You're not from round here, are you?

The EU had a wonderful vision at its heart; peaceful co-existence.    The shorthand for this is 'multiculturalism'.   Everybody would celebrate everyone else's unique features.

But if you repeatedly remind people that they are foreign all you are telling them is that they will never reach the level of acceptance at which the differences are irelevant, unremarked.   It also reminds everybody else that Sanjay, Errol, and Nikita are foreign, even when all three of them have been born here, as were their parents and grandparents. 

It does not matter how well intended one is.  If you point out the differences between people, especially unbidden, all it does is 'other' the person, excluding them by example.  It does not matter how much you celebrate the differences.  That they are different is thereby underlined, even when for all pratical purposes, they are the same as anybody else. 

Thus multiculturalism creates instability.  It magnifies small variations which should be rendered insignificant by time, cutting them like fresh letters in stone:

 "You are not One of Us".   

The Next Chapter

Let us look at the breakdown of the referendum calmly.

Out of ten people, three said nothing at all.  Of the next six people, three wanted to Remain in the EU while three knew they wanted to Leave. The last person eventually voted for Leave, taking it over the dividing line.

This is not a landslide.  It would be wrong to make the mistake of 1975 and paint this as a definitive expression of national sentiment - not with almost a third of voices silent.  But now we know exactly the strength of  feeling in significant part of it, which is all that was ever necessary.   The elites have annoyed enough people over the political spectrum that only half the active electorate can be relied on to follow their recommendations.

The first thing is to stop annoying people by making enemies unnecessarily. Instead, look closely at the texture of people's lives and ask what can be done to foster the historically successful identity of the United Kingdom. It was last seen in 2012 at the Olympics, and it was confirmed - just - at the Scottish Referendum. 

Note, however, that almost half the active electorate voted Remain, and it is their country too.

The opportunity now is to take this solid expression of disapproval and let our ruling elites show they have understood: they got it wrong.  Sackcloth and ashes, please. 

Next, a delay while the parties take on board what has happened. They are so tired that they can barely think straight.  And that includes the Leavers.   Nothing in legal terms has happened, nor is it going to for months. 

A signal has been sent to the European Union - specifically Ms Merkel - "This is not your border to open."   Germany has twice plunged Europe in to war.   This signal prevents them from making the same old mistake but in a new way: i.e. thinking they own the place.

Now, let us have a cup of tea and remember we are British.  Exactly as we were yesterday.

Story Arc

Back in 1975 the world looked like this:

The USSR was, we were assured, a thriving economy.  But it was rapidly running out of basic things such as bath plugs and soap.  However, it was not running out of nuclear warheads or the will to dominate the bordering countries, which included East Germany. 

The USA was economically bouncy, although it was struggling in competition with the Asian states which were rapidly advancing in electronic goods, such a Nikon cameras.

Canada and Australia and New Zealand were Far, Far Away.  People who went there were emigrating, and that meant you would not see them again.

Europe, however, was getting closer.  Coach tours, package holidays which included flights, and ambitious car drivers, all went to Europe for their holidays.  To the surprise of many Brits, there was more than one kind of wine.  Beautiful gifts came back from these romantic places; fans made of white lace, packages of nuts in a sweet and crispy coating, enamel bracelets with abalone shell insets, woven bags with twisty white shoulder straps, china cockerells; all the glamour of the Silk Road cascaded on to The Continent.

If I had to think of Europe in just one thing, it would be a tiny cup of thick black coffee; sweet, slightly gritty, the aroma of adventure.   Nothing like the bitter watery beige back home.  Apparently coffee is made from roasted and ground beans, not gravy granules. It is like the wine; there is more than one kind.

In 1975 homes had a telephone in the hallway and everyone remembered how, the year before, the electricity had been rationed.  A modern society had been flung back 100 years, only without the quantity of oil lamps and open fires, so people were reduced to hunching over candles and organizing their lives so as to go to bed to keep warm and save the torch and radio batteries for emergencies.

In 1975 it looked like a good idea to stay in the European Economic Community.  That way, at least the children could emigrate to Spain and not freeze to death, which was better than having them go permanently to Australia.

However, within ten years, the world began to look very different.

Developments in air travel meant that if someone went to Canada, Australia or New Zealand, they could come back to visit.  It was no longer like colonizing a distant planet.  Freddie Laker proved that there was a market for a budget airline, and that ordinary people could afford to fly to New York.

