Toby on Tuesday

'Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'

Last week, during a visit to London after Islamic State’s atrocities in France, I visited the Eurostar Terminus at St. Pancras Station.   What struck me most deeply was the eerie silence.   Apart from the security guards and the motionless trains, the place seemed deserted.   And as someone who has always loved France, her way of life, her art and her people, and of course her food and wine, I found this deeply disheartening.   It was as if the illusion of the Euro-dream had finally died.   I have always suspected that the Euro project would end in France and not in Britain, and this is now happening.   Despite the foolish attempts of Brussels and Berlin to prevent it, the return of border controls has ended the Schengen accord while the vast new debt being incurred to restore some security to France will breach every rule of the Eurozone – sic transit gloria mundi.

 

And as the Euro dream fades, it seems doubly strange that America’s State Department should continue to put pressure on Britain to remain in a project that now poses an existential threat to our national survival.   To the utopians in Brussels and Berlin, free movement of people across the EU is an article of faith, but on the ground it puts the lives of the innocent at risk.   Now one statistic of which I am quite proud is that this blog receives over 1,000 visitors a week from the United States.   And in a year’s time the citizens of America will go to the polls to elect a new President.   It would be wrong of me to advise our cousins there – for indeed they are our cousins – which way to vote.   But I would ask them to support candidates who feel able to grant to Britain that which America sought from Britain in 1776 – the right to be a self-governing democracy once more.

 

Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence contains some of the noblest words in the English language, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed – That wherever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...”   It is not difficult to understand just how divided Britain was over the American War of Independence, how many here sided with the patriots and how many chose to wear the buff and blue colours of George Washington’s army.   The patriots prevailed, as they were bound to do, and today I say to their descendants, Britain too must have her own Independence Day, for the sake of our shared heritage of free government and for the safety of our people!

 

Until next Tuesday!

 

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

 'Bucket Cars and Bulwarks' 

  (Image from www.ww2incolor.com)

 

One of my oldest, dearest friends is Rodney Atkinson.  His brother Rowan is in the business of comedy but Rodney is in the business of tragedy, in particular the tragedy of Britain’s membership of the EU.   And Rodney has just published his latest and most powerful polemic.   Called “And Into The Fire” it is available through Amazon (http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1882383346) in paperback or as an ebook by GM Books.   Now he knows his EU and he knows his Germany, having been a lecturer at the University of Mainz.   In essence his thesis is that, when Germany saw defeat looming in 1944, the Nazi Party recognised that hegemony over the Continent of Europe would need to be sought instead by peaceful means through the creation of a “European Union”.   Rodney’s evidence for this narrative is incontrovertible.   

 

He cites Theodor Heuss, Federal President of Germany from 1949, a leading Nazi who had designed concentration camps and supplied slave labour to the V2 project,.   He cites Heinz Twetschler von Falkenstein, appointed by Hitler as secretary of his “Europe Committee” and then in 1949 appointed to a similar role as Director of the European Division of the West German Foreign Office leading the negotiations for the founding of the EEC in 1958.   He cites Hans Josef Globke who had drafted Hitler’s Nuremberg Race Laws and went on to be Director of the Federal Chancellery of West Germany from 1953 to 1963.   And he cites Heinrich Hunke, Hitler’s Principal Lecturer for Education of the Nazi Party from 1934 to 1945, who went on to become Ministerial Dirigent of Lower Saxony and a leading German academic.   This will give you a flavour of Rodney’s densely packed book, full of astonishing information.   Its conclusion is that Germany has once again over-reached herself.   For she is being destroyed by the failure of the Euro, the very currency designed to bring the whole Continent under her control once more through the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank.   In achieving the ambition she first set herself in 1914, she has succeeded only in bankrupting herself and the whole Continent of Europe.

 

For my part, what I believe to be indisputably true is that in 1945 America took over from Britain the leadership of the West.   With Germany apparently defeated, the threat of a belligerent Soviet Union was seen as a far greater danger to World peace.   To this end, America was prepared to turn a blind eye to the murky past of so many of Europe’s leaders.   Indeed, she wished Germany to become a bulwark against Communism and so sought a restored Germany as a shield against Russia.   And Britain’s role in American eyes was to allow ourselves to be absorbed into the European Union as a further defence against Russia.   This mindset, which is as strong in 2015 as it was in 1945, explains why so many former Nazis obtained prominence in post-war Germany and in the creation of the European Union.

