The EU’s 1989 Declaration of War on Smokers

Posted on December 16, 2018 by

I generally explain my disenchantment with the EU as dating from 2010, when I discovered that in late 2009 the EU had declared war on smokers in Europe.

But a few days ago Rose produced evidence that the EU’s war on smoking dates from far earlier than 2009,

In fact, it dates back to the Resolution of the EU Council 18 July 1989, which I reproduce in full with added emphases:

RESOLUTION OF THE COUNCIL AND THE MINISTERS FOR HEALTH OF THE MEMBER STATES, MEETING WITHIN THE COUNCIL of 18 July 1989 on banning smoking in places open to the public (89/C 189/01)

THE COUNCIL OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES AND THE MINISTERS FOR HEALTH OF THE MEMBER STATES, MEETING WITHIN THE COUNCIL,

Having regard to the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community,

Having regard to the draft recommendation from the Commission,

Having regard to the opinion of the Economic and Social Committee (1),

Whereas the European Council held in Milan on 28 and 29 June 1985 stressed the importance of launching a European action programme against cancer;

Whereas the Council and the Representatives of the Governments of the Member States, meeting within the Council, in their resolution of 7 July 1986 on a programme of action of the European Communities against cancer, set the objective of contributing to an improvement in the health and quality of life of citizens within the Community by reducing the number of cases of cancer and under this heading gave priority to measures against smoking;

Whereas, in addition to the potential encouragement to smoke and the unpleasant physical effects and the nuisance which smoke causes for non-smokers, there is an increased risk of respiratory illnesses for non-smokers involuntarily exposed to the smoke of tobacco products ; whereas consequently, it is appropriate to protect the right to health of non-smokers against involuntary smoking;

Whereas, to ensure respect for the right to health of non-smokers, it is essential to ban smoking in public places in certain establishments and in forms of transport;

Whereas, however, in view of the extent of tobacco addiction affecting part of the population, it is appropriate to make provision to permit smoking in part of these establishments and forms of transport;

Whereas it is necessary to extend to the citizens of all Member States the protection they are afforded in some Member States against the damage caused by involuntary smoking;

Whereas, finally, the initiative set out in this resolution will have an even more beneficial effect on public health, particularly for the workers directly concerned, when coupled with health education programmes during the years of compulsory education and with information and public awareness campaigns,

INVITES THE MEMBER STATES:

to take the following measures by introducing legislation or by other methods in accordance with national practices and conditions:

1. Ban smoking in enclosed premises open to the public which form part of the public or private establishments listed in the Annex. Member States may add to the said list;

2. Extend the ban on smoking to all forms of public transport;

3. Provide, where necessary, for clearly defined areas to be reserved for smokers in the above establishments and, if possible, in public transport, particularly for long journeys;

4. Ensure that in the event of a conflict, in areas other than those reserved for smokers, the right to health of non-smokers prevails over the right of smokers to smoke;

to inform the Commission every two years of action taken in response to this resolution. (1) Opinion delivered on 26 April 1989 (not yet published in the Official Journal).

Public and private establishments referred to in point 1 of the resolution (non-exhaustive list)

1. Establishments where services are provided to the public, whether for a charge or free, including the sale of goods;

2. Hospitals, establishments where health care is given and all other medical establishments;

3. Establishments where elderly persons are received;

4. Schools and other premises where children or young people are received or housed;

5. Establishments where higher education and vocational training are given;

6. Enclosed establishments used for entertainment (cinemas, theaters, etc.) ; radio and television studios open to the public;

7. Enclosed establishments where exhibitions are held;

8. Establishments and enclosed places where sports are practised;

9. Enclosed premises of underground and railway stations, ports and airports.

Today’s smoking ban was all there already, back in 1989!

The document doesn’t specifically mention bars and cafes and restaurants. But they are clearly “Establishments where services are provided to the public, whether for a charge or free, including the sale of goods.” Nor does it mention churches, which provide services for free, but they must clearly be included as well.

Another interesting feature of the document is that it requests that, where necessary, and if possible, areas should be reserved for smokers in all the establishments listed.

It would seem that, in the event, it was never found either necessary or possible to provide any smoking areas in any of them. So that part of the Resolution fell away.

But what’s most notable about the resolution is that  the rights of non-smokers must prevail over the rights of smokers:

4. Ensure that in the event of a conflict, in areas other than those reserved for smokers, the right to health of non-smokers prevails over the right of smokers to smoke.