Mobile phones were the size of house-bricks and only certain people had them, but everyone could see the price coming down. By 1985 computers had migrated from the data departments to the desk top and were busy taking their jump in to the household and thence to the handbag.

Perhaps in front of you at this moment is the data relic of The World Before: the QWERTY keyboard, designed to stop metal printing arms from tangling.  In 1975 we learned to touch-type on manual machines. The layout is so engrained that there is no point in trying to change it.  But by 1985 the mighty manual typewriter had gone, replaced by electronic versions, and then by word processing software. 

There was determination to end the Cold War, not by fighting but by showing that to have the fight would be cripplingly expensive, even for the victor.   In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down.  Germany re-united.  In 1990 I unknowingly worked for a few weeks on the last of the Star Wars projects, convincing the remnant of the USSR that the Cold War  really was over.  It was more of a PR stunt; no security was taken at all  - I did not even sign the Official Secrets Act -  and I suspect I was faxing materiel manifests direct to the Soviet embassy, having produced them on an IBM word processor.  The aim was to show them that they could be comprehensively, bankruptingly, out-spent. 

Meanwhile, Tim Berners-Lee was writing the code which meant that anyone could use the giant file structure which is the Internet, not just Unix programmers and computing students. 

In 1975 it was not apparent to most people that technology was changing the world, so they made a sensible decision based on the visible situation at the time.   The technology had been incubating for decades but it still seemed like science fiction.  It took only fifteen years, less than the time than for a child to grow and leave secondary school, for the changes to become visible in every home.

Britain joined the EEC not on the morning of a new world,  but on the eve of the old post-war, Cold War, world.

It is in the nature of life; you have to take a decision based on imperfect information, knowing it will have long-term consequences.

Last week I bought a pair or shoes which had been designed in the US, manufactured in Germany, but coordinated by a British company which operates a portfolio of international fashion brands out of an office in Norwich. It is the company which stands behind the authenticity of the shoes so that I am not being scammed in to buying a knock-off.  They make some of the brands in Britain, and I wear those, too. 

I also bought a dress which is designed and manufactured in London.   Kindly do not tell me I am raaaaycist; the owners can trace their family back to Cyprus in the 1950s and have over half a century of experience in the rag trade.  They now manufacture in London where they can guarantee the production standards and the care of the workforce.  They ship world-wide.  Do I pay over the odds for that?  No I do not.  I pay no more than in any high street chain, and I know that this dress helps secure the families in London.

It makes sense to vote Remain.  It is an insurance policy, but it is not the horizon of opportunity it once was. Forty years on I sip an expensive ethical coffee and it is still exotic.  I can tell you where it was grown in South America and who bought the crop,  which small-outfit roaster processes it, and the family-run farm shop which is one of the distribution points.  Opportunity is now out in the world, via the web, via transport.

So that's where I'll be looking, outwards towards the world, because that is where the best chance to build prosperity for our children is; but they need a secure country in which to stand in order to do it.

That country is Great Britain.

Freebie - The supremacy of European Law

David Cameron and other MPs think they can negotiate with European law.  It is a very old delusion caused by not being bothered to buy even an entry-level primer. 

During the 1980s Mrs Thatcher threw millions of pounds down a series of drains called Factortame.  The essence of this festering sequence of cases was that the British government thought it could protect our fishing rights by specifying who could own British-registered ships based on nationality, even though the British government had signed those rights away in a treaty.

You do not need to be a lawyer to understand that if you have signed a reciprocal treaty and then you go to the trade court moaning that 'snot fair, they will just point to your signature on the bottom of the deal.  What are you complaining about?  You want to fish their waters, they want to fish yours.  You can own their boats, they can own yours. If you can't take a joke, you should not have signed up. 

The code word for this is 'pooling our sovereignty in designated areas'.  i.e. All of them.  Whereas I think sovereignty is like virginity. You either are, or you aren't.

European law takes precedence over English law.    Politicians should  check what the European Court of Justice said half a century ago; they need not take this blog's word for it - why not ask a reputable law publisher?

Thompson Reuters is offering a key freebie. You can have a section of the Nutshell Guide to European Law online.   For political purposes you do not even need to read all of it.  Just scroll down to their section 4,  EU and National Law, page 36,37, 38. 

People feeling studious can read to the end, though. It is not long -  only ten pages of core material as the rest is surrounding items such as the cover.   Somebody should print this out for the Prime Minister. 