 

Of course none of this is to gainsay the sheer technical genius of so much German industry.   Perhaps Germany’s greatest engineer of the 20th century was Dr. Ferdinand Porsche.   He designed the Kraft-durch-Freude-Wagen, or “Strength through Joy Car”, which we know as the Volkswagen.   He went on to design the Wehrmacht’s jeep-like Kubelwagen or “Bucket Car”, the amphibious Schwimmwagen or “Swimming Car”, the Panzer tank and the flying bomb which Goebbels branded the Vergeltungswaffe-Ein or “Revenge Weapon One”, which we know as the V-1 or Doodlebug.   Despite the emissions scandal, Germany’s technical genius continues.   And as the old joke goes, “When you get behind the steering-wheel of a Porsche, you just feel that you want to invade Poland!”

 

Until next Tuesday!

 

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Hertz and Hegemony'

Today I’d like to write about the BBC, or “Auntie” as she became known in the 1930’s (“Auntie knows best”) or the Beeb as Peter Sellers first called her.  But of course Auntie doesn’t know best and has always completely misjudged events on the Continent, not least in Germany.   In the 1930’s Winston Churchill was banned from the airwaves for his speeches alerting our country to the scale of German rearmament, while Lord Reith, the Beeb’s Director-General, was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler.   “I really admire the way Hitler has cleaned up what looked like an incipient revolt” he wrote in July 1934 after Hitler had had his enemies in the Nazi Party murdered.   And in 1939, after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia he declared, “Hitler continues his magnificent efficiency.”   Now all of this would be of historical interest only if Auntie’s fawning instincts were not just as strong today.   And here I want to introduce you to Joschka Fischer, the dominant figure in Germany’s Green Party, Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, Germany’s most popular politician and the leading architect of the new Europe.

Born in 1948, as a student Fischer became a member of the militant group, Revolutionarer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle).   His radical “Putzgruppe” (Cleaning Squad) – the first syllable being an acronym for “Proletarische Union fur Terror und Zerstorung” (Proletarian Union for Terror and Destruction) - was involved in many a street battle and a photograph of him clubbing policeman Rainer Marx came to haunt him in later life.  In May 1981 the Hessian Secretary of Commerce was murdered with a firearm that in 1973 had been carried in Fischer’s car.   He maintained that he had given the car to the terrorist Hans-Joachim Klein so that Klein could fit it with a new engine.   Fischer then immersed himself in Germany’s nascent Green Party, being elected to the Bundestag in 1983.   His influence and popularity in Germany grew exponentially to the point where he was able in 1996 to write his first autobiography, “Wir sind die Wahnsinnigen” (We are the Mad Ones).   In this he declared, “Germany should now, as it has become peaceful and reasonable, get all that Europe and the whole world has refused in two gigantic wars – a sort of smooth hegemony over Europe.   A Superior Power that it is entitled to by its large size, its economic strength and its position.”   And two years later after the September 1998 elections, although the Greens had won just 7% of the votes, Fischer succeeded in negotiating a role for himself in Gerhard Schroder’s Social Democratic Government as Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany.   The rest is history.

By 2005, he had opened the floodgates to new immigration into Europe by relaxing visa regulations for Ukraine, which his critics argued would allow illegal immigrants into Germany with fake identities   And after leaving office in 2005 his zeal has in no way lessened.   Now, along with his grisly gang of old friends, Jacques Delors, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Guy Verhofstadt and the rest, Fischer is running the so-called Spinelli group to push for yet more EU integration.   Last June, in an interview of embarrassing obsequiousness by the Beeb’s Europe editor Katya Adler, Fischer took the opportunity to say to David Cameron, “Don’t lose yourself in wishful thinking.   Angela Merkel will do nothing which will endanger the basic principle of the common market, of the EU...It would be an illusion to think that the UK would get special treatment because it is a major contributor to the EU budget.”   The voice of the Superior Power, first enunciated in Fischer’s 1996 autobiography, was as clear as ever.   But at least Britain has UKIP to question the narrative of Auntie Beeb’s Euro-federalists.   And in the 1930’s, we were lucky too in a robust anti-appeaser Conservative MP called Captain Leonard Plugge.   He got round Auntie’s monopoly by the simple expedient of creating his own radio station in France, Radio Normandy, broadcasting into Britain from a transmitter at Fecamp on the Channel coast.   Thanks to Radio Normandy Winston Churchill’s warnings were heard on this side of the Channel, to the horror of Lord Reith.   And Churchill took his revenge 20 years later when as Prime Minister he oversaw the creation of ITV as a direct challenge to Auntie’s monopoly.   But all that’s a story for another day!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Bovine Spongiform Europepathy'

