fahrenheit451:176

The problems faced by those opposed to the UK's departure from the EU are not my concern. It is axiomatic that nothing worthwhile can ever be achieved without pain and sacrifice. The restoration of the UK's national sovereignty is precisely such a worthwhile undertaking and I am content for that necessary burden of pain and sacrifice to be shouldered exclusively by all those opposed to Brexit.  It goes some way to mitigating the shame and dishonour of our now 45 years long abject subjugation to the tyrannical despotism of the Franco-German European Union.
The insidious,shrill demagoguey of the Remain campaign continues unabated. The metropolitan elitist led Remoaner rabble are still helmed by the 200+ Labour MPs who never rescinded their allegiance to the plainly seditionist #LabourIn ,who so unexpectedly lost out to the democratic will of the sovereign Electorate,something that took them and their sinister globalist corporate confederates completely by surprise on June 23 2016.
 Bloomberg.com carried the black propaganda headline , " Even Immigrant Managers Fear Brexit These Days ".
Like we should even give a f***. The gist of the Remoaner stance being summed in the Bloomberg article up by :-
" The potential departure of EU migrants means tough times ahead for countless British businesses, including Traditional Norfolk Poultry, one of the companies Bloomberg is tracking through the Brexit process. Set in rolling farmland in East Anglia, the company relies heavily on migrant labor to oversee the farming and processing of more than 5 million turkeys and chickens every year. And it depends on people like Migut to recruit and manage workers who often don’t speak much, if any, English.

 “It’s getting worse and worse. We just can’t find people,” said Mark Gorton, the company’s co-founder. “They’re just not there to recruit.”

Gorton says he and his staff talk about trying to hire more Brits at their weekly meetings, but they can’t even find enough east Europeans to fill vacancies. He tries to move workers off of the minimum wage—7.50 pounds ($9.80) an hour—as soon as he can to retain staff. He’s done away with the requirement that all workers speak English as he struggles to find people."

Even the dumbest Leftist, Another Europe is Possible, marxist-manque ought by this late stage acknowledge the efficacy of the iron law of economics;supply and demand. Capitalists are forced against their own ideological prejudices and personal consciences to actually increase their offer on wages in a vain attempt to attract the necessary numbers of workers.They can of course brutalise and exploit those workers later, on other terms and conditions once they've got them to swallow the bait on remuneration.
It was ever thus. 40 years of stagnant and declining levels of real wages, the rapid cancerous spread of Zero Hours precarious casualised employment are inextricably linked to ever increasing levels of globalisation. None of which is ever in the interests of the workers.
Neither is the EU pantomime of  " freedom of movement of labour ". A heretofore one country's jobless becomes several other countries' problem in so far as the jobless mendicants from Latvia,Lithuania,Romania,Bulgaria, Poland's moribund dysfunctional economies have displaced those who would otherwise have been employed in ,for example,the UK.
The aggregate total of officially 30,000,000 jobless throughout the EU remains undisturbed; the Titanic continues to founder,only the deckchairs have been rearranged.

fahrenheit451:117

You know that feeling of dread you get at the onset of what you know will be a migraine headache? The same sickening sense of foreboding is achieved by listening to what that humongously vapid and lacklustre straw man masquerading as the current leader of the British Labour Party has to say on the EU's " Freedom of Movement ". The impending sense of nausea he induces when evading the issue is all too palpable. It is also all too indicative of the 200 #LabourIn MPs' tawdry metropolitan PC ideology. For some reason, this antidemocratic, seditionist, parliamentary rabble and quite a large swathe of otherwise serious and rational people on the British " Left " think and behave and speak as if the ineluctable Laws of the Capitalist means of production,distribution and exchange , i.e. the totality of the Capitalist economic system has ceased to operate. Despite their voluble and disingenuous abusive harangues to the contrary, they e.g  most of Labour most of the time and most of the other " left " most of the time categorically deny the following.:- The basis of the laws of supply and demand are that the less you have of something,the higher the price of it inexorably is.The more you have of something the lower the price of that becomes.  Seriously,the operation of the capitalist system is really simple, that's why it works. 100 tons of potatoes might fetch a sum of say £1per ton; if only 1 ton of spuds became available, the price would rocket. An increase in the availability of labour in what is " a labour market " will overall lower the price of labour.A shoratge of labour would increase the price. Adam smith expounded on this Marx certainly knew that this is how our world operates. But not according to Corbyn or Slogans With Placards or any other amongst the dreck of failed PC multiculturalist neophytes who show off their faux-revolutionary,anticapitalist politics at Uni. Sad.  Unrestricted labour market competition is called freedom of movement. Utterly ghastly. Time for sovereign borders and tariff barriers and each nation State to its own.Time for autarky and higher wages. Time to smash the #EU to smithereens. And that Comrades is Revolutionary!

