societies  that lived through war and then cold war – asserting themselves, but their desires are informed by poor economic understanding, and infected with dangerous petty nationalism.

They can, in the end, achieve nothing, even if they gain power in the United States by a disastrous election result, and of course if Britain cuts itself out of the largest trading block of like minded people on the planet. Their dreams reflect their flaws in both comprehension, and capacity to empathise with their fellow citizens who disagree with them.

This is a new form of violence – of intimidatory social violence. Its bluff should be called. Its absurd unwise, simplistic, childlike urges should be confronted and defeated.

In Britain, the Prime Minister is a constraint on wisdom and rationality. In my view, she is the worst prime Minister the country has ever experienced – or certainly since 1914. Teresa May below.

Therefore, I hope in Parliament. I trust it will steer the country to more rational times. (If May does not go to the country selling another dose of cheap nationalism and unachievable hegemony over a supine world waiting with baited breath for Britain to flex its free-trade wings).

At this rate, I half-expect us to try to recover India. Anyone for tiffin?????

Terry Field nesting in Florida much of this winter....

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