L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree

being the maunderings of an Englishman on the Côte d'Azur

08 November 2006 Blog Home : November 2006 : Permalink

The Biggest Threat to England

So my post yesterday may make it seem like I think Islam is the major threat to England. Actually I don't think that is the case. In fact this is where I tend to go along with the Suspect P as he makes the claim that much of the "Islamic terror" threat is wildly distorted. Note that doesn't mean I think Islam is a wonderful religion or that its tenets are true, nor does it mean I deny that parts of it are abused as blatent propaganda by bloodthirsty middle eastern tyrants and would-be tyrants, it just means that I believe that to whatever extent it is a threat, it is essentially an external threat and one that England is well able to stand up to under normal circumstances. Q.V. Napoleon, Nazis, Commies etc. As I wrote in the previous post, the English have proven to be pretty good at thinking, and as I have written earlier, the English have historically proved to be damn good at fighting and killing, so if push comes to shove we'll invent the next superweapon and use it to create a desert called peace.

However, just as the Vandals, Visigoths etc. delivered the coup de grace to the Western Roman Empire and the Turks did sometime later to the Eastern one, Islamic immigrants could possibly inflict the final blow that marks the end of England*. Islam will only inflict this blow if England succumbs to the biggest thereat and that threat is internal rot. Had I been a grown up as opposed to an inky schoolboy I suspect I would have decided that England in 1978 was irretrievably fucked. As someone who came to man's estate under the government of the Iron Lady M, I decided that England had a promising future. Unfortunately 8 years of Blairist government now leaves me less sure.

The problems I'm seeing are not unique to England, but as an Englishman and a patriot I don't really care so much about anywhere else. They also seem to be worryingly advanced in England. The problem boils down to the concept that because "Government is good so more government is better" - an opinion spread around by the UN, EU and other transnational organizations as well as ZANU labour and its ideological soul mates in the Grauniad and the like. "More government = better" has been a staple of continental European thought for decades and despite the economic and humanitarian disasters that result (communism, nazism...) still seems to be popular. The problem is that people think that just as long as their sorts are in power then big government is OK, unfortunately big government corrupts everything it touches.

It is my contention that the biggest threat to England's existence as a country with a promising future* is that it succumbs to the embreace unaccountable big government and state control. There are a lot of examples the show that state control is a bad thing - see Callaghan era Britain, Stalinist Russia etc. - but it still seems to be popular. One problem with big government is who pays. As this TCS article points out, it probably isn't the bloated plutocrats:

The tax code doesn't determine whether wealthy people invest their wealth or not. The tax code simply helps determine where they will invest it. They can invest their gains either on information technology and heavy equipment, or they can invest them in a small army of tax accountants, trust attorneys and other advisers to whom they turn for help in sheltering their gains from the IRS. I should know, I used that small army. In the late 1980s I was a tax accountant for the world's largest accounting firm. I had some very wealthy clients, but not one of them gave in and sold all that they had and gave it to the poor. Instead they gave big chunks of it to us in exchange for us finding ways to structure their affairs so as to avoid giving even bigger chunks to the IRS. The higher the capital gains tax rate, the more they needed us.

This is not a US centric view. Ask any builder who prefers to be paid in used fivers or recall my post about Antwerp. When tax rates get to be too high people find ways to avoid paying them and people with more money have a greater incentive to avoid than those with just a little more so they will tend to spend more and be more successful in doing so. And of course the scum in government and their pals always find ways to structure their own income so that it shows up mostly in un-taxed perks and the like than in taxable do$h - if you want to make a politician really scared you'll propose removing almost all tax deductions and allowances. Removal of both is unlikely to affect the incomes of the poor and is likely (eventually) to benefit the middle classes but it will utterly fuck the parasite classes.

Then there is what big government spends. Even ignoring the obvious pork barrel style corruption which is fairly easy to document even if it is hard to stop, the defenders of big government have a problem proving that government spends its money wisely. One thing that governmet does is provide hand outs to deserving individuals. Think about the fuckups in the CAP payment scheme (announcement yesterday/today that year 2 will miss its deadline of next June) and in Gordon Brown's tax credit scheme. If (see previous link) the left wing, pro big government Independant thinks the scheme is in trouble then it must be really really screwed up. The big all knowing government blows our tax money on the NHS (computer fuckups R us), on education (media stidiez enywun?) and ridiculous attempts to ensure that we are all nannyed to death with pointless regulations about car seats, weights and 10001 other areas of life. Some of these regulations (implemented at a cost of £millions each) are projected to save perhaps a dozen lives a year - one French example is the law that you have to have a "childproof" fence surrounding your swimming pool. This law has cost the millions of swimming pool owners thousands of euros each, was predicted to save (IIRC) 29 lives a year and has in fact led to an increase in drownings in swimming pools. I have absolutely no doubt I could find a similar regulation in England if I spent about 10 minutes searching for one. And then there is the protectionist habit via regulation and quotas so well described as "throwing rocks in your own harbour". Oh and then there is the competing minority problem. What happens when a black lesbian loses her job to a disabled Moslem (or any other combination you like as long as one of the parties is not a straight white male)? The simple answer is we spend zillions on legal aid to all parties so that they can figure out who is in the right and thereby take up court time and legal aid budget that might be better spent locking up Wayne for beating up pakis, Mohammend for nicking phones or prosecuting Lord Wotwotleigh or Mr Patel for fraud.

Worst is that the habit of government dependency becomes fixed in the population and then you can't reform it. Countries like France, Belgium (or IIRC Scotland) now have a majority of voters dependant on the government for their living, whether it is social security benefits, working as a civil servant or whatever. We know what happens next - we lived through it in the 1970s. Taxes rise, money does a bunk and the country goes bust. Followed by (see Russia) major hardships as the government goes and inflates its way out of the problem but fails to inflate the pensions it pays. Oh and (see Germany c. 1930) the inflation tends to lead to demagogues and their simple wrong solutions (brown people out) and civil disorder on a scale that it permits the government to hire a boatload of sadistic secret policemen to keep the proles in line. For which purpose wheezes like a biometric ID card - aka ID theft central - as recently defended by A Blair and Polly Pot come in handy. And ever more intrusive security measures (3 inch pocket knives now banned) now help to keep the proles docile because they have nothing to fight with. Of course the crooks aren't stupid enough to hand over their guns (let alone their swiss army knives) so the crime rate increases - crime is now lower risk for criminals - and we enter the vicious spiral of more failed attempts at security.

I don't buy everything written in the "Welfare State we're in" but the basic premises seem to be accurate and seem to be an perfect example of what I'm talking about. England has had a rich history of self reliance and minimal government. We're losing it and that is the primary threat to the nation.

*Note: England has a future no matter what the question is whether it is a good one. Absent some global cataclysm, England as a piece of land with people living on it will continue no matter what so the question is whether they will consider themselves heirs to the England of the past and whether they will be proud of that fact and inspiring to others or not



I despise l'Escroc and Vile Pin