RUTHFULLY YOURS

No political observer in his right mind would have expected at the beginning of 2016 a Brexit vote in Britain in June, the resignation of David Cameron, a dogfight between the two main Brexit supporters and propagandists within the Tory party, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and eventually the rise of Theresa May. Nor would he have foreseen, for that matter, the election of Donald Trump in the United States on November 8.

Something similar is happening in France now — on a much larger and trickier scale. A few months ago, it was taken for granted that François Hollande’s ineffectual socialist administration would be succeeded after the 2017 election — on April 23 and May 7 — by a conservative government led either by former president Nicolas Sarkozy or former prime minister Alain Juppé: a simple matter of the swing of the pendulum, as is the rule among democracies. What the French are facing now, however, is an unprecedented upsurge of the National Front, the elimination of a generation of political leaders on almost all sides, and the collapse or near collapse of classic Left and Right parties. While many voters welcome the change, others are just in a state of shock. On March 18 — one month or so ahead of the first ballot — 34 per cent of the electorate and 43 per cent of voters under 35 had still not decided whether to vote or not.

On March 20, the five most prominent candidates debated for three and a half hours on TV. About 10 million people watched intently. It was indeed a great show — and probably a defining moment in the campaign.

All five candidates are rebels. Marine Le Pen, 48, the National Front leader, is a rebel by definition. She has managed to upgrade in many ways the party she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011, to purge it of many unsavoury elements, to trim its formerly racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric (including Holocaust denial) and to switch from Vichy nostalgia to a near-Gaullist statism. In fact, she has even been increasingly reluctant to use the name National Front, and has floated alternative labels, such as Rassemblement Bleu Marine (“Navy Blue Rally”, a play on words with her first name which means “Navy” in French).

For all that, she is still sticking to a binary, undemocratic and utterly revolutionary view of the world, positing a bitter fight between what she calls “the System” (the political and cultural elite, of both Right and Left, the “lobbies”, globalisation, multiculturalism, immigration, the European Union, the euro) and “the people” (the ordinary Frenchmen) whom she claims to represent exclusively. The implication is that either you side with the people and her against the System, and opt for a fully sovereign and autarkic France under her guidance, or you are, willingly or not, an enemy of the people. Interestingly enough, she used this logic against her own father, as he resisted the revamping and defascisation of the National Front, and did not flinch from expelling him from the party at the age of 86.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 65, a former minister of vocational education, rebelled against the Socialist party in 2008 to found the more hardline Parti de Gauche (Left Party) and then the Front de Gauche (Left Front) in association with a diminutive Communist Party. He eventually started a new movement in 2016, France Insoumise (Indomitable France).

This year’s Moscow Economic Forum (MEF) opened last Thursday at the Lomonosov State University under the slogan A New Strategy for Russia. The panelists—prominent academics, businessmen and senior managers—were brutally blunt in their diagnosis of the causes of Russia’s economic woes, and especially critical of the country’s Central Bank for continuing to follow a neoliberal strategy. There is a general consensus that Russia’s economic and financial problems are systemic, and only in small part due to Western sanctions.

Ruslan Grinberg, head of the Institute of Economics and the Forum’s moderator, noted that in the 1990’s everyone was intoxicated by the dogma of the free market: you should privatize, deregulate and stabilize. The results were disastrous, but Russia’s economic decision-making community is still not free of neoliberal blinkers. This applies not only to the Central Bank, but also to the economic departments of the Medvedev government. According to Grinberg, “market fundamentalism is dead, but its cause still lives on in key segments of Russia’s ruling elite.”

Economist Vladislav Zhukovsky noted that the economy is supposedly growing, but the country’s human potential has declined. Current spending on education is only 4.1%, instead of 7% of GDP, and health care accounts for under 5%. The overall state of the Russian economy can be described as degradation and compression. It is accompanied by bureaucratization, monopolization, and dollarization. On the other hand, says Zhukovsky, “our officials have discovered a new art form—ever more sophisticated forms of statistical manipulation to draw a beautiful reality in contrast to the deteriorating crisis situation.” According to the latest revised data, in 2015 the downturn officially amounted to only 2.8%, and to a mere 0.2% in 2016, while the real economy was actually growing. Zhukovsky is adamant that this is “statistical alchemy,” and that all key macroeconomic indicators were overrated. In reality, he says, Russia has experienced 26 months of continuous fall of real incomes, by about 17.5% overall.

