Greetings fellow couch potatoes.
Never did I think I would see the day that I would actually want Front Nationale to win in France. I spent some time observing them in Second Life, and the crowd ten years ago were not particularly edifying. An older le Pen was in charge then.
Times change and so do we, and I was commenting only last week that our fortunes in the UK depend heavily on the outcome of the French election.
Why? Macron is the French equivalent of Tony Blair, a corporatist who welcomes Europe and wholly imaginary ‘unity’ in France (Front Nationale has always been a far stronger right wing force in France than we have in the UK – my ex, who was rather swarthy himself, was a keen supporter.)
If Le Pen wins however, our negotiating position significantly improves in Europe. Two feeder economies in negotiation are far stronger than one. It is, to put it simply, our best chance of having a country at all in a century or so.
The EU was set up on the basis that there was safety in size – you can easily see the future being China versus India versus Russia versus the USA in only a couple of decades. An attempt to form a super-state rather than forge shaky alliances with other countries in Europe is therefore considered desirable for defensive and negotiating purposes. The other reason for the EU is corporatism.
Labour is significantly cheaper when there is plenty of it and it creates a nice division amongst the population in terms of fighting for employment rights or even having a job at all. As far back as 2002, there were over three hundred applicants for each relevant job available in Scotland, and I am sure if you asked other people, it goes far further back than that. In the event that you want 30 or so specific PHD qualified applicants, you can easily have them under a system of free movement.
As I have said before this is bad for you as an individual. More supply means you are compensated far less for your skills, and you have limited means to fight back if you simply cannot get a job at all.
So as a Scottish Nationalist, I am afraid I cannot buy into the idea of unlimited immigration in the face of the lack of employment I have experienced. It is utterly soul destroying to find your government offering grants to people from other countries to stay after their degree, whilst doing nothing at all to aid natives in the form of providing relevant jobs in sufficient quantity.
The entire system in fact, falls down if you cannot secure a sufficient supply of jobs. The sociological basis of racism is competition for resources, as we have seen from the example of the north of England. These people are not all racist, they are starving and living in decaying circumstances.
This is why Brexit was a good move for the English population, and an unusually intelligent decision. Weak pound equals jobs, stalling immigration means less competition for jobs. This adds up to a potentially better standard of living for everybody in the UK. A revival in manufacturing was exactly what the UK needed, and a low pound is the most exquisitely democratic way of making sure that happens.
We have not even begun the system of starve-in-order-to-boom yet, and people are complaining, backtracking and I am getting the impression that the Conservatives believe that we cannot Brexit at all. This is extremely shortsighted, and there seems to be a prevailing misunderstanding of Conservative history in the party. Conservatism has not always been the party of the rich cutting taxes. The idea is that you provide opportunities for the masses, and the government is thereby enabled to cut taxation because everybody is paying it. What we have now is a system where they cut taxes at any cost, including people quite literally starving to death.
Perhaps it would take a messy haired free thinker to point this out, once we have secured a Frexit. It would seem unlikely that a thinker is going to emerge from anywhere else in the party. A more egalitarian, conscience-led Conservatism would be considerably more popular.
I will be going further into this topic in Lucifer Ogilvie, but I thought I would just plant the seed, if it is not already there.
Boris’s carpet is going very well, and the first layer is almost complete. I think it is going to be rather nice.
Toodle Pip, chums
Ina