RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/europe-starts-to-fray-at-the-seams/

The European parliament elections last week have provided further graphic evidence that Britain and Europe are in the throes of a profound political and cultural upheaval.

In Britain, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party pulverized both Labour and the Conservatives by winning many more seats than either to become the largest single party in the European parliament – within just five weeks of being created.

Since Farage’s party stands for Britain leaving the European Union with no withdrawal deal, many Conservatives rightly believe that whoever they elect as their new leader (and therefore Britain’s prime minister) in the wake of Theresa May’s resignation will need to endorse a no-deal departure to have any chance of saving the party from total destruction.

That’s because they understand from this electoral meltdown that the fury of their mainly Brexit-supporting voters over the Conservative government’s failure to honor the 2016 referendum vote, exacerbated by the refusal of the Remainer-dominated parliament to leave with no deal, is off the scale.

Among other EU countries, which are similarly witnessing a revolt by the people against the erosion of their democratic independence and social cohesion, these elections produced a parallel collapse of mainstream parties and a rise of “populist” nationalists.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/05/31/britain-should-take-lesson-trump-slash-taxes/

When President Trump arrives on Monday, he will encounter a broken prime minister and an economy stuck in a growth rut. Tory leadership contenders would do well to listen to him, for Trump’s economic policies have achieved what current chancellor Philip Hammond has not.

Look at the contrast. In the first quarter of 2019 the British economy grew at an annualised 2.0pc – the US expanded by 3.2pc. Since 2016, the US economy has grown at 2.55pc a year – the UK averaged 1.6pc. If current rates are maintained, the US will have opened a 4.6pc cumulative growth gap by 2020. What Americans get in four years, Britons will wait seven for.

Leadership election promises of world-class schools and hospitals are a dead letter unless accompanied by fresh thinking to revive economic growth. That requires answering the productivity puzzle: why productivity growth has dwindled to virtually nothing since the crisis. Over the last four years, growth in output per worker in the UK averaged a dismal 0.6pc a year and output per hour actually declined in the last two quarters. Ten-year productivity growth from 2007 was negative for the first time in almost a century.

Weak economic performance demands bold policies. Trump’s explicitly set out to maximise employment, production and purchasing power by, in the words of his 2019 Economic Report, “providing maximum scope for the efficiency of free enterprise and competitive market mechanisms”.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/05/30/course-london-no-longer-english-city-rest-country-needs-ever/?li_source=LI&li_medium=li-recommendation-widget

It was, I suppose, inevitable that John Cleese should get it in the neck for restating the blindingly obvious – that London is no longer an English city. The former Monty Python and Fawlty Towers star was only telling a truth that has long been recognised by foreign tourists, and indeed by just about everyone else with a modicum of worldly awareness. 

If you want a picture postcard caricature of what most people think of as England, you are much more likely to find it outside the capital than within the bounds of the M25. London is a global city, with more in common with New York and the other great metropolises of the world than much of its own hinterland. 

This is not a particularly new phenomenon; as early as the thirteenth century there are recorded complaints of London as an unrecognisable city, back then on account of supposedly being overrun by Moors. Today they come from all over the world; in my particular borough there are apparently more than 50 spoken languages. We have become a veritable tower of Babel.

To point this out is, however, to invite a tirade of condemnation from all the usual suspects. How dare Mr Cleese say that multicultural London is not England.

Time to get real. On so many levels, it is manifestly obvious that London is a world apart from much of the rest of the country, right down to the great Brexit divide, where support for leaving the European Union is at its highest outside the capital. Most Londoners would by some margin prefer to remain. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/orbans-switch-back-to-the-center-right/

The European election results were fairly clear — the mainstream centrist parties declined again; the Greens and Left-Liberals benefited from this and rose in much of Western Europe; and the populists gained too in France, Poland, Italy, and Hungary, but not quite as well as expected elsewhere. (For a deeper dive into these events and their significance, see my column here). Not all is clear, however. A pall of obscurity hangs over the “populist” parties, not only about what they believe but even about what should they be called.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin have written a good book about them — National Populism. While they concede that there are quite deep ideological divides between different parties, arising from their different national political cultures, they put them all into the same box labelled “national populism.” That’s not an unfair label. Indeed, many analysts in the European media, being left-liberal and acting on the principle of “No Friends to the Right,” calls them many much more hostile names.

But the term “populism” reflects the earliest stage in the rise of these parties when they were essentially protest parties angry that remote liberal elites had misgoverned their countries and avoided being held to account for their failures. Populists were then groping towards an understanding of what went wrong and how to put it right. The longer they are around in politics — and most European countries now have populists in their parliaments — they develop more serious analyses and more positive policies. If they don’t manage that, they will eventually disappear as the voters move on from being angry to wanting problems solved. And if they do, we will discover the color of their political philosophy and give them a different and more informative name.