In an earlier interview Zhukovsky complained that this year’s MEF would be the voice of the entrepreneurial community crying in the desert: “It is clear that none of those who determine macroeconomic policy, and distribute annually a trillion rubles of public procurement, are interested in it. Today we see a strange situation that the windfall in oil and gas complex, metallurgy, raw materials, natural monopolies, in the production of various kinds of fertilizers, technical complex, which has grown over the last 2.5 years, more than 55% in ruble terms, all to no positive effect in the economy. The growth of corporate profits did not affect the growth of investment and wages . . . There is no general strategy.”

Professor James K. Galbraith, author of the seminal 2012 study Inequality and Instability, noted that rising inequality happens in clusters of countries. Extreme polarization occurred between 1990 and 2000 in Russia and other ex-communist countries. There has been considerable stabilization after 2000, however, as many of those countries abandoned the extreme neoliberal model. In recent years Russia has experienced the fact that when currencies weaken, those who sell abroad do better than those who sell at home. Russia’s fundamental problem is the dollar-based global financial regime. Galbraith added that the new U.S. administration does not have an effective economic strategy to preserve and expand a stable and diverse middle class: “We still suffer, and we will continue to suffer, from private affluence and public squalor.”

British prime minister Theresa May triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on Wednesday, beginning the two-year process in which the U.K. must negotiate an agreement for its withdrawal from the European Union. During this process, the U.K. government must decide the most efficient way to keep, repeal, or amend the thousands of EU regulations on the books.

One day after May triggered Article 50, the U.K. announced its intent to repeal the European Communities Act of 1972, which grants supremacy to EU law over U.K. law, and introduce a Great Repeal Bill that will incorporate EU law into U.K. law. Having imported the whole kit and caboodle, the British Parliament will begin the arduous task of scrapping any statutes it considers superfluous.

Iain Murray, co-author of “Cutting the Gordian Knot” and the vice president for strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), argues that the “Great Repeal Bill will begin what may prove to be the greatest deregulatory endeavor undertaken by any modern government.” But that deregulatory effort will be successful only if Parliament chooses to cut these overbearing regulations; otherwise, these same laws will simply be enforced by legislators in Westminster rather than EU bureaucrats in Brussels.

Here, the “how?” is as important as the “what?” Asking Parliament to vote to keep, repeal, or amend each law separately would be impractical and could take years. In practice, such an approach would likely lead to few laws’ being repealed. In consequence, Murray and his colleague Rory Broomfield argue that the British government should establish a Royal Commission on Regulatory Reduction and assign it the daunting job of deregulation. The committee would be chaired by a current or former justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, and members would represent both the governing and opposition parties.

The commission “would essentially depoliticize the process of regulatory reduction,” Murray tells National Review. Each year, it would provide regulatory revisions to be voted on by Parliament — and, to keep the process efficient, members of Parliament would be prohibited from amending the commission’s proposal.

If such a commission is formed — and if, as Murray hopes, it ends up successfully repealing a quarter of the regulations imported from the EU — the U.K. economy would save between £33 billion ($43 billion) and £140 billion ($182 billion) annually.

There is a lot of work to do before Britain reaches that point. The U.K. “won’t be able to cut the rules until they are formally out of the EU,” Murray says. Thus, as the U.K. moves toward a deal that restores sovereignty to the British people, U.K. leaders such as Theresa May must decide sooner rather than later how they expect Brexit will impact the economy, the environment, trade negotiations, and more.

A sterile Europe apparently thought that civil liberties could be bargained away in exchange for a temporary peace. Everything became negotiable.

As British author Douglas Murray has asked, why were workers not brought in from European countries suffering high unemployment, such as Portugal, Italy, Greece or Spain?

A clear-eyed U.S. Congressman, Rep. Steve King, correctly said recently that, “You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies.” He instantly drew that white-hot fire reserved for people who tell truths that threaten treasured fantasies (think Giordano Bruno or Galileo).

The new data released by Italy’s National Institute for Statistics for 2016 sounds again like a death knell. There has been a new negative record of births: 474,000 compared to 486,000 for 2015, which had already fallen to historic lows. There were 608,000 deaths in 2016. In one year, Italy lost 134,000 people — the equivalent of a city of the size of Ferrara or Salerno.

The demographic “illusion” is kept only by the influx of immigration (135,000). If one needs an idea of what Italy would be without immigrants, look at Emilia-Romagna, one of Italy’s most populated and affluent regions: in 2035 it will have 20% fewer residents.

Italy is sometimes thought of Europe’s guinea pig: wherever Italy goes, much of Europe follows it, especially in the central and southern countries. In 1995, Antonio Golini, a professor at La Sapienza University and a former president of the National Institute of Statistics, was contacted by the director-general of Plasmon, Italy’s largest producer of baby food. Looking at the declining birth rates, the firm asked him if something could be done to prevent the company from going out of business. Plasmon started to make dietary products for adults.

A year ago, European geographers went in search of “the most desolate place in Europe”. They discovered it not in northern and cold Lapland, but in sunny Spain, specifically in the area of Molina de Aragon, two hours from Madrid. Depopulation has not been the consequence of the climate, as in the Russian steppe or northern forests, but of a demographic crisis.

A report by the National Statistical Institute of Spain explained how the Iberian peninsula has become the sick man of Europe: Spain loses 72 inhabitants every day; 20% fewer children are born there than two decades ago. Demographers draw a line where Spain has no future and 30% of the population will be over the age of 65. In some Spanish regions, the fertility rate barely reaches one child per woman. Deaths already exceed births. Even the newspaper El Pais asked, “Are the Spanish people in danger of extinction?”. The Spanish government just appointed a “sex czar” to try to figure out how to sustain the shrinking population.

All is clear to me now. Islamists are faithful to Islamic scripture in its entirety, whereas the good Muslims pick and choose. The latter group follow an expurgated version of their scripture, so all we need now is for them to identify which parts they embrace and which parts they disavow.

If you look you will find that numbers of Conservative MPs in England hide their school. This is pure speculation on my part, but I imagine that they’ve either gone to a posh public school and want to hide that from the common folk; or they’ve gone to a local comprehensive and want to hide that from their colleagues and sundry VIPs.

Who cares, I suppose? But I was looking up Conservative MP Michael Tomlinson. He’d asked a particularly stupid question of Theresa May and I wondered, naturally, whether he’d been educated at Eton.

I have the view that public schoolboys have been largely responsible for selling England’s (Britain’s if you really insist) cultural heritage down the river to satisfy their moral vanity. I could be wrong about that. I might have a chip on my shoulder, having been dragged up in a working-class school for budding deplorables in the North West of England.

But never mind, that’s my view, and I am sticking to it. If climate alarmists can stick to their tenuous view, why can’t I?

Apropos the Westminster act of terror, Mr Tomlinson asked this question of Mrs May in the UK Parliament:

“It is reported that what happened yesterday was an act of Islamic terror. Will the Prime Minister agree with me that what happened was not Islamic, just as the murder of Airey Neave* was not Christian, and that in fact both are perversions of religion?”

I don’t want to dwell on Tomlinson or his penchant for the non sequitur. But to state the bleeding obvious, killing for Allah is religious alright. Killing for a united Ireland has nothing to do with wanting the universal imposition of papal law.

The illogicality of Tomlinson’s question is one of the reasons I thought that he might be an old Etonian But wherever he was educated, he is quite clearly a fool. But enough of him, what about Mrs May?

In part she answered this way:

“I absolutely agree, and it is wrong to describe this as Islamic terrorism. It is Islamist terrorism; it is a perversion of a great faith.”

At Rennes, in Brittany, a city whose name all familiar with the infamous Dreyfus Affair will recognise, university students prove their crass immaturity and fascistic left credentials by disrupting a talk by Israel’s ambasssador to France, Madame Aliza Bin-Noun.

Screaming the usual malicious canards, and citing the despicable one-sided report just released by the loathsome Richard Falk and his accomplice Virginia Tilley, they belie the very liberty, equality and fraternity that underpins the Republic, and the very democratic principles they accuse Israel of lacking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDXGafdmlzo

May their own futures not be blighted, ces enfants, by the Islamic menace that endangers the viability of long-term Jewish existence in La Belle Pays …

France — Fact is stranger than fiction. In France, doubly so. On the day I leave for Paris, the following headline adorns Le Monde’s front page: “Fillon Received $50,000 to Introduce a Lebanese Industrialist to Putin.”

Alors. A scandal to mar the French election. Anything less and they wouldn’t really be trying, would they? Of all the world’s political gods, those that serve the French are the most puckish.

And yet, the persistent rumors that have engulfed François Fillon are, in truth, the least interesting thing about this extraordinary election cycle. That Fillon’s descent has left a gaping political void is interesting, certainly. But what’s really fascinating is how it’s being filled. Late last year, it seemed all but certain that France would have a sensible, center-right president of the sort you could take home to your mother. Today? Heaven only knows.

On paper, Fillon was perfectly placed. He had the experience, having been prime minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, and he had the novelty value, having become the North Star of a new French conservatism that has embraced Catholicism in spite of laïcité, turned happily toward “Anglo-Saxon” free markets, and even rebranded its flagship party as “the Republicans.” In addition, he was well suited to bridge the gap between the sects in a country that remains as divided as ever — “How,” Charles de Gaulle asked, “can you govern a country that has 246 different sorts of cheese?” — but has become steadily more right-leaning as the years have gone by. Astonishingly for a French politician, Fillon is running on a platform would be familiar to voters in the United States: Inter alia, he wants to reduce the number of civil servants, abolish France’s “wealth tax,” abolish the 35-hour work week, reform the health-care system, and raise the retirement age; and, while he has promised to protect the legal status quo, he is vocally pro-life and opposed to gay marriage. For once, the stars seemed to have aligned: The most credible, electable option was also the most sound.

But, damn those puckish gods, it was not to be. And, alas, the alternatives to Fillon are markedly less appealing than is he. There is Marine Le Pen of the Front National (FN), who, despite having distanced herself from her father and swapped open-handed racism for implication-heavy populism, is still rather unpleasant. There is Benoît Hamon, the most left-wing candidate within the Parti Socialiste, whose big ideas are to tax robots and to add a universal basic income on top of France’s creaking welfare state. There is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a cerebral left-leaner whose destiny is to be the best-spoken also-ran in French history. And there is Emmanuel Macron, a self-described post-ideological moderate who is a leading contender for Luckiest Man in France.

Macron, an independent with no party apparatus around him, is a former Rothschild banker who at one point seemed destined to be a footnote but after Fillon’s implosion is now the odds-on favorite to win the whole thing. Perilously untested, chronically vacuous, and ostensibly tarred by his work under the incumbent president, François Hollande (the most unpopular the Fifth Republic has ever had), Macron nevertheless seems set to take the lion’s share of a political middle that is sorely lacking in credible representatives. Cosmopolitan, pro-immigration, and publicly insistent that “there is no such thing as French culture,” Macron is precisely of whom Marine Le Pen is thinking when she lambastes the “savage globalization that has been a nightmare” for France.

Politically, France is in a bad place. Under Hollande’s feckless leadership, the country has been attacked from both without and within and seen an average of 1 percent growth for almost half a decade. Unemployment among 15-to-24-year-olds is now at a staggering 25 percent and has led to an exodus that has rendered London the sixth-largest French-speaking city in the world. The reflexively proud French are no longer sure that they have a future. They are afraid for their economy. They are afraid of immigration. They are afraid of technology. There is, almost everywhere you go, a tangible sense of ennui. It is an uncertainty that does not suit the people that produced de Gaulle.

BELGRADE, Serbia—Serbs voted Sunday in a presidential election that was a test of their prime minister’s authoritarian rule amid growing Russian influence in the Balkan region.

Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, a former ultranationalist now a declared pro-European Union politician, is slated to win the presidency by a high margin against 10 opposition candidates, including a parody candidate who is mocking the country’s political establishment.

Mr. Vucic’s political clout could face a blow, however, if he doesn’t sweep his opponents in the first round of voting.

Mr. Vucic needs to win by more than 50% of the vote Sunday to avoid a runoff election on April 16 that would put him in a much trickier position against a single opposition candidate.

His main challengers in the vote include human-rights lawyer and former ombudsman Sasa Jankovic, former Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic and firebrand nationalist and Mr. Vucic’s former mentor, Vojislav Seselj, who has been tried for war crimes.

The opposition has accused Mr. Vucic of muzzling the media and intimidating voters ahead of the election. Mr. Vucic denies such accusations, saying only he can bring stability to a region scarred by the wars of the 1990s, which Mr. Vucic had supported at the time.

“I really hope that with these elections, Serbia will carry on toward its further stability with full support of its government,” Mr. Vucic said as he cast his ballot. “I don’t know if I’ll win, but I truly hope that those who want to destabilize Serbia will not succeed.” CONTINUE AT SITE