In which I agree with Peter Hain

At last. 

He [Peter Hain] told The Independent: “Ukip is hoovering up the anti-politics vote. It goes beyond Europe and even beyond immigration. Some of it is plain bigotry. A lot of it is deep, deep antagonism to the political class, of which all the major parties are part. Under New Labour – and it has still not been wiped away - there has been a big disillusionment with us as a party among white working class traditional Labour supporters.”

Labour has not represented the working classes since it voted for the party to continue the European project in 1974. Michael Foot objected on exactly the grounds that it would deny Labour the chance to protect its own core vote. He was out-voted.  No problem; since then, Labour has just changed its core vote to represent net beneficiaries of the welfare state, such as benefits claimants, immigrants, public sector employees, and the middle-class chatterati luvvies who think that there is a magic money tree.   It was shrewd political decision; put together this group can, and did, deliver electoral success.

Of course, it was helped by John Major also alienating the Conservative core vote.  A child of the aspiring working classes, an outsider, he made good and became PM.   He promptly squandered the legacy of Margaret Thatcher who had recruited 'Essex Man'; the folk who do not have local authority jobs and guaranteed pensions, people whose work ebbs and flows with the market demand, the net contributors to the welfare state.  Instead of helping them, Major shuffled that huge group towards benefits dependency and straight in to the arms of Tony Blair, where they have remained. 

This does not mean they like Labour.  Older voters remembers that the Conservatives did feck-all for them after an initial burst, but they also remember that there was a time when they thought they might get ahead, might be able to work their way upwards instead of seeing the likes of Tracey Connelly given child benefit, housing benefit and a refurbished house so that her boyfriend could  torture her children in comfort.

Moving below this like a vast lurking Jaws, ready to leap out and snap the ship of state in half, is the issue of immigration.  This does not signify crude xenophobia. Rather, it is that the minister for immigration found a cleaner whose status was queried from the beginning, then later claimed he left the paperwork in his jeans and his daily lady washed them.  Or something.

Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, Paul Gallico, 1958

In the process, he denied that paying work to one of those 'Mrs Harris' voters, who used to make a living out of supplying domestic services to several modest households. Try paying £15 per hour and giving the contract to somebody with a British birth certificate - their own certificate - and she would be back in business.  But that would mean allowing discrimination in favour of British nationals.

I do not have a problem with this but currently it is against EU law as British and EU nationals must be treated equally. There is a way to fix that.

The Gambler

This vid would never get on TV now because of the references to cigareets and whisky, but it has a good lyric for UKIP councillor, David Silvester, who will be feeling sore at UKIP disciplining him for giving an interview when he was told not to.

He is, of course, perfectly entitled to hold whatever personal views he likes and to express them.  However, UKIP is in the run-up to a key election and its enemies are playing for their political lives.  In this context, what matters is not what he told David Cameron two years ago,  but what it will tell the other parties in eighteen weeks time if their troughers can be chucked off the Euro gravy-train by a significant swing to UKIP.

Best then not to get in to an unwinnable argument instead of sticking to the main thing: we have got to get back control of our own law, borders and negotiated terms of trade. 

The Gambler

You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done. 

Songwriters: SCHLITZ, DON, © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC 

Social Workers have too much free time

....the chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers Bridget Robb says the report on social work in the UK offers an insight into how stressed, overloaded and under-resourced social workers have become.

Source ITV News

This week Essex social workers, a health trust and members of the judiciary have found themselves side-tracked by having to deal with the outrage over their handling of an unwell Italian woman.

The bare bones as everyone knows are that a visiting Italian woman had an episode associated with a condition of being bi-polar.  The police took her to a mental hospital which sectioned her although she explained she was a foreign national and said she wanted to go home.  Bi-polar people are irrational when they are distressed, but then so are some people who are not bi-polar.  This is not the same as lacking the capacity to give consent, the capacity may fluctuate.  Besides, going home seems pretty rational to me.  Best place for her.

She was pregnant but that makes no difference in this instance. What matters is that a foreign national who had committed no crime was detained against her will.  The only thing the Health Trust should ever have done was stabilize her and put her on a plane home, with an escort if necessary, after liaising with the Italian authorities.  Their citizen, their problem. She was not exercising her EU rights to remain in Britain.

Instead, for reasons which have yet to be disclosed, the hospital 'looked after' her for the next ten weeks from 13 June 2012 to 23 August 2012 .   Ten weeks is ample time to arrange a short plane ride.  Her right of free movement, also established in EU law, was interfered with.  She had a right to be ill where it suited her, not the Health Trust.    She now says that she was shocked and had no inkling that she would be forced in to surgery. No, but somebody knew because the Health Trust did nothing until she was ripe (39 weeks), then they applied for emergency powers, giving the judge (Mostyn M-J) the bum's rush late one afternoon. Mostyn  agreed to let them act without seeking her consent on the pretext that she lacked capacity to consent and that it was in her best interests. That is, he took at veterinary approach .  He did not check thoroughly for capacity or lack thereof.  

The Trust is going to have to explain why it chose to do that and how it colluded with Essex cc social workers to give the judge no time to make an order returning her to Italy. 

We have many British citizens and traumatised refugees who may need ten weeks adult in-patient care.  Towards them we have a humanitarian duty.  Instead we have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on in-patient care, lawyers, social workers and court time to hold someone who could, and should have been treated in their own country.

Our humanitarian duty to this lady was to escort  her home safely as quickly as possible, which is where she wanted to go. You do not need a degree in law or social work to see this.  Nor do you need to be a whackjob conspiraloon to ask "Why were they holding on to a foreign national whom they were anxious to get rid of after the birth?"

Surely it is obvious that if you say you are snowed under with child protection work, what you do is send home those who want to go and who can be cared for by their own social service departments,.  Essex CC knew that the baby is half-Italian, half-Senegalese and that her mother, father, siblings and grandparents - the whole extended family - are in Italy.  It may be she will be adopted, but it is in her interests to be adopted in Italy because that is where her real family is. It is where she is from.

The judges, being separate, do not notice they are being hustled. Although Mostyn M-J agreed to hear the interim care application himself, the social workers obtained a different judge, Parnell, to hear it.  That way they controlled what Parnell was told.  Classic control dynamic; limit the extent to which the marks can compare notes.    Later, Judge Newton recorded that he did not understand the background which had been obscured from him. He did not ask himself 'why is this obscure?'.

Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me is what the judges should have said. Only they could be, and were.

Their final step will be to get Judge Munby to reluctantly agree that since the child has been attached to the foster carers for so long and speech will now be well-advanced at 15 months, the social workers will be allowed to continue as per the adoption order.   He will find it very hard to resist this argument.

I call bullshit. Social workers have got too much free time and they've been using it to do baby-selling, using our dollar to fund the farming operation. Plus, they've now made sure that any pregnant or post-natal woman feeling a bit dicky will not call her doctor in case they end up snatching the kid, so we can look forward to an increase in suicides.  The correct name for this is 'anti-social work'.

If the social workers don't like that conclusion, perhaps they should behave differently.

Silver lining though - it is now published right round the globe that if you come to Britain they'll knock you on the head and nick your baby and tell you it's legal.  The BNP itself could not have come up with a finer deterrent to immigration.

A free and pluralistic media to sustain European democracy

I can't face wading through all this so let's concentrate on one feature:

Recommendation:

 

There should be a provision of state funding for media which are essential for pluralism (including geographical, linguistic, cultural and political pluralism), but are not commercially viable.

 

The state should intervene whenever there is a market failure leading to the under‐provision of pluralism, which should be considered as a key public good

 

Translation: 

 

Tax payers will be obliged to fund dreary publications such as pro-EU propaganda, union self-congratulatory bumf, anything vaguely leftist such as the extinct Spare Rib magazine, and perhaps a whinge-sheet by groups such as Hacked Off.

It is obviously a market failure that people don't rush out and spend their own money on this, so we'll have to have it delivered to their houses anyway, in defiance of the EU rules about not creating waste. It's not waste when we do it. 

Pluralism does not mean funding the UKIP newspaper or anything which puts forward the view that the state has a primary over-riding duty towards its own citizens.  

This is all to show how democratic the EU is, even though it isn't.

The Death Penalty

There is a parallel between the 1965 vote on the abolition of the death penalty and the 2013 vote on same sex marriage. 

The vote on same-sex marriage went 366 in favour to 161 against. That is, approximately two thirds of the House supported the government. The larger part of the one-third opposition was not the Opposition at all; it was the government's own party.  In a free vote, the government only got its bill through by doing deals with the party which it nominally opposes.