fahrenheit451:088

GDP is the main measure of UK economic growth based on the value of goods and services produced during a given period.

My  " facts " are harder than your " facts ". That's about the infantile level of public political discourse in Britain regarding the actual state of the national economy. For years now the DWP ( Department of Workslavery & Penury ) has bleated on and on and on ad nauseam about the record numbers of people " in work ". Their latest stats put it at close to 32 million or something like that. Who cares? It really is Ministry of Truth stuff.  Great news citizens of Oceania, the chocolate ration has been increased! Wherein fact the hapless Winston Smith had just disposed of all written records showing that the chocolate ration had been in fact decreased only the previous year and  he had just consigned those records to the oblivion of the Memory Hole. And still the punitive-Sanctions imposing, human rights and human decency shredding DWP carry on announcing in triumphalist overtones ( ( weirdly reminiscent of the Argentine military junta of 1982 and its successes in the Falklands ) that more and more people are in work or have taken up self-employment. But in the end Capitalism has to maintain rationality and objectivity; if a business is doing badly and making losses or insufficient profits they do get found out and punished by the marketplace in the end. To be pedantic, companies do really need to sell whatever it is they are in business to sell. Governments and the political classes in general don't get this.Neither do the far from impartial,far from dispassionately objective civil service bureaucrats who manufacture propagandistic pigswill that wouldn't have passed for credible even in Maoist China. And so the declining and increasingly moribund western capitalist democracies are atrophying economically,socially and culturally.Insane, indiscriminate punitive social welfare regulations actually inflict quasi-legal punishment on citizens deemed not to be sufficiently actively,in the opinion of a bureaucrat,  "searching " for additional hours of work. There are no, ( how shall I phrase this bearing in mind pseudo-effete/genteel aspirational middle class sensitivities might be involved ?) fucking jobs,ok? geddit? Across the entirety of the , (the UK is still in there at the minute) 28 satrapies of the European Union,there are officially some 30 millions unemployed. The UK's apparent phenomenal jobs growth, which alas the more deluded Brexiteers are harping on about as being an indicator of some outworking of special economic thaumaturgy, is utter fantasy. Gross Domestic Product has barely recovered to its 2007 levels. There are now a million workers on zero hours contracts. Inner EU migration is still in full flow.Vast numbers from south of the Danube and east of the Oder are in effect continuing their colonisation of British society. The tyrannical European Union's great shibboleth of  " freedom of movement of labour " needs to be taken down. take that down, you take the entire EU down.

Footnote:-

On this day,September 15,1940,when that which was necessary for national survival was accomplished, the grandchildren  of those Heroes alas turned out unworthy of the inheritance and life which those Heroes had helped in securing.