In this document, smokers have been declared to be second class citizens, with their rights to smoke restricted to a few smoking areas. But since, as just pointed out, they were never actually given any such smoking areas, they effectively have no rights at all. And in fact, since they have no rights to smoke anywhere other than designated smoking areas, then if their own homes or the outdoor environment have not been designated as smoking areas, they have no right to smoke there either.

Anyway, it would seem that the EU was, from the outset, bent on banning smoking everywhere.

And this might well prove to be one very strong reason why the EU political project was guaranteed to fail. Because one of its first acts was to remove the rights of fully a third or a quarter of the population to smoke anywhere, and thereby reduce them to second class (or third class) citizens.

There is no possibility whatsoever that a society which expels such large numbers of its own people from public life can survive. There is no possibility that the EU, which has done exactly this, can survive either.

.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Puzzled

Posted on December 14, 2018 by

One thing that’s puzzling me about the Conservative No Confidence vote of a couple of days back is this: why did the rebels call for a vote if they knew they were going to lose?

For when I first read about it, it was reported that Theresa May was expected to survive the vote.

I can only suppose that the rebels expected to win.

Why might that have been? Because they’re received enough promises from among the 317 Conservative MPs in parliament to believe that they had the necessary number of votes to topple Theresa May.

So I can only suppose that some MPs must have been a) promising the rebels they would vote for them, and b) promising Theresa May that they’d back her. And they’d been lying to somebody or other.

And there seem to have been at least 42 of these double-dealing MPs. Are we going to find out their names? I saw yesterday a link to some website that purported to have a list of MPs and how they voted, but it was behind a paywall so I couldn’t see it.

A lot of people in the Conservative party must be very, very angry at some of their colleagues. They’re probably no longer on speaking terms. The whole fiasco would seem to have deeply divided the Conservative party, perhaps irreparably.

I suppose we’ll find out in due course.

The other thing that’s puzzling me is: why did Theresa May head off to Brussels, on the day after the vote, to “negotiate” with the EU, when they’d already said there weren’t going to be any more negotiations?

Wasn’t the day after the vote the time to set out to unite the Conservative party, smooth ruffled feather, pour oil on troubled waters? Shouldn’t she have been on radio and TV everywhere, talking to people in Britain? Why did she immediately head for Brussels?

It didn’t seem to be quite the right thing to be doing, after such a momentous vote.

But it all makes sense if she’s a Remainer, and essentially one of the European political class. She may well feel more at home in Brussels than she does in Westminster. She’s probably got lots of friends there.

And maybe that’s why she always comes over as being so very confident. She has lots of friends in Europe, and lots of friends in the Conservative party.

There’s a lot that has yet to be played out. Doesn’t her Brexit deal need to get the approval of Parliament? Last I heard, she was unlikely to get that approval. Is anything likely to change in that respect?

I think it’s going to be some months before we know exactly where we are. But I strongly suspect that when she said “Brexit means Brexit”, she was really saying that Brexit could mean whatever she wanted it to mean.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Mounting Volatility

Posted on December 13, 2018 by

I didn’t find out until late yesterday afternoon that Theresa May was facing a vote of No Confidence by Conservative MPs. In the report I first read, it was said she was expected to survive it. And indeed she did.

And she won’t face another one for at least a year, according to the rules.

But someone else pointed out that Margaret Thatcher had survived a similar vote of No Confidence in 1990, and was gone a week later. So there may well be further developments in the weeks to come.

Did the plotters themselves expect to lose the vote too? If so, why did they call for it?

But with the vote being 200 in her favour and 117 against, there was an 83 vote majority, which meant that only 42 MPs needed to change their vote in order to oust her. And maybe the plotters believed that they had received assurances from sufficient numbers of them to think that they could get rid of her.

But if they’ve achieved nothing else, they’ve shown the world just how deeply divided the Conservative party is right now.

But is the Labour party any less divided? The rise of the left wing Jeremy Corbyn entailed the fall of the more centrist Blairite wing of the party. So I’m sure that Labour is just as divided as the Conservatives.

And with Nigel Farage having just quit the party, it would appear that UKIP is equally divided.

Is it any different in Europe? Probably not. All the political parties everywhere, of whatever hue, seem to be rent with dissent of one kind or other.

And in the USA the Republican party is divided between Trump supporters and Never-Trumpers, and the Democrats pretty much equally divided.

In fact the whole world seems to have become increasingly volatile.

In the past year or so Vladimir Putin has warned Russians to prepare for war. And with an ongoing confrontation with Ukraine, and NATO forces conducting exercises on its borders, Putin has good reason to warn his countrymen.

Who wants a war? Does Trump want war? I don’t think he does. Trump admires Putin, as a leader who sticks up for his own country. I think he wants to do deals with Russia (and everyone else). Instead it seems to be the US “Deep State” that is always looking for new wars to start, simply to feed the ravenous US military-industrial complex, which always needs an enemy somewhere. And the current near-civil war in the USA seems to be between the war-mongers in the US Deep State, and Trumpist peace-mongers or trade-mongers. Who’s going to win? Neither side seems to have gained a upper hand so far. And the struggle between the two has lasted for two whole years.

From just a couple of weeks back:

Britain’s most senior military leader has issued a stark warning to the government, comparing the current state of international security to the breakdown in diplomatic relations that led to the outbreak of the First World War.

General Sir Nick Carter says that the military threats around Europe are “reminiscent of the first decade of the 20th century.” He adds: “For me, it’s hard to remember a time when the strategic and political context was more uncertain, more complex and more dynamic.”

Nothing to disagree with there. But the general goes on:

Sir Nick highlighted both mass migration and the “bellicose nature” of populism and nationalism that run counter to it as major threats to European stability.

The 59-year-old also warned that “ambitious states such as Russia, China and Iran are asserting themselves regionally and globally, in ways that challenge our security, stability and prosperity.”

I think he’s misreading contemporary populism and nationalism. European populists and nationalists simply want to govern their own sovereign states, and not be governed by Brussels. And that is increasingly what European politics is all about. This isn’t the bellicose nationalism evident throughout Europe in 1914.

And isn’t it the EU which is the “most ambitious state” of all, which has now rapidly expanded to the borders of Russia? And isn’t it also becoming one of the “bellicose” states, as it attempts to create an EU army? And in a time when the EU is showing growing signs of internal fracture, isn’t it in such times that states look around for foreign enemies to unite their peoples against? I think the EU is far more dangerous than any of the patriotic populists and nationalists who are springing up all over Europe.

What happens next will probably be determined by the outcome of the current American civil war. If Trump wins, I think he’ll move rapidly to reduce global tensions. And if the Deep State war party wins, there’ll be yet another war, somewhere or other. And for the time being, the scene in Washington looks like the bridge of some ship, with rivals fighting over the helm as it steams forward at full speed.

Or, just as likely, there’ll be a Sarajevo-style event that will trigger a chain reaction, in which everything flies apart.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 17 Comments

10 Years After

Posted on December 12, 2018 by

I must say that I was rather surprised that, when asked yesterday what they thought the world’s most pressing problem was, over 60% of respondents cited smoking bans.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, because I write a blog in which I keep banging on about smoking bans year after year, and I should expect to have attracted a fairly like-minded readership over the nearly 10 years that I’ve been writing it.

But all the same, I expected smoking bans to be the choice of a small minority of respondents, given all the other problems the world has got. And particularly at a time when the most urgent and pressing problem here in the UK is Brexit. So I expected to see Brexit top the poll. And if not Brexit, something arguably just as serious – such as immigration, militant Islam, or Ebola.

I also thought that one or two people might have chosen Donald Trump as the world’s biggest problem, given that so many people seem to be completely obsessed with him, and filled with hatred for the poor man.

I also thought that someone might have voted for global warming/climate change, given that so many people seem convinced that it’s the greatest threat facing humanity right now. But no, nobody seems much bothered about that either.

I also thought that someone might drop in a comment asking: “Frank, do you really think that smoking bans are the world’s most pressing problem? Because nobody I know thinks they are.”

That someone would have been a non-smoker, Because for most non-smokers, naturally enough, smoking bans simply don’t figure at all in their lists of the world’s most pressing and urgent concerns. And if they heard anyone cite smoking bans as any sort of cause for concern, they’d be completely disbelieving. Which is why I thought one of them might leave a comment to that effect. Maybe, because none have, quite a few non-smokers realise that these smoking bans are cause for concern? Perhaps they’ve seen the smokers outside the pubs, in all weathers, year after year. Or outside the hospital gates.

And indeed here in Herefordshire, England, nobody seems to think that the UK smoking ban is a problem. Not even the smokers. And I’ve been talking to them on and off for years, in one pub garden or other, when I find myself drawn into conversation with complete strangers. I’ve heard them talking about Brexit quite often. I’ve even seen them engage in shouting matches about it. But smoking bans, never. They don’t talk about it. It’s an unmentionable subject, even if it’s the only reason why they’re all sat outside with their beers and the cigarettes, talking about something else. To raise the matter is like drawing attention to the decomposing corpse sat at an adjoining table, head slumped onto the table, one skeletal hand still grasping the handle of a beer glass, the other holding a half-opened pack of Marlboro. You’re not supposed to mention it. You’re supposed to behave as if it isn’t there.

For me the UK smoking ban is the single most pressing problem in the world, because for the past 10 years I’ve felt like I’ve  been lying on the ground with someone standing on my chest, or maybe just standing on my foot. Smoking bans exert constant pressure on smokers. And since smoking bans are always multiplying and intensifying, the pressure exerted by them gets more and more intense. And to this there must also be added the pressure exerted by the hyper-taxation of tobacco. And also the insulting messages and pictures which cover all tobacco products these days. And the peer pressure from friends and family and colleagues at work. And the constant media demonisation of tobacco.

It doesn’t really surprise me at all if smokers eventually succumb to this pressure, surrender, and quit smoking. It requires a stoical determination to carry on smoking in the face of this unrelenting storm of abuse. And sometimes it must simply become impossible to go on. Whenever I see anyone light up a cigarette or pipe or cigar, I feel an instant rush of admiration for them, that over 10 years after the smoking was banned in public places, they still persist in their folly.

It’s also why I was filled with delight when I learned yesterday, via Smoking Lamp that:

A new survey has revealed that 34% of Spaniards smoke cigarettes every day, compared to 32.8% when the anti-tobacco law was introduced.

How wonderful!

Health Minister María Luisa Carcedo and Azucena Martí, the government delegate for the National Plan on Drugs … were unable to explain the rise in smokers.

How wonderful that these two fuckwits can’t understand it.

There are a lot of dogged, stoical smokers in Spain, who are carrying on smoking just like their less numerous British cousins.

There are lots of dogged, stoical smokers in France as well. Almost as many as in Spain.

Smoking in France was so much of an issue scientists have even invented a name for it: the French paradox. The paradox consists how the French seem to smoke so many cigarettes but don’t appear to be affected by their adverse effects at the same rate as their European counterparts.

There are two ways of looking at this paradox: either the French cancer care system is vastly superior to those in neighbouring countries, or scientists have fallen victim to the stereotype that France is still the tobacco haven it was back in the 1960s…

Its annual health report shows that the number of people lighting up regularly is no greater than the 2013 WHO official European average of 28%…

Given the stats, why then do French people seem to smoke conspicuously more than the British, or Americans? Tourists visiting France frequently cite smoking as the first culture shock they experience when they set foot on French soil, or perhaps simply when they step on a discarded cigarette butt.

A survey by travel website Tripadvisor revealed that users found that France was by far the “smokiest” country in the world.

My experience of the UK smoking ban has been, as I say, like having someone standing on my foot for 10 years. And I dare say that 34% of Spaniards, and 28% of French, feel pretty much the exact same way.

Which may explain in part why France has just experienced a sudden volcanic political explosion. Beneath the surface, a lot of pressure has built up. In France they’ve had a draconian smoking ban for slightly longer than Britain: theirs dates from 1 February 2007

Smoking and vaping are banned in all indoor public places (government buildings, offices, public transport, universities, museums, restaurants, cafés, nightclubs, etc.). Cafés and shops selling tobacco-related products are submitted to the same regulations. No exceptions exist for special smoking rooms fulfilling strict conditions. Additionally, some outdoor public places also ban smoking and vaping (railway stations).

Perhaps it just takes a while for the pressure to build up to breaking point. Perhaps it takes 10 years, or 20 years, of slowly mounting pressure before there’s an explosion. The explosion doesn’t come immediately: it comes 10 years after. Or 11.8 years, to be exact. And if Spain hasn’t erupted yet, it’s because they’re only 7 years into their smoking ban: 2 January 2011. Spain is likely to explode in 2022.

And, by this analysis, Britain is due to explode in April 2019. And in fact, recent political developments very strongly suggest that Britain actually will explode around about then. Although it will be Brexit (or the lack of it) which will be the nominal cause of the explosion, much like fuel tax hikes were the nominal cause of the French eruption.

…

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

What is the World’s Most Serious and Pressing Problem?

Posted on December 11, 2018 by

A couple of things caught my eye this morning. The first was a headline in the Sun:

Theresa May scraps Brexit vote and vows to beg EU for a new deal – but they’ve already said they WON’T renegotiate

But the second was a remark by one-time Conservative leader William Hague that a second referendum on Brexit would be:

“the most divisive and bitter political conflict in this country in a hundred years.”

I’m not sure it would be. If asked to vote again, I’d just vote the same way I did last time, because I haven’t changed my mind.

But I doubt if I’m going to be asked, for that very reason. So instead, tasked with steering Britain out of the EU, what Theresa May has done has been to simply drive Brexit into the wall. The whole thing has become such a complete and utter shambles that it simply isn’t going to happen. And that’s exactly what the European political class wanted.

But is Brexit “the most divisive and bitter political conflict in a hundred years”? I suppose some people would say it is.

But I can’t say that I wake up every day thinking about Brexit and the EU. I only get interested and engaged in these matters from time to time. For essentially Brexit is of concern primarily for people in Britain, and secondarily for people in Europe. Nobody else is much interested in it.

How about something more global in scope as a cause for concern, like the one highlighted in the Guardian of 6 Dec 2018?

Compared to the threat of climate change, Brexit is a distraction

With Guardian readers writing that

Our national government is focusing on Brexit, which is merely a distraction in the face of what is the greatest threat our species has ever faced.

and

Climate change is the greatest issue the world is facing and readers can’t have the message highlighted enough.

Well, I can’t say that I wake up every morning thinking about global warming.

How about Donald Trump?

Donald Trump is ‘greatest threat to international security’, says former MI6 head

And clearly there are a lot of people who still can’t accept that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to become President of the United States. It seems to be the only thing that some of them think about.

But, again, I can’t say that I wake up every morning worrying about Donald Trump.

So what do I wake up thinking about every day?

The smoking ban. That is the single most divisive and bitter event in the entire 70+ years of my life. It shattered the culture in which I lived. It shattered all the friendships I once had. After the smoking ban I became an exile in my own country. I became an outsider.

Brexit didn’t do that. Global warming didn’t do that. Donald Trump didn’t do that. Only the UK smoking ban of 1 July 2007 had that effect on me. And since the entire world has been buried in recent years under a deluge of smoking bans, there’ll be the same shattered cultures, and broken friendships and exile and exclusion everywhere else in the world.

Brexit is a serious matter, but it’s really only a serious matter for Britain and Europe. Global warming may be a serious matter for the entire world, but it isn’t a problem right now, because the sea levels haven’t been rising.  And if Domald Trump is a problem for some people right now, he’s not going to be one for very much longer, because he’s already half way through his term in office.

But smoking bans are having serious social and economic impacts, right now, all over the world. I think that they have opened up deep divisions in societies everywhere, and these divisions are going to grow deeper. I think they’re going to be seen one day to have been catastrophic political mistakes.

But what do you think?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 21 Comments

Nigel Farage Has Quit UKIP

Posted on December 10, 2018 by

Nigel Farage quit UKIP last week.

Nigel Farage has quit UKIP, saying the party’s leader Gerard Batten seems to be obsessed with Islam and ex-English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson.

Speaking on LBC radio, the former leader of the Eurosceptic party said he made the decision with a “heavy heart”.

But he said he did not “recognise” the party any more and it was turning a blind eye to extremist politics.

Mr Batten survived a vote of no confidence on Monday, after he appointed Mr Robinson as an adviser.

He’s probably the only politician I’d actually like to vote for, if I ever got a chance. It would not be because he’s anti-EU: it would be because he’s the only politician in Britain who has very publicly stuck up for smokers. He did so at Stony Stratford. I went there just once. He went there several times.

