Britain to Pay £50 Billion for the Right to Continue Buying From Germany!

The rumoured decision by the British government to bung at least £50 billion to the European Union for the right to buy goods mainly from Germany reminds me that a century ago the statesmen of Europe were getting ready to travel to Versailles to end the Great War. There, the German delegation was presented with a document and told to sign on the dotted line, as you can see them doing in the above photograph.

Germany was defeated, her navy had mutinied, her army was in a state of collapse and the country was almost ungovernable. She had no choice but to agree to the terms that were dictated to her at Versailles.

The last time I checked the German army had not had a victory parade down Whitehall in 2017 and even if they had I would expect the British people to ignore that and carry on fighting. Actually, we have not been defeated in war and should not sign up to pay reparations as if we had.

Forking out a few quid to a few fairly dubious types is one thing. It is how we expect them to behave and no right-thinking man could object to further greasing a few already greasy palms, but this amount of money is less about smoothing the path to future relations and more about taking the piss.

What is the worse that Germany and her client states can do if we tell them to do their worst? 

We have a massive trade deficit with the EU and can buy the goods that the Germans currently sell us elsewhere in the world. Germany, and it is mainly Germany that we are talking about, would lose a major customer with a detrimental hit on her own economy. So if they want a trade war they can have it and they will lose. 

I might add that in that event the British should play the other cards that we have in our hand. Why should we pretend that Russia is a threat to us just to stop the Poles, Hungarians and Czechs from wetting their beds? Especially if trade with Russia increases as it diminishes with the Germans, and it is mainly Germany that we trade with since the likes of Poland are only able to supply British capitalism with little more than cheap, non-union labour. 

The threat to withdraw from NATO should do wonders for bowel movements acrosss the EU and it is not a threat that the UK should fear using. As with trade, so it is with defence, and they need us more than we need them since we have the channel to protect us today as it has always done in the past.

The British government really must grow some backbone and stop pandering to Berlin and its stooges.

Tesco's Christmas Advert Annoys Headbangers

The headbangers appear to be in full retard mode as they scream about Tesco's 2017 Christmas advert. To my mind, it's just about getting people around their tables to munch tasty Tesco grub, but the headbangers are screaming all over the web that by having Muslims and Sikhs in the video, Tesco has somehow perverted the Christian nature of Christmas with this advert:

Do you think that somebody should tell these utter and complete head-the-balls that the relationship between the sky fairy and late-December is tangential, to say the least? Christmas is a boozy feast that starts about the 24th December and ends around the 1st January. Between those dates, anybody who is sober and not overeating is really not getting into the true meaning of the festivities.

I say about the 24th December because the works' parties will start in early December and just last week I went into a Tesco and saw one worker there with raindear antlers on his noggin, which has to be a record of some kind for the first week in November. The date when the festivities end is also flexible with Scotland having the 2nd January as a public holiday since no true Scotsman is capable of thinking straight until that day at the earliest.

Hardly anyone thinks about the supernatural at any time of the year, still less when they are three sheets to the wind in December. I doubt if most people really fix themselves on the Dawkins' Scale, or have even heard of it, but they are secularists to the core and December gives them an excuse to enjoy themselves, just as Easter is their chance to get away for a few days.

This is why the American habit of wishing people "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" has always struck me as a bit silly. Since Christmas has nothing to do with religion for most normal people, the traditional greeting is now a secular one that has no need to be changed.

If Muslims and Sikhs can be brought into the Bacernalian delights of Christmas then there is a good chance that they will become as post-religious as we are and that can only be a good thing for Britain and her future.

The Catalan Crisis Has Become the Catalan Farce

The Catalonian independence crisis has turned into a farce with the leaders who planned the declaration of independence taking refuge in Belgium, of all places, less than a week after they proclaimed Catalonia's freedom.

Let's start from the beginning: pretty much all the countries that have ever declared their independence have done it unilaterally. Countries that haven't tend not have such declarations in their founding documents. Canada, for instance, has the British North America Act, 1867, passed by the parliament in Westminster along with subsequent British legislation. She did not need to proclaim her independence as it was granted by Britain, the colonial ruler.

Countries that issue a declaration of independence do it against the backdrop of a ruling power that can be expected to oppose that declaration. There then follows either a war of independence or at the very least, such a level of civil unrest that it is obvious to all concerned that this is a serious matter that needs to be addressed. The USA became independent as a result of a war and large chunks of the old USSR did it via the second method of popular insurrections on the streets.

Sometimes a country will win and other times it will lose. If the latter happens then a secessionist state has two options. It can do as the Confederate States of America did and accept the defeat with good grace, or it can copy the Irish strategy of trying again and gain down the generations until eventually, the colonial power decides that it has had enough.

What it cannot do is declare its independence and then refuse to defend that declaration. No state is bound to accept the independence of any other state that does not have the means or willingness to defend itself. In the case of a seceding state, nobody will recognise such a state if it shows no willingness to defend its declaration by force of arms.

Following on from the brutality shown to the Catalans by the Spanish authorities during the country's independence referendum, it was widely expected that following a declaration of independence the population would be busily engaged in building street barricades in Barcelona, filling bottles with petrol and tearing up street cobbles to throw at the incoming Spanish forces. Had Catalonia done that then it is highly likely that more than a few countries would have recognised her as an independent state.  Countries like Venezuela and Bolivia had already been talked about as early recognisers, but even Finnish politicians were discussing it as well, so the numbers could have been quite large.

That would have given hope to the Catalan population and encouraged the government, presumably by then living in hiding, to begin the creation of an underground army in preparation for taking the conflict to the next level.

Instead, the senior Catalan political figures, including the president, jumped into a fleet of cars and drove to the French border where they took a flight to Brussels. Meanwhile, the Catalan people seem to be blithely going about their business, as the Spanish authorities turn the screw tighter and tighter.

One of the problems that you have in all the Latin countries is a belief that the striking of postures and the making of noise equates in some way to the making of progress. So demonstrations are carried out at the drop of a hat because people genuinely believe that this achieves something. It doesn't, of course, and neither does the sounding of car horns in a traffic jam, but they still do it.

This attitude seems to have been at the core of the recent Catalonian Declaration of Independence, but it was coupled with one other factor which may have doomed the venture from the start.

If you look at the photographs of the people who were cheering the declaration they all seemed to be very well fed and dressed. They looked to me like the same types who demonstrate in Britain against Brexit. That is to say, arseholes with dentures and types like that don't intimidate anyone.

The people who do put the frighteners on governments are the denizens of the barrios, the tough neighbourhoods that we would call estates in English. The toughest of them are called barrios jodidos in Spanish and they are on a par with what is known in Portuguese as the favelas. It looks as if this whole business was carried out from start to finish by the middle class who wanted to strike a  radical pose. Those types who have now received a serious dose of heavy manners from los federales and have run away with their tails between their legs, as you expect the middle class to do when things get rough. Meanwhile, for reasons that are still unclear, the boys in the barrios are completely disengaged from everything that has happened.

The end result of all this is that Calalonia has become an international joke, and nobody in power in Madrid will even pretend to take the views of Catalans into account when decisions are being made.