“I will say what I think about Putin: the Russian nation needs a person just like this – with a Russian temper. Putin is trying to return just a bit of dignity back to the people.”

He then added: “For me, he is like (former French president) Francois Mitterrand or Pope John Paul II.”

Putin? Actually, Gerard old luvvie, he called the collapse of the Soviet Union: “one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.” He actually said that; he couldn’t have been clearer, could he?

http://www.economist.com/node/9682621

• Socialists in general are good, caring people who selflessly want to spread wealth around to alleviate the problems of the most vulnerable in society. Capitalists, on the other hand, are (as far as most socialists are concerned) mean, exploiting and money-grabbing and often heartless toffs; devoted mainly to grinding the noses of the poor into the dust while they selfishly amass great wealth for their personal use.

• So, the chief desire of the socialist is to altruistically dole out welfare to the needy. However, it is (or should be) obvious that this most noble of aims cannot be fulfilled unless you actually have the money to dole out. (Many socialists do of course borrow it against future growth, but this is not the place to discuss “Alice in Wonderland”).
  

• This of course is where the capitalists come in. Socialists – while being wonderful, caring and touchy-feely people – do not specialize in making money, only in dishing it out.

• It is in fact “capitalists” (all in the rather – for socialists – odious private sector) who actually create the wealth that the socialists seek to redistribute to the deserving needy.

• To restate this – just to make sure it is clear – socialists NEED the capitalists to CREATE the money that the former want to redistribute. I am not sure how many die-hard socialists will agree that they need capitalists – indeed, could not manage without them – but you can argue that one among yourselves.

• If you agree with my theory about the capitalists being a necessary evil, then it further follows that the MORE money the latter create the MORE the socialists can take off them to redistribute.

• And logically, if that is the case, it follows that socialists should do EVERYTHING they can to make it easy for capitalists to create wealth, since the more they create the more can be taken from them to do the touchy-feely, caring bit.

• In other words, the successful capitalist is the socialists’ best friend, since without the former the latter would have no money, as is clearly shown in Cuba, where there are no capitalists and correspondingly no money, meaning that everyone is just about equally poor with little redistribution needed.

• Of course, everything is a question of balance; you can have too much of either “ism”, just as you can die from drinking too much water. However, it would be nice if the socialists would sometimes accept that without people creating wealth they (the socialists) would have no justification for their existence, since they would have nowhere near enough of anyone else’s money to redistribute. I am hoping in particular that Mr Francois Hollande, President of France, will take this on board. In truth, however, this hope is tempered by realism.

  Much of the above falls into the category of “the bleedin’ obvious”, but I have always loved this saying of Talleyrand:

  “Cela va sans dire, mais cela va d’autant mieux en le disant.”
  
  

HAVE A NICE DAY!

Dictionary definition

We all LIVE in Europe.  I actually am British, now live in Germany, am married to a German, worked in France for ten years, speak four European languages, have a tri-lingual son, have 3 Anglo-Spanish daughters, have family living in the UK.

How the HELL am I “eurosceptic”?

What I am “sceptic” about is the humungous waste, cost and corruption of the EU as well as the unhidden agenda to create a European superstate that NOBODY has voted for.

This “eurosceptic” rubbish is absolutely typical of the Goebbelesque propaganda flung around by the Brusselomafia and those who fall for their sheit.

I will agree to being called “EU-sceptic”, since this organisation has USURPED my own personal dreams for Europe and has brought much of it to sclerotic and economic ruin as well as behaving in a quasi-fascist way.

This is dynamite stuff so I promised faithfully I would not publish it. However, as we all know a promise is not worth the paper it isn’t written on in politics, and in any case circumstances have changed since I made the promise (namely that now I have the info and before I didn’t), so here we go.

It seems the PET (Party Election Theme) will be DOUBLE OR QUITS, since apparently lots of things are going to be doubled. It was felt this would be a sufficiently catchy slogan to seize and retain the attention of voters.

And in a stunning move there will be a major reconciliation of the warring tribes within the great movement, bringing back on board some who had jumped ship and others who had of course been pushed off it.