 In 1965 the Labour MP Sydney Silverman, who had committed himself to the cause of abolition for more than 20 years, introduced a private member's bill to suspend the death penalty, which was passed on a free vote in the House of Commons by 200 votes to 98. The bill was subsequently passed by the House of Lords by 204 votes to 104.

Source: wiki, which goes on to detail the exclusions and parliamentary technique used to present abolition as suspension.  The split, again, was a two-thirds for change, one-third for the status quo.  Note also in subsequent developments that there was a deadline; the abolition had to be enacted in English law before a European-set deadline. If it had not been done then the authority of European law would have become much more visible to the voting public.  As with same sex marriage, the impetus is not from within Britain but to disguise the fact that the real power comes from outside it. 

Despite the parliamentary feeling that the argument about the death penalty is done and dusted, no politician would dare put the matter before the public.  The public is much less convinced that there is any point in keeping Ian Huntley breathing, and it is about to ask the same question of David McGreavy who has failed in his bid for anonymity.  Despite what some people claim, the law does not lead public opinion as much as they would like, nor is it clear that we get good law when it tries to do so.

English law jumps before it is pushed in order to disguise that hand of the pusher.

Switzerland News

As can be seen from the diagram on My Favourite Wiki, Switzerland is not a member of the EU but in 2000 it signed the Agreement on Free Movement of Persons with the European Union. (Reports the Independent on Sunday)

It's not clear why they would sign that since Swiss citizens appeared to be able to move freely without it, but there must have been some reason at the time.  Perhaps in those balmy pre-9/11, pre-banking-crisis days it seemed like a good idea. Switzerland's majority trade is with the EU so it makes sense not to annoy the customers.  However, it also looks like a surreptitious way to try to get the Swiss to agree, de facto, to something they had already voted against.

Just in case of trouble, there was a safety-clause written in giving the Swiss state the power to restrict entry via a permit system but even that power will lapse.   However, for the moment it has been invoked, capping the numbers of people who can come in to Switzerland from certain states.   As wth all EU-related matters, the power is hedged about with conditions, categories and implementation dates, making it take effect slowly and incrementally.

But the overall pattern is clear: these levels of immigration are not acceptable to the Swiss people and the government has reacted to that.  Since the complaint is reported by the Independent as immigration pushing up house prices as a result of business expansion and Switzerland being a very attractive place for businesses to relocate, it can be assumed that the squeeze is being felt by middle-class voters.  The BBC however, reports this as if the concern is about the influx of lower-paid workers . 

The doctrine of free movement of people is good for the businesses and the individuals who move to secure better conditions for themselves.  However, the doctrine takes no account of the way this also imposes a disbenefit across the rest of the society. Demands for infrastructure: transport, housing, policing, health services and education rise. These have to be paid for by existing taxpayers who may then find they also face greater competition.  Benefit is privatized, the wider costs nationalized.  There can be good reasons for doing that, such as the general benefit of education, but the costs should be recognized properly instead of pretending they don't exist.

The Swiss mode of government includes regular use of referenda.  It is therefore arranging two of them to find out exactly what people - their citizens, not other folk and especially not Germans - want their government to do.

My favourite Wiki - Supranational European Bodies

This lovely Euler diagram shows that there are alternative bodies we could be members of in a way which is very easy to see.  It's only like a gym membership package or choosing which insurance options to take on a policy. Just move your flag to where you'd rather be. 

Where we ought to move to is a matter for debate, and there could be some additional rules which link certain memberships so that if you want to be in one, you have to be in another, which might constrain which group(s) we go in to.

However, Switzerland seems to do pretty well by being in The Council of Europe, EFTA and the Schengen area.  Admittedly they still have the rulings of the EFTA court to deal with but then, if you are forming mutual trade agreements you must expect there to be a way of arbitrating when club members disagree.

The main thing to grasp is that when David Cameron makes oozy noises about a referendum and Tory ignoramuses pretend you can pick and choose which part of EU law to comply with, either they haven't done their homework or they are telling a flat lie in the hope of electoral success. It's not an in-or-out issue to frighten the children with.

Yes, we can leave the European Union and survive. No, we won't necessarily lose all our memberships although we might have to ask EFTA nicely if they would admit us.  No, we don't really need permission to go. Lawyers will tell you they can't undo this, that or the other.  Tell them we are going to resile, repeal the ECA72, and if they won't get on with the job then, like Cardinal Wolsey, they'll be replaced with Thomas Cromwell.

If it's good enough for Henry VIII, it's good enough for us.

.....
See also Switzerland News