RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/spains-abrupt-left-turn-1528054426?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=6&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

His many opponents finally caught up with Mariano Rajoy on Friday when a leftist coalition ousted the Spanish Prime Minister’s center-right government with a no-confidence vote in parliament. The risk now is that Madrid will unwind the reforms that have helped the country grow faster than its neighbors.

Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP) has itself to blame for Friday’s 180-169 defeat. Last month Spain’s National Court convicted 29 people, including the party’s former treasurer, of a kickback scheme. Mr. Rajoy denied knowledge of the operation, but the scandal has alienated PP voters and the party’s liberal-centrist Citizens coalition partner, whose leader, Albert Rivera, called for snap elections.

Mr. Rajoy ignored Mr. Rivera’s good advice and tried to hang onto power, giving an opening to Socialist Party leader Pedro Sánchez to cobble together a so-called Frankenstein coalition that few Madrid insiders thought possible. The crew includes far-left Podemos, Catalan pro-independence parties and the right-leaning Basque Nationalist Party, which had negotiated pension benefit increases for the region in Mr. Rajoy’s last budget.

Mr. Sánchez has promised to honor that budget, as well as keep Spain’s fiscal commitments to the European Union. But to do that he’ll have to keep Spain’s economic engine purring. That will be hard to do with Podemos in the coalition. The Spanish left wants to roll back the Rajoy Administration’s supply-side reforms, including tax cuts and the 2012 Derecho Laboral reform, which made it easier to hire and fire workers, as well as implement a new wealth and inheritance tax.

Mr. Joffe is an editorial council member at Die Zeit in Hamburg and a fellow of Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Everybody loves Italy for its savoir vivre and panache—not to mention Rome’s place as the cradle of Western civilization. Yet there is a darker side to the country’s vanguard role. In 1922 Italy gave the world fascism, more than a decade before Hitler’s storm troopers marched through Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. After World War II, Italy was the only Western country ever to include members of a pro-Soviet Communist Party in its governing coalition. In 1970, the Red Brigades invented modern European terrorism.

This March brings another nasty first: power to the populists of the left-wing 5 Star Movement and the far-right League. Radical parties have won seats in several European legislatures, but nowhere have they captured a majority. Forget Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, which can’t win more than a third of the French public. The outcome in Italy is historic: Europe’s fate may well be decided in Rome.

Imagine, in American terms, a coalition between Bernie Sanders and the tea party: an orgy of government spending on one side, tax cuts and small government on the other. Can’t be done? In Italy, non fa niente—it doesn’t matter. We can eat our pizza and have it too. While 5 Star seeks a guaranteed income of €780 (around $900) a month, the League will pursue its suggested flat tax of 15%.

Now do the arithmetic. Italy’s public debt has already surpassed 130% of gross domestic product, and European hedge-fund manager Joseph Oughourlian predicts that the new government’s goodies could swell the annual deficit by more than €150 billion.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12435/rape-gangs-oxford

What price has been paid, is being paid, or might be paid at some stage, by all those public officials who tacitly or otherwise allowed these modern-day atrocities to go on, doing nothing to stop them?

Families of some of the abused girls related that they had tried consistently to raise the alarm over what was happening to their daughters, but that every door of the state was closed in their faces.

If Britain is to turn around the disgrace of its culture of ‘grooming gangs’, it should start by changing the risk-reward ratio between those who identify these monstrous crimes and those who have been shown to have covered them up.

Since the arrest of Tommy Robinson on May 25, the presence generally — and incorrectly — referred to as ‘Asian grooming gangs’ has been back in the news. This has reignited a debate about whether victims are getting justice and whether perpetrators are encountering it.

In all this at least one key element is missing. What price has been paid, is being paid, or might be paid at some stage, by all those public officials who tacitly or otherwise allowed these modern-day atrocities to go on, doing nothing to stop them? The policemen, politicians, council workers and others who were shown to have failed time and again. They have never been sentenced to prison for any of their oversights — and perhaps criminal charges (not even charges of criminal negligence) could never be brought against them. It is worth asking, however, if any of these people’s lives, career paths, or even pension plans were ever remotely affected by their proven failure to confront one of the greatest evils to have gone on in Britain. That is the mass rape of young girls motivated by adults propelled by (among much else) racism, religiosity, misogyny and class contempt.

Perhaps the post grooming-gang career of just one public official might help to answer that question. Her name is Joanna Simons. In 2013 she was the Chief Executive of the Oxfordshire County Council. She had been at the centre of that Council’s ‘care’ programme for nearly a decade: that is, throughout the period in which the mass rape of local girls (subsequently investigated under the name ‘Operation Bullfinch’) was carried on. The barbarism, which was carried out by local men of what is erroneously described as ‘Asian’ origin, included branding one of the girls with an ‘M’ on her body. The abuser’s name was ‘Mohammed’ and the Mohammed in question wanted people to know that this girl ‘belonged’ to him and as such was his property.