This is apparently how it goes:

A) The following will be doubled:

1. borrowing – to invest in infrastructure and thus create jobs
2. doctors’ salaries – to improve the NHS
3. local council salaries – to improve councils
4. our EU contribution – to improve the EU
5. investment in PFIs to improve infrastructure, along with the doubling of the time taken to pay off the debt
6. the size of the Civil Service to speed up and improve the quality of service to Ministers
7. the welfare budget so as to abolish poverty
8. taxes so as to pay for all the above (an idea filched from President Hollande of France)
9. the minimum wage to keep the unions quiet
10. MPs’ salaries to keep them quiet – or at least quieter
11. the number of government consultants to create jobs and help Ministers reach the right decisions
12. the amount of land sold to foreigners to build houses to rent to native Brits in a vast extension of the “Buy-to-let” policy, with the hope of doubling tenants and reducing home-ownership by half during a single parliament
13. the cost of energy through the doubling of the number of operational coal mines – this is calculated to double the country’s fuel self-sufficiency safety factor and of course will put the final nail in Mrs Thatcher’s coffin
14. the BBC grant so as to improve government propaganda
15. the airspace devoted to convincing the public that the Tories are incompetent toffs (some had argued against this on the basis that everyone knew it already and that all our politicians are incompetent but the only case to be resolved was which lot were less incompetent than the rest)

B)    Some things however will be abolished:

1. border controls to save paperwork
2. the armed forces to save money (and the risk of a coup)

C)    The main govt aims will be based on growth. The party is particularly pleased with the brilliant idea of increasing spending while simultaneously reducing the crippling debt through the anticipated massive increase in growth. Growth in fact will be the party’s new mantra. With this in mind, the following policies will be pursued:

1. to reduce the debt through increased borrowing and spending (another idea from our French socialist comrades “Merci, les gars!”)
2. to end austerity by increasing growth (see previous article)
3. to increase the money supply (and thus in people’s pockets) by printing lots more of it
4. to improve the country’s infrastructure so as to increase growth
5. to reduce carbon emissions through increased growth

D)    Among the Reconciliation and Truth appointments (RATS) will be these exciting initiatives:

1. Tony Blair to run the The Listen and Respond Department (LIAR).
2. Gordon Brown to oversee the Quantitative Easing Solves Everything Department (QUESE).
3. Peter Mandelson to run the Socialist Millionaires United Group (SMUG) – this will convince the people that Labour has nothing against millionaires, as long as they are socialists.
4. David Milliband to run the How to Lose elections Gracefully (HOTLEG) Advisory Group, which it is hoped this will be of particular on-going value to his brother (Gordon Brown is said to have lobbied unsuccessfully for this particular job).
5. John Prescott to be Roving Troubleshooter (ROT), as usual punching above his weight, difficult though this may now be – he will be known as SUPREME ROTTER.
   David Blunkett was also offered a post but apparently declined on the basis that the country did not want – as he said – to see the blind leading the blind.

All in all, this is a stupendously exciting package to put to the voters in 2015. I bet you can’t wait!!

Have a good day, especially those luxuriating in their own properties while millions of their fellow-citizens struggle to pay the rent.

Rumours of the Labour Party’s Central Planning Office blowing a fuse have been swirling around the ether since latest British manufacturing production figures were released.

It seems that contrary to endlessly-repeated predictions of the total collapse of manufacturing along with the rest of the economy (rumours primed by Labour since the first years of Mrs Thatcher of course, even though manufacturing was higher at the end of her period than at the beginning), British manufacturing growth is holding its own and set for an increase even as that in most of Europe still declines. This is because Britain’s share of trade with the rest of the world is increasing while the EU atrophies into a total bureaucratic meltdown – apart from Germany of course, whose high-tech machine-tools and automobiles are still rising in demand.

Labour IT wizards have admitted that there must be a glitch in their algorhythms and are furiously working to fix it. Of course, any improvement in the economy is a disaster for Labour, as they thrive best when the economy is collapsing, both when they are in AND out of power.

On the technical front, one IT insider confided that they may have given Osbourne too high a negativity rating. This should apparently have been minus 100 and not minus 10,000, a rating given because he is an upper-class toff. “In future,” admitted the technician, “we may have to set this variable according to actual performance rather than a person’s social origin. But to be fair, nobody expected a toff to have a clue, and so this has taken us all by surprise.”

Still, analysts assume that Labour is working on some sort of spin to explain to the people why this improvement in manufacturing is in fact a purely spurious and completely temporary delusion and the figures do in fact on the contrary predict eventual disaster. Meanwhile the Labour Economic Planning Department is still proposing extra borrowing and spending to “create jobs”, and thus like its soulmates over in France demanding an end to “austerity” and a new spending splurge to “boost growth.” It remains to be seen whether the British public will buy this breathtakingly-daring economic cunning plan, which is one which the Germans – so far – have resisted. The astonishing thing is that all those countries now in an economic death spiral because of too much borrowing and debt are proposing to indulge in yet more borrowing and debt. This must either be extraordinarily clever or totally insane, and the jury is still out on that one.


NOTES FROM THE PRESS:
A) “Just days after receiving a Queen’s Awards for Enterprise to mark its exporting performance, the company said it will expand its Stoke-on-Trent production facilities, with the creation of 230 jobs.

Its sales rose 6pc to £70.2m last year, helped by fast growing sales in the US, Asia and South America. More than 80pc of its turnover comes from overseas.

Kevin Oakes, chief executive, said: “We sell into more than 130 countries. I have no doubt that’s largely because we manufacture in the UK. Our overseas customers see a real value in the Made in England backstamp. It’s not just about the quality and design, it’s about the integrity of the business as a whole – the service we offer and the fact that we stand by our products and our values.”

B) “Thursday’s promising manufacturing output figures may have come as a surprise to many, but not John Nollett. The managing director of £19m turnover Pailton Engineering, which was founded in his grandfather’s garden shed in1969, has long been a cheerleader for the prospects of British production. Even when politicians were, as Nollett puts it, “pushing manufacturing to one side thinking it was dead”.

“I own a German manufacturing business and an English one – I see [similarities] between German and British skills. And ours exceed what they have – even if they’re better at marketing themselves.” “

David Cameron (the current British Prime Minister!) recently took some flak for endangering Britain’s trade with China, specifically possible inward investment in infrastructure that the Chinnese might make in Britain. Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that this makes us resemble some quasi-colonised African state and consider some facts. Our Great Leader’s sin was to have met the Dalai Lama, who as we know the Chinese government consider to be an unperson. Three facts spring to mind, all pretty much indisputable I think.

A) North Korea is virtually a gigantic concentration camp, but worse, since the people are brainwashed as well as being subject to oppression and frequent death by famine while the leaders live in luxury.

B) China has supported the country practically and politically for decades. Without China’s help this loathsome family dictatorship – first among equals on the planet – would have collapsed decades ago.

C) China is one of our biggest and most important trading partners.

To make it even clearer, we do a massive amount of business with a country that is accomplice to and facilitator of oppression and mass-murder on a horrendous scale. The vast scale of this business allows the Chinese government to maintain its dictatorship and build up its armed forces, launching periodic bellicose threats towards Taiwan and other sovereign territories in the region.

The Western world seems quite happy with this state of affairs, or if not exactly “happy” then certainly accepting and of course profiting from it.

CONCLUSION: The entire western world is utterly immoral.

Please note that I have tried to be logical, though the last point is obviously a value-judgement.

What is puzzling about all this is that we seemed to adopt a moral high-horse at some cost to ourselves when it came to apartheid in South Africa, but not when it comes to North Korea, where people are in fact treated much worse. This could I suppose be because it was the Europeans who colonised most of Africa and so we felt a special guilt and had a special responsibility to try to put things right. But – being logical once more – “No man is an island.”, it seems bizarre to treat one group of oppressed and suffering humans differently from another. Brutal oppression is the same everywhere, and if globalisation is right for business then why not for the fight against human suffering at the hands of mass-murdering criminal family gangs?

Our Great Leader should tell the Chinese government to stick it. If it comes to a boycott of their goods (fat chance – we are too greedy), THEY would be the ones to suffer. And in the west, our unemployed workers could start making toasters and stuff again. Or a boycott would boost other third-world countries much worse off than China.

Whatever, it all leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

North Korea – FURTHER READING:

• 20 facts
  
• Human Rights
• Horror on our planet
• NK prison camps