Those of us who relish the comic genius of the great P.G. Wodehouse can never forget the preposterous figure of Sir Roderick Spode.   He appears in “The Code of the Woosters” as the leader of the Saviours of Britain, otherwise known as the Black Shorts, and a parody of Sir Oswald Mosley who went on to found the Europe a Nation movement.   But the bullying, hectoring Spode has a dark secret.   The wealth that maintains him comes from the sale of ladies’ underwear and his company Eulalie Lingerie.   Once the secret is out, no one takes his campaign seriously again.   So it is only appropriate that the chairman of the EU “Stay” campaign, Britain Stronger in Europe (BSE), the 21st century equivalent of the Saviours of Britain, should like Sir Roderick Spode also have a background in selling ladies’ underwear - none other than Sir Stuart Rose, ex-Chairman of Marks & Spencer.   And of course in a farming constituency like Thirsk and Malton, the acronym BSE means something very different and more wretched still.   The memories of Mad Cow Disease have not gone away here, nor the extent of so-called “European co-operation” when that particular tragedy hit our farmers.   It is a measure of the sheer haplessness of the “Stay” campaign that the connotations of the letters BSE did not occur to a single one of its founders.

But behind Sir Stuart Rose, who is really only a front for BSE, lie some far more Machiavellian figures, Peter Mandelson for the Labour Party, George Osborne for the Conservative Party and, back from the dead, Nick Clegg for the LibDems.   And the word at Westminster is that they have already lost patience with the weakness of the “Stay” campaign and are starting to exercise their dark arts.   The old friendship between George Osborne and Peter Mandelson, which first flourished among the Greek islands on the yacht of the Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, has been rekindled to the point where, in the words of one Tory adviser, “George is goggle-eyed in the presence of Peter Mandelson.   He behaves like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”   And to prove the point, George Osborne, obsessed as he is with China, has just appointed Peter Mandelson as President of the Great Britain China Centre.   As to Europe, their plot is now becoming clear.   As well as the usual fear tactics and bullying already underway, it is to delay the Referendum until as late as possible in 2017.   By then EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker will have set in train a series of treaty changes for further integration as the EU moves towards the superstate foreshadowed in June’s “Five President’s Report”.   At that stage the 19 countries that form the Eurozone will effectively become a single nation dominated by Germany.   However, those countries not in the Eurozone, including Britain, will be offered some kind of so-called “associate status” on a basis to be determined by Brussels and Berlin.   This will enable David Cameron to return to London claiming not so much “peace with honour” but rather “the best of both worlds”   On this basis, he, George Osborne, Peter Mandelson, Nick Clegg and the whole of their tawdry campaign will press for a “Stay” vote.   The truth, however, is that nothing at all will have changed for Britain, while the struggling Eurozone members will have been drawn yet deeper into the abyss.

Our Nigel himself put the reality of David Cameron’s negotiations in his customarily succinct way the other day when he wrote under the headline ‘Britain will be flattened if it stays in the EU’, “Instead of standing up for the national interest, Mr. Cameron has staked his premiership on supporting EU open borders;  European commissioners and courts that can overrule the British legislature and judiciary;  and a spiralling EU budget, which he recently boosted by handing over another £1.7 billion when Brussels came calling.”   And Nigel, in his witty and perceptive way, has spotted the sheer folly of Sir Stuart Rose’s Britain Stronger in Europe, just as P.G. Wodehouse spotted the sheer folly of his fictional Sir Roderick Spode’s Saviours of Britain.  Nigel I know is another avid reader of P.G. Wodehouse’s comic mastery for the simple reason that they both received their same fine, rigorous education at Dulwich College, albeit at different times!   So there must definitely be something in the water of that part of South London that brings out the insight that humour is among the very best weapons against bullies and tyrants.   And, like Nigel and P. G. Wodehouse, we shall all need to have our wits about us during the coming two years!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby