The media and the punditocracy were having orgasms last weekend over the defeat of Marie Le Pen in the French Presidential election. “Crushed”, “landslide” were just two of the words used in celebration of her loss. Consigning MLP to the dustbin of history the hacks went on to gush over Emmanuel Macron, the young former Rothschild banker/civil servant who had “come from nowhere” to win the presidency.

Come from nowhere….lol….

Nobody “comes from nowhere” to win like that. Once it was clear that the traditional parties were persona non grata the French and EU political elites needed a package to sell to shore up their interests in the face of Le Pen’s nationalist and anti globalist rhetoric and the young photogenic former socialist banker fitted the bill perfectly.

What the media have failed to grasp is the fact that Le Pen knew that victory was very much a long shot. Her eyes have always been on 2022. What she needed from 2017 was legitimacy – and that she has gained in spades, firstly by coming a close second in the preliminary round despite having zero support from the official French media. Then, and this is of even greater significance, she gained the support of  over a third of those who voted. In other words a sizeable chunk of the electorate wanted her to lead France. This is something her father (and founder of the Front National) could never achieve. In 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen won just 4.5m votes in the presidential run off – his daughter gained 11m. She did well with younger voters and women and easily outmatched Macron amongst the working class.

Marine Le Pen has broken out of the core rump of the FN faithful and become a major political figure and could lay claim to the mantle of the leader of the opposition to the Macron administration

She will now capitalise on this by restructuring and rebranding the FN into a broader political movement that can still sell the FN’s seductive fusion of right wing nationalism with left wing social policy but without the old vichyite trappings that always held her father back.

She reacted to her defeat with grace and dignity but vowed to carry on

I will be at the head of this fight to gather together all of those who choose France first.

For those who hope to think that Marine Le Pen is finished – she has only just begun….

DAVID Davis has vowed that Britain’s “best days are yet to come” as he laid out the Government’s White Paper on Brexit.

The Brexit Secretary told MPs this afternoon said that our vote to leave the EU was a “vote of confidence in the UK’s ability to succeed”.

The train out of the EU has now left the station with the Remoaners still sobbing in the last carriage while casting a wistful eye towards the massed ranks of faceless EU bureaucrats still gloweringon the platform.

Of course the Guardian/BBC EUphiles will still maintain their doomsday chorus of sniping and sneering but, Gina Miller notwithstanding, our destination of an independent Britain where we and we alone decide on our laws is coming nearer

BREXIT DAY WILL BE MARCH 9  

Theresa May has set a target date of launching the formal Brexit process on March 9.

The Government is pushing its EU Bill through Parliament by March 7, which would allow the Prime Minister to trigger Article 50 at a summit of European leaders on March 9 and 10.

Ministers told the House of Lords yesterday that it hopes to have the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill approved by March 7.

The following day – March 8 – is the Budget, before Mrs May travels to Brussels for the long-awaited Brexit showdown with her EU counterparts.

The PM has promised to trigger Article 50, the formal mechanism for quitting the EU, by the end of March.

 We’re on our way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

An ice cold bucket of cold water from Roger Helmer MEP over the claim by government minister and former George Osborne bagman Matthew Hancock MP that Brexit would be a “leap in the dark” and lead to a decade of uncertainty – so therefore there is really no safe and sensible alternative to being shackled to the zombie EU.

The alternative to being in the EU is not being in the EU. And far from being a mystery, it is in fact the current state of a hundred-plus countries around the world – most of whom are doing rather better, in economic terms, than the declining and dysfunctional EU.  It is the state that Britain was in for centuries before we joined the “Common Market” less than half a century ago.   I don’t think that many Canadians or Australians or Singaporeans wake up in the morning scared to death because their countries are independent and not in the EU.  

For the benefit of Mr. Hancock, let me set out the parameters of Britain post-Brexit.  We shall have a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU, and contrary to the government’s scare story, that will involve negotiation not “with 27 member-states” but with just one interlocutor – the EU itself. 

But imagine a worst case, where we failed to negotiate an FTA. Then, as Matt Hancock knows perfectly well (or ought to know), the default position is simply the WTO rules.   Arm’s-length trading on a WTO basis would be less advantageous that an FTA – but not much.  For example, the duties payable on our exports to the EU under the Common External Tariff would be less than half our current net contributions to the EU budget. Dozens of countries around the world trade perfectly well with the EU on WTO terms. The three largest external suppliers into the EU are China, Russia and the USA. None of these has an FTA with the EU, but they trade with it very successfully nonetheless.

Simples….