fahrenheit451:082

In spite of the British Electorate's continuing, unambiguous, disdain of mass immigration, all major political parties ( as well as the plethora of non-parliamentary Leftist parties ) support and promote mass immigration. Quite why this should be so remains at best, somewhat of a mystery and at worst a systematic,conscious betrayal of the fundamental economic interests of the Electorate as a whole. Immigration is the Great Shibboleth of British political discourse. Even in the aftermath of the groundbreaking historic vote for Brexit, idiots such as Jeremy Corbyn argue, ad nauseam, that it's incumbent upon the British people to get used to the idea of large numbers of immigrants permanently altering the British way of life.Why? because in his view ( and that of the rest of the Labour Party ), immigration is a good thing which brings with it benefits to wider society. An ageing workforce is one threadbare unsubstantiated claim they make, as is NHS staffing levels and how dependent the NHS is on immigrant workers. As if by some inexplicable act of thaumaturgy workers with the prefix " immigrant " are somehow intrinsically morally superior or have an innate noble quality about them that are simply absent in the bog standard british worker. It is, surprisingly, politicians of the Centre Right to whom it has fallen to be the ones to explain the basic laws that govern the operation and functioning of capitalist economics. Immigration increases and intensifies competition within national labour markets and depresses wages. And as we have seen in the UK economy as a whole, since even before the onset of the Recession in 2007/08, labour market competition galvanised by unrestricted EU migration has been at its most intense at the unskilled, entry level industrial end of the economy. Official data such as it is, puts the current aggregate figure of unemployment amongst the EU's 28 member states at around 30,000,000.It has always been the case that the EU's " freedom of movement " for labour, has simply been a mechanism for allowing and facilitating the transferring of jobless from one country to those countries where the national economies have fared better; generally from south to north and since 2004 from east to west. The bankrupt, rustbelt economies of the former Warsaw Pact, Poland chief amongst them, have been major beneficiaries:-

Poland's unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent in July 2016 from an all time high of 20.70 percent in February of 2003.Unemployment Rate in Poland is reported by the Central Statistical Office of Poland (GUS).  It was in 2004 that Poland along with Hungary,Czech Republic, Slovakia,Estonia,Latvia and Lithuania became full members of the EU. Britain was only one of three existing member states that allowed these new member states immediate access to its national labour market. 

The recent accession of the even more economically sclerotic and dysfunctional Bulgaria and Romania has exacerbated beyond measure the chaos and turmoil engendered by inner-EU migration. Quite where the benefits to the host nation state are supposed to accrue from in all of this, is the question the Left and most other political parties refuse steadfastly to answer let alone engage with in a rational and meaningful discourse. And yet, despite all the specious and convoluted posturing, attempted manipulation and snake oil salesmanship of the Pro-mass Immigration lobby, the vast majority of British People have never actually believed one goddamn single word told them by the establishment or by their political representatives on this issue.

 

fahrenheit451:073

You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. That's what's so wonderful about capitalism. Especially the serious, grown-up institutions of Global finance and those who oversee them. When all the needless economic pain and hardship inflicted upon millions is over and done with, when all the attendant , negative-qualitative impacts on civil society have been duly inflicted as a sort of de-facto collective punishment on a nation's citizens; when ALL is done it turns out that it really was a complete and utter balls-up from the very beginning. Or as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Daily-We're lovin'Global Usurer-Capitalism-telegraph writes:-

IMF admits disastrous love affair with the euro, apologises for the immolation of Greece

 

28 JULY 2016 • 8:38PM

The International Monetary Fund’s top staff misled their own board, made a series of calamitous misjudgments in Greece, became euphoric cheerleaders for the euro project, ignored warning signs of impending crisis, and collectively failed to grasp an elemental concept of currency theory. 

This is the lacerating verdict of the IMF’s top watchdog on the Fund’s tangled political role in the eurozone debt crisis, the most damaging episode in the history of the Bretton Woods institutions. 

Many documents were prepared outside the regular established channels; written documentation on some sensitive matters could not be locatedIEO report

It describes a “culture of complacency”, prone to “superficial and mechanistic” analysis,  and traces a shocking break-down in the governance of the IMF, leaving it unclear who is ultimately in charge of this extremely powerful organisation. 

The report by the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) goes above the head of the managing director, Christine Lagarde. It answers solely to the board of executive directors, and those from Asia and Latin America are clearly incensed at the way EU insiders used the Fund to rescue their own rich currency union and banking system.

The three main bail-outs for Greece, Portugal, and Ireland were unprecedented in scale and character. The trio were each allowed to borrow over 2,000 percent of their allocated quota – more than three times the normal limit – and accounted for 80pc of all lending by the Fund between 2011 and 2014.

...            
You can't make all that up. It belies the otherwise unimaginable bounds of speculative fiction. Paul Erdman, back in the '70's wrote a couple of international financial thrillers along similar lines. This mea culpa from the IMF is that preposterous. Even within the hegemonic dominant ideological constraints and norms of the IMF, what the hell were the Asian and Latin American executive directors doing? Minding their bankrolled exotic lifestyles?
On the other hand, taking a somewhat longer term view of this imbroglio and its ramifications, one might surmise that one helluva blow has been landed against the system.And that is to be welcomed.The only pity is that the bastards will, no doubt, be able to worm their way out of it,again.

fahrenheit451:059

In ten days time, the sovereign British Electorate get to make History. I personally have campaigned against, spoken out against ,written letters to the Press against the European Union and its previous EEC/Common Market incarnation since 1973. I have not faltered, nor deviated or equivocated in my opposition to the EU and its utterly damnable project.  The only two Journalist-Commentators that I both respect and admire and in whose work I find great intellectual and philosophical solace and reassurance are, ( in order of preference ), Peter Hitchens ( Mail on Sunday ) & Ambrose Evans-Pritchard ( Daily Telegraph ).Their resolute stance and clarity of vision and analyses about the EU are essential reading.Their respective most recent pieces even more so.  AEP in particular nails the ultra-left fantasist nonsense of " Another Europe is Possible " which is today's Plate de Jour for the isolated and redundant, intellectually demoralised " left " that cannot bring itself to advocate a Vote Leave  nor does it want to succumb to the inexorable Petainism of Corbyn's tragicomedic contortions.

Pritchard writes:-

 "My Europhile Greek friend Yanis Varoufakis and I both agree on one central point, that today's EU is a deformed halfway house that nobody ever wanted. His solution is a great leap forward towards a United States of Europe with a genuine parliament holding an elected president to account. Though even he doubts his dream. "There is a virtue in heroic failure," he said.

The Project bleeds the lifeblood of the national institutions, but fails to replace them with anything lovable

I do not think this is remotely possible, or would be desirable if it were, but it is not on offer anyway. Six years into the eurozone crisis there is no a flicker of fiscal union: no eurobonds, no Hamiltonian redemption fund, no pooling of debt, and no budget transfers. The banking union belies its name. Germany and the creditor states have dug in their heels.
Where we concur is that the EU as constructed is not only corrosive but ultimately dangerous, and that is the phase we have now reached as governing authority of crumbles across Europe.
The Project bleeds the lifeblood of the national institutions, but fails to replace them with anything lovable or legitimate at a European level. It draws away charisma, and destroys it. This is how democracies die. "
Varoufakis was Greece's Finance Minister in the absurdist installation artwork that called itself Syriza and promised and was elected into office in 2015 on the popularly accepted understanding that it would campaign against EU/Troika imposed austerity which continues to essentially kill Greece. Needless to say, the continent's first elected openly Ultra-Left government post 1945,bottled it. The virulent contagion of Class Appeasement continues to infect and strike down nearly all potentially effective forms of anti-capitalist movements and parties across geographic Europe. Nearly all,but not all; some - Podemos,The Five Star Movement,TUSC,People Before Profit,- have acquired ideological immunity and appear resistant to the strains affecting the nomenklatura of cowardice and retreat such as Varoufakis and Corbyn.  But on 23 June we get to choose for existential capitulation to inoperable brain cancer and Vote Remain or Vote Leave and go into remission and a long period of enforced convalescence leading to restored sovereignty.