THE SASH OUR MASTERS WEAR

He’s back –that strutting Russian officer, with his bullying sidekicks, last seen in Budapest in 1956, is now in Ukraine and doing exactly the same. Of course, as in Hungary, he would claim that he has been “invited” in to defend the country against Fascist mobs but it’s all lies. He’s there because Ukrainians have dared to aspire to glance westward rather than remain a supplicant of Moscow.

In 1956 realpolitik dictated that we stood by as the Russian tanks moved into Hungary to crush the uprising – but we did have the good grace to weep for those brave freedom fighters as they were imprisoned and tortured and executed by the grim legions of Soviet terror. Indeed, throughout the west those tears were followed by a sense of shame and guilt that we just watched as they drowned.

But in 2014 there are few tears and little, if any, sense of shame. The liberal left is mute, as always in the face of Russian aggression, incensed, no doubt that the Ukrainian protestors should dare to go around toppling statues of Lenin. But what is far worse is the attitude on the right. “Russian sphere of interest” is the current weasel phrase. Until a couple of decades ago Ukraine had been a colony of the Russian Empire for centuries, we hear from many “conservatives”, so what else should they expect if they annoy Moscow. It’s like getting an axe buried in your head in the East End in 1960 because you had a few beers too many and started badmouthing the Krays – you deserved it because you were STUPID….

Or, if “armed men” are swaggering around Crimea pulling down Ukrainian flags well isn’t that the same as what happened in Kiev?

Actually – no. Power didn’t shift in Kiev because the demonstrators, armed to the teeth with assault weapons, stormed into parliament and arrested President Viktor Yanukovych and his ministers. There was violence and there were bullets and scores of people killed and wounded. But the shootings were ordered by Yanukovych and the violence instigated by his security apparatus – and when the bullets failed to intimidate the crowds his authority just melted away just as it did in Petrograd in 1917 and Tehran in 1979. The government disintegrated and the police disappeared from the streets.

There was no putsch – just a power vacuum that the anti Yanukovych elements began to fill.

Still the myth of an armed insurrection has grown legs, conveniently reinforced by the Russians with references to gangsters, neo Nazis and anti-Semites. Standard agitprop in the best soviet mould, naturally and total bullshit. But the essence of the tragedy is not Putin’s lies – as a former KGB hack it came with his mother’s milk.

The most shocking aspect of the whole affair is how so many on the right are gloating over Putin’s actions. He has become, with his anti gay and anti Islamic rhetoric the antithesis to the gelded softness of the western elite. He rides a horse, Obama rides a golf cart. He hunts animals, Cameron strokes them. He vows vengeance against Islamic terrorists, the BBC worries about Islamophobia.

Our emasculated, feminised and over sentimental me-me-me society makes many of us uneasy. But a corrupt self serving regime led by a posturing bully like Putin who feeds on grievance is no substitute for the rule of law.

Realpolitik once again demands that there is little we can do to protect Ukraine from Putin’s bullying. But for crying out loud don’t bolster the man’s ego by gleefully supporting Russia’s right to strut imperiously into anywhere that once fell under the writ of tsar or commissar.

You would have thought that we had learned that lesson with that other gangster in in 1938.

Do you still believe David Cameron – or do you, like me, suspect a con?

Maybe this Polish politician has let the cat out of the bag and the European political elite has been given the inside story.

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski:Nick Clegg told me this afternoon it was extremely unlikely Britain would vote to leave EU #newsnight

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) May 29, 2013

They really think we are stupid. They believe their own agitprop that the the surge of support for UKIP is just a nine day wonder, a brief blip of protest that will disappear as the spin merchants and their media pimps attempt to switch the narrative. Tory Chairman Grant Shapps, we are told, has written a letter to local activists. William Hague might soon be wheeled out to assure the doubtful that all is well. Samantha Cameron should make herself available to secure the female vote.

They hold us in contempt – but they are rattled. Keep up the pressure and we can beat  them.

Chris Bryant, a gay Labour MP who is a tireless crusader against homophobia and who once made his underpants famous,  is clearly not a fan of Estonians barmaids.….

‘It would be nice sometimes when you go into a British hotel if the receptionist was British. ‘We need to give our young people to have the skills and the opportunities to get those jobs. ‘There is a hotel in my constituency quite often it’s not been able to employ locally, it has ended up employing people from Estonia and Latvia, often people from Estonia and Latvia have so much get up and go they’ve got up and gone.’

That’s not only true about hotels around Bryant’s Welsh constituency – hotels and pubs around West Sussex and Surrey are often staffed by Estonians and other East Europeans. But it’s not about low wages as some of the comments at the DM piece have opined. The key is in Bryant’s last few words

“people from Estonia and Latvia have so much get up and go”

Fact is Estonians and other East Europeans are not afraid of hard work and are also cheerful and helpful whereas some Brits…….

Sorry, Mr Bryant, I’d rather be served by an Estonian barmaid any day……

h/t for barmaid here…

This is, or was, Erika. She was a young student who was a real revolutionary. She and thousands of other brave Hungarians came out onto the streets of Budapest in 1956 to demonstrate against the communists who ran the puppet regime that governed Hungary on behalf of the Russian Soviet Union. She holds a gun because the regime’s secret police tried to break the demonstrations. When the Russian Red Army, flying the hammer and sickle flag carried by Romany Blythe, moved in to crush the uprising, Erika and her friends fought against their tanks with rifles, sub machine guns and petrol bombs.

They failed.

The Red Army’s hammer and sickle was triumphant and a new puppet communist regime brought back the secret police, the execution blocks and the prison camps. Erika was dead, killed in the last hours of the fighting while trying to help her wounded comrades. The dead hand of communist dictatorship gripped Hungary and the rest of Eastern Europe once again.

Western governments accepted the iron grip of Communism in Eastern Europe and Russia as a fact of life to be accommodated. Many voices in western academic and cultural circles, being of a Marxist bent, celebrated it.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the first western leaders to publicly denounce those communist regimes as evil and oppressive and, by implication, illegitimate. At a time when internal stresses and strains were beginning to distort the social and economic fabric of these tyrannies the impact of external condemnation from such influential voices were important factors in causing the red regimes to implode.

And in October 1989, 33 years after the uprising, Hungary became a free multi party democracy. How sad that Erika could not have been in the crowds celebrating that moment but, no doubt ,her spirit, and those of all those other courageous freedom fighters who died with her, was smiling down from above.

What would Erika have made of Romany Blythe’s theatrical posturing and ghoulish disrespect of Margaret Thatcher?

Not much, I suspect.

Probably with as much contempt as Lech Walesa and those of his Solidarity comrades who had welcomed her to Gdansk in 1988 when it was still under communist rule.

Those on the Left who still probably regard Thatcher as a hate-figure, have either forgotten the history of the Cold War or possibly never understood that Communism meant the virtual enslavement of millions of people in the East European countries, who loathed its ideology as much as Margaret Thatcher herself. It is simply not possible to imagine Thatcher visiting Russia in the 1930s, like certain Left-wing useful idiots from Britain, and being taken in by Stalin’s propaganda machine. Ordinary East Europeans took a different view of her to her critics in this country. For them she symbolised opposition to Communism; indeed she was given a tumultuous welcome by the shipyard workers in Gdansk when she visited them. She wept at the sight. The shipyard workers would have been puzzled to learn of the refusal of Oxford University, her old alma mater and one of the most prestigious universities in the world, to give her an honorary degree.

Amen to that, say I – and I am sure the spirit of Erika would agree….

So the Cypriots have given Angela Merkel and the EU the finger – instead they have turned to Putin’s Russia

Cyprus turned to Russia for help on Tuesday night after the country’s parliament overwhelmingly rejected a tax on the deposits of bank savers.

Despite warnings from the EU not to touch the Russians with a barge pole Cyprus is looking for help from the KGB men who now rule Russia and have been using Cyprus as a “helpful” venue for laundering investing their hard earned “profits”

It could be seen as a smart negotiating ploy – calling the EU bluff. I would imagine there might even be a bit of panic in Brussels because if just one Eurozone member decides to go it alone politicians in Athens, Rome and Madrid will start having second thoughts and the whole Euro farce might start to unravel.

Prepare to add another notch for UKIP…

Claims of bribes, kickbacks and false accounting at Italy’s oldest bank, Monte dei Paschi (MPS) based in Tuscany – a bank closely associated with the left wing Democratic Party which hoped to win next month’s elections on a pro EU “save the Eurozone” ticket. Indeed until a few days ago it was run by a leading socialist, Giuseppe Mussari

Moreover questions are now being asked about the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, who was in charge of the Bank of Italy in 2010 back when regulators went through the MPS books and claimed it was all kosher. Draghi is supposed to be the big cheese who will control the revamped Eurozone via the ECB so this brings into question his powers of judgement.

MPS is closely linked with liberal/left elite of Tuscany, the Italian equivalent of the high minds of WaPo/NYT in the US and Guardian/BBC in the UK so Berlusconi (loathed by the left) and other Italian politicians suspicious of EU schemes to prop up the Eurozone are rubbing their hands with glee.

Bribery, corruption and lies from the Italian left? Nothing new in that……