fahrenheit451:057

In a fortnight's time Great Britain will be on the very cusp of a historic sea-change. A seemingly interminable EU Referendum campaign will be all but over. And yet one story has managed to upstage the whole EU-In/Out slanging match. Step forward Mike Ashley, the boss of Sports Direct. Ashley was called to give evidence before a Parliamentary Select Committee concerning issues over his Company, Sports Direct's treatment of workers, abuse of their employment and other Rights including illegal underpayment of wages. And boy did he get pilloried and rightly so. Pernicious, venal, boastful, unscrupulous, hectoring,  and mendacious to an astounding degree in full view of the Media and Public; all that Mr.Ashley was missing from his wardrobe to complete his self-authored caricature as a Victorian mill owner was the iconic top hat. Yet,what single characteristic of Mr.Ashley's management style and draconian behaviour toward his Company's employees differentiates him from every other similar CEO ? Quite simply none, at least none of any discernible significance. He simply is one capitalist bastard amongst a whole legion of capitalist bastards. Sports Direct business model with its use of,according to his own evidence, an 80% zero hours contract workforce and a workplace culture of fear,uncertainty and harassment is pretty much the universal benchmark across the logistics/warehousing sector as a whole. The only genuine surprise, from my own Activist's point-of-view, is just how much of a surprise, indeed startling and shocking revelation this has been portrayed as in the Media to the general Public. Kudos to the UNITE Union for spearheading a very long and arduous campaign against Ashley's High Street Empire. The Trades Union movement on the whole has alas, not effectively engaged with the spreading cancer of zero hours agency contracts,nor with the cold blooded business practices that all Agencies utilise with virtual impunity against the many millions of workers now wholly dependent on casualised precarious work. Ashley's antiquated, oppressive tyranny is a symptom and a pretty major one at that, but clearly what needs to be addressed and focused on is the cause of such heinous, inhumane, and demeaning conditions of employment being allowed to exist and take shape in the first place.

fahrenheit451:052

Our democracy and our very existence as a bona fide sovereign and independent nation state is in clear and present danger.This is not " scaremongering " neither is it empty rhetoric. All those campaigning for a REMAIN vote in the forthcoming Referendum on the UK's continuing ssubjection to the Strassbourg/Brussels yoke,are fully conscious of the fact that the EU's self-professed grandiose imperative and raison d'etre to become a Unitary Continental Superstate will be strengthened and greatly reinforced should the plebiscite go the way of the IN campaign.

And what the EU and its technocratic bureaucractic governing elites won't tolerate and will soon enough get around to dealing with in exemplary fashion is any kind of substantive dissent that might challenge their hegemony and stymie and perhaps even mortally jeopardise the full realisation of their Historic design, a United European entity.

What they did to Austria in 2000 - conveniently jettisoned down the Orwellian " Memory Hole " and in need of rediscovery,is vitally worth studying.

( This article was published in European Affairs: Volume number I, Issue number II in the Spring of 2000.)

Sanctions Against Austria Pose Troubling Questions for the EU    

 

Michael Calingaert

The entry into Austria's governing coalition of Jörg Haider's Freedom Party presented the European Union with an unprecedented situation: participation in the government of one of the member states of a party widely considered "undemocratic." The response of Austria's EU partners was equally unprecedented: lacking the means under the EU treaties to mark their concern, they impulsively imposed diplomatic sanctions as 14 "like-minded states."

The European Community, as it was originally called, did not deem it necessary to spell out the member states' adherence to democratic principles. Nor did it occur to the original members that the domestic politics of a member state would be considered an appropriate subject for comment - let alone action - by the others.

One of the criteria for membership established at the Copenhagen European Council in 1993 was that candidates had to have "achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities."

For that reason, the EU refused to open enlargement negotiations with Slovakia while the clearly undemocratic Vladimir Meciar controlled the government, and it added Slovakia to the negotiating countries only after his defeat at the polls in 1998. It was with the example of Slovakia in mind that the EU added the first explicit mention in the EU's treaties of general principles previously accepted only implicitly: the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, building on language in the preamble to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, declared that the EU was "founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law."

During the Cold War the perceived danger to the democratic system in EU member states came from the left, although the United States was far more inclined than European countries to voice concern about communist parties joining EU governments.

The rise of the Freedom Party in Austria was seen as a different matter - particularly after the previous governing parties opened the door to Mr. Haider by failing to resurrect their former broad-based coalition.

The concerns of some member states - particularly Germany, France and Belgium - related very directly to their own domestic politics. The National Front in France shares many attributes of the Freedom Party, and both the governing Socialists and the Gaullist President Jacques Chirac, feared the "demonstration effect" of the entry of the Freedom Party into government.

Next door in Germany the implosion of the Christian Democratic Union as a result of its party financial scandal has led to serious concern over what will fill the vacuum, in particular the possible resurgence of the far right. In Belgium, many are afraid of the Vlaams Blok, a right-wing party seeking Flemish independence.

But what could the other 14 member states do? Under the treaties, nothing. The Treaty of Amsterdam provides that the heads of state or government, acting by unanimity and with the concurrence of the European Parliament, may determine that a member state has engaged in a "serious and persistent breach" of the EU's democratic principles. In such a case, they may decide, by qualified majority, to suspend voting and/or other rights of the country in question. Clearly, no such "breach" had taken place.

Led by Portugal - acting unofficially, though speaking explicitly as President of the Council - the 14 countries informed Austria that if the Freedom Party were to enter the government, they would take three steps: not accept bilateral contacts at a political level with the Austrian government, provide no support to Austrian candidates for positions in international organizations, and receive Austrian ambassadors in their countries only at a technical level. When the Freedom Party entered the government a few days later, the member states made good their threat.

The 14 member states in effect they acted as member states of the EU. In so doing, they set an important precedent: they added to the range of issues addressed by the EU by adopting a position on the composition of a member state government - a subject hitherto regarded exclusively as the business of the member state in question. In addition, their "joint reaction" (as they termed it) was a way of getting around the national veto that Austria would have applied if the action had been proposed in accordance with the EU Treaties.

The action of the 14 member states raises several questions:

Standards: Against what standards should member states judge political parties in other member states? What constitutes "anti-democratic" behavior? Do the standards apply equally to parties of the far right and far left ?

Circumstances: Under what circumstances is it appropriate for member states to concern themselves with the composition of another member state's government? Is it appropriate to seek to block the entry into government of a party that has gained over one-quarter of the votes in a free, democratic election? Would the member states contemplate analogous action against for example France with respect to the National Front?

How great is the likelihood that, as often happens with economic sanctions, the 14 member states will find themselves locked into actions that they will subsequently want to terminate but cannot because they lack an exit strategy?

Effect on the EU: The Portuguese Presidency has stated that there will not be "business as usual" with the Austrian government. Can there be "EU business as usual"? The 14 member states' actions clearly run counter to the "Community spirit" that is an important ingredient in the operations of the EU institutions. Would their actions have been possible if Austria had held the EU Presidency? Will the ostracized government - in this case Austria - adopt a hostile attitude, which could impede work in the EU?

As these questions indicate, the implications of the actions taken by the 14 member states extend well beyond the particular case of Austria in February 2000. Without the luxury of contemplation or advance planning, the EU has established ground-rules in an entirely new area. Before embarking down that path, it would have done well to consider the wisdom of a more restrained approach - for both the present and the future.

( This article was published in European Affairs: Volume number I, Issue number II in the Spring of 2000.)

And from the Daily Telegraph

By Michael Leidig, in Vienna

12:00AM BST 14 Sep 2000

 

AUSTRIA'S Freedom Party leader, Jörg Haider, has hailed the end toEuropean Union diplomatic sanctions against his country.

His EU critics had been humiliated, he said yesterday. "We are leaving this with our head held high." Yesterday, as Austria's political classes celebrated, Mr Haider revelled in the climbdown by President Chirac. France, which holds the rotating EU presidency, announced the end of sanctions on Wednesday. It also led the original call for the measures.

The end of sanctions followed an EU-mandated report saying they were "counter-productive" and liable to cause further nationalist reaction in Austria. Most Austrians greeted the news with indifference.

June 23, 2016 #VoteLeave. Anything short of that ensure national self-annihilation.

fahrenheit451:051

People who show great reluctance or an inability to discuss and debate embarrassing topics or perceived sensitive subject matter usually refer to such things as " The Elephant in the Room ". And it is a curious fact,often remarked upon by those  of a more gregarious and inquisitive disposition that it's the british " educated " middle classes who are the most introverted and diffident when it comes to even acknowledging that the said Elephant even exists let alone that it should be pointed out to all and sundry. Unfortunately for the rest of us,those of a truly robust,egalitarian and genuinely open democratic cast of mind,it is precisely the bien pensant,who in effect control access to the platforms and the means of production themselves, that are necessary for political discourse to take place. And for those self-referencing,venal elitists who are supposedly " educated " they  pretend to an intellectually untenable degree that basic and immutable economic laws of supply and demand do not operate when it comes to attempting to discuss the real impacts of unregulated mass immigration/transborder inner-EU migration.  Millions of eastern european workers descending in unaccountable droves upon the parlous British jobs market,has according to " The Left " had absolutely no effect whatsoever; wages according to " The Left " have not gone down as a direct result of the vast and rapid escalation in the supply of labour. Which is empirically something of an anomaly since all previous records and data from all leading industrialised nations attests to the Laws of capitalist Supply & Demand working perfectly in that regard. Competiton in the Labour Market depresses wages. Except when the British left says it doesn't. Oh,okay.. Maybe that explains Jeremy " The Great Who Am I "Corbyn's certifably eccentric and baffling remarks about the inundation and de-facto collapse of the UK's public sector infrastructure,jobs market and just about anything else that Lab/Lib/Con had in their ideologically driven sights to destroy.

Asked about those within Labour who worry about immigration undermining social cohesion, Corbyn said: “You have to ensure that communities are brought together, that people do understand the changes that are happening and actually see some plus and some benefit within it.

“You look at various towns where there’s been a big change, quite often the economy has actually begun to grow after that level of migration, there’s been actually very good levels of community understanding and integration.”

He said there needed to be greater investment in housing, schools and hospitals by central government to accommodate immigration."

 

“Migration actually is a plus to our economy as a whole, those people pay a lot in taxes, receive much less on average in benefits than the rest of the community and make an amazing contribution to our community. "

Quick ,someone call for the Nurse !!

Official Data from ONS ( Office of National Statstics ) shows that " A feature of the UK’s recovery since 2013 has been that unemployment has fallen faster than in previous recession – in the 1980s and 1990s unemployment lagged behind the recovery. This fall in unemployment is due to several factors, such as – more flexible labour markets, low wage growth and low labour productivity.". ONS  research and analysis shows that real household incomes per head have been stagnant since 2007.

In 2012 for instance the ONS found that :-.More than four years after the start of the recession, productivity remains 3.7 per cent below its pre-recession peak. At the corresponding stage of the recessions in the early 1980s and 1990s, productivity was more than 10 per cent higher than at the start of the recession. The current level of productivity, measured as output per worker, is around 15% lower than might be expected on the basis of previous experience.

The point of allowing and promoting the idea of Freedom of movement of labour,is to maximise the ensuing economic benefits for the Capitalist Ruling Elites,the owners and controllers of the means of production,distribution and exchange. Why do you think they came up with the idea in the first place and are so keen to promulgate it so fanatically ? To their chagrin,the boost they get from continuing depressed wages is off set,more than they anticipated,by the failure of overall GDP output per head to even get back to the levels of 2007/08.

Other than that,the myriad ,self-deluding fantasists of  Lab/Lib/Con whose centre and left all are of the exact same agenda perpetuate their own vainglorious failure with vacuous appeals about multiculturalism and integration that have precisely nothing whatsoever to do with nor are they connected with in any sense at all to the operations of Laws of Supply & Demand and the necessary demands of the Capitalist Economic System. It is axiomatic that were the present seemingly endless free flow of available labour to be severely restricted or altogether cut off,then quite simply the basic function of Capitalism would be impaired and the bargaining power of organised Labour would be vastly enhanced. A historic scenario that remains anathema to the British Trades Union & Labour Movement.

fahrenheit451:043

*** IT'S THE 1st. ANNIVERSARY ***
‪#‎DansLaMerde‬ ‪#‎Interserve‬ ‪#‎WDHCS‬ ‪#‎FLUTTERBUYS‬

-THE DAY THE WAR STARTED - ‪#‎TUSC‬ ‪#‎TUSCWAKEFIELD‬

Following legal advice , advice from my Church and the advice from my JCP Wakefield Work Coach,I can confirm that I shall be "reporting" to the placement at 11.30 am this coming Monday as set out in the letter of 20 April. I do so under the most strongest personal protests and misgivings. My attendance cannot be legally interpreted as my having agreed or given any willing consent to this scheme of state-sponsored forced labour. Interserve are aware that they have not made any rationally,fact-based assessment of what might constitute a beneficial placement. I must also inform you that I am initiating a formal complaint with the JCP West Yorkshire District Office against Interserve for their failure to adhere to procedure and additional and repeated failure to offer an explanation of their statement to me that this MWA meets the criteria that " the activity you undertake will also be of benefit to the local community ". A separate complaint against WDHCS to the Charity Commission is also under active consideration . I look forward to commencing my MWA at 11.30 am Monday 27 April.

P.S.

I Won .

fahrenheit451:039

It's been about a year or so since Alex Tsipras led his Syriza comrades to an astounding electoral triumph in Crisis-ridden Greece. Long story short; it all got snuffed out. All the hopes,misplaced or not,all the aspirations,partially deluded or not. Gone. And the multi-layered Crises deeper and sharper and even more brutal than were apparent in 2015. The Troika - European Commission,European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund - have gotten away with carrying out regime change / externally orchestrated, unconstitutional coup d'etat via their policies of political intimidation and blackmail against yet another formerly sovereign, democratic nation state. It's as if the fevered Greek elections and subsequent referendum of 2015 had never happened. Bloomberg News quoted in the Daily Telegraph of 11 April 2016,reports :-

Germany tells Greece it needs to 'do more' as debt talks stutter ahead of May deadline

 11 APRIL 2016 • 9:56AM

 Greece said it’s aiming for an agreement with creditors on the next tranche of emergency loans by the beginning of May as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble sought to play down debt relief expectations.

“We have almost identical estimates with the European Commission,” Minister of State Nikos Pappas said in an interview with Bloomberg News.

“And what needs to be done in the following days is to turn the almost identical into identical,” he said, ahead of frantic negotiations between the government and officials representing creditor institutions that failed to find a deal.

Bailout auditors from the European Union’s executive arm, the euro area’s crisis fund, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been holding talks with government officials in Athens for the past week to discuss policy measures attached to the country’s bailout.

The biggest area of contention is the management of bad loans burdening bank balance sheets, Pappas said, with their positions closer on a pension system overhaul and income tax reform.

“We’ll find a solution in the coming weeks,” Schaeuble said Sunday in an interview with German public television channel ARD. This solution “has nothing to do with debt forgiveness, but with the fact that Greece needs to do more” to return to a competitive economy, he said.

POSTSCRIPT

The irony in all this diplomatic imbroglio,is that the EU itself is in terminal decline and is losing itself in ever more byzantine chicanery and outbursts of quasi-judicial acts of diktat against an increasing array of partially comatose sovereign states all locked in to the single currency madness. There is no  " solution " in sight because there are no solutions to be had. Disorder is a natural state for the capitalist economic system to find itself in ; more or less unfettered or rigged or mediated by state intervention doesn't actually make any significant difference to the actual conditions that determine and constitute Crises. Schadenfreude it is , then we BREXIT !