Can anyone “recognise” any party any more? I used to vote Lib-Dem, but I ceased to recognise the party after 95% of its MPs voted for the smoking ban. But I don’t really recognise the Labour party of Jeremy Corbyn either. Nor the Conservative party of Theresa May. Perhaps it’s only natural that political parties will always gradually metamorphose into something different from what they started life as. If nothing else, new members arrive with new ideas, and old members depart with old ideas. Change is inevitable.

The same thing happens in the USA. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are the same parties they were 50 years ago.

Political parties, like other social institutions, are made up of people, and people are always changing, so the institutions are changing as well. I dare say that the British Medical Association today is a very different thing than it was 50 years ago: it now seems to be full of mad doctors who believe that smoking causes all diseases, and if not smoking, then drinking. In time, these mad doctors will be replaced with a new tranche of equally mad doctors.

Same applies to religions, universities, cities. Is San Francisco today the same sort of place it was 50 years ago? Is London? Is Paris? Everything changes, but keeps the same name.

And a week after leaving UKIP, Nigel Farage is starting a new political party.

Nigel Farage has confirmed he is planning to launch a new political force to save Brexit, vowing he “won’t lie down” as the political establishment tries to overturn the referendum result.

The Brexit pioneer, who resigned from UKIP last week, told the Sunday Telegraph: “I sense within me I have not fought my biggest battle yet — that is how it feels. Whether it is happenstance, serendipity, destiny.

“I am not going to lie down and watch it go down the plug hole. I couldn’t do that. And I won’t do that. If there are European Parliament elections I am standing and I am thinking about vehicles do to that,” he added.

…I have always said that if the ball gets dropped on Brexit I will have no choice but to “pick it up. It increasingly looks like that is the case.”

He seems to think that the ball is going to be dropped. And that’s what I think too.

The latest idea seems to be to just cancel Brexit.

UK can cancel Brexit by unilaterally revoking Article 50, European Court of Justice rules

The UK has the legal power to stop Brexit by unilaterally revoking Article 50, the EU’s top court has ruled.

The ruling matches legal advice given to the court last week by its advocate general, who said as a sovereign country Britain could reverse its decision even at this late stage.

The legal decision is significant because means Britain could prevent a no-deal Brexit from happening if it wanted, even if Theresa May’s deal is voted down by MPs next week.

In their judgment released on Monday morning the panel of judges said it would be “inconsistent with the EU treaties’ purpose of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe to force the withdrawal of a member state” against its wishes.

I have no idea what Parliament will decide, but I’m pretty sure that we won’t get the Brexit we voted for.

But I’ve begun to think that in the longer term it’s not going to matter whether Brexit does or doesn’t happen right now, because I think the EU is going to disintegrate anyway, and there’s going to be Brexit whether anyone wants want it or not. And there’ll also be Grexit and Frexit and Spexit and about 25 other exits.

The EU is a political project. And that project – as the European Court has just pointed out – is that of “ever closer union” between the peoples of Europe, just when the peoples of Europe have begun to demand autonomy and independence from the EU. The Eurocrats in the EU are now increasingly fighting to simply hold the EU together, and prevent any of its increasingly fractious members from leaving. The centrifugal forces inside Europe are beginning to exceed the gravitational forces holding it together, and Europe is likely (in fact, certain) to fly apart. It won’t be the first European empire to have disintegrated. It probably won’t be the last either. The more that “ever closer union” is imposed on the peoples of Europe, the harder they’ll all fight for their independence.

The only thing that can possibly save it is for the goal of  “ever closer union” to be abandoned, and for sovereignty to be restored to the members states, with the EU reversing back to becoming the EEC once again, with trade agreements between sovereign states which have their own borders, their own governments, their own courts, and their own currencies. But the European imperialists in Brussels are far too ambitious for that.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Mad Social Engineering Projects

Posted on December 9, 2018 by

After the French government cancelled the fuel price hikes, why are the Yellow Vests still rioting? They don’t seem to know themselves:

The founder of the “yellow vest” revolt said it had become a dangerous “dog without a leash” prey to extremists and anarchists, and urged moderate protesters to open dialogue with the French government.

Jacline Mouraud, a 51-year old composer and hypnotherapist from Brittany, is credited with sparking the movement after six million people viewed her Facebook diatribe against environmental duties on petrol and diesel last month.

“What are you doing with the money apart from buying new dishes at the Élysée Palace and building yourself swimming pools?” she asked President Emmanuel Macron in her viral video.

But she said the movement had now been hijacked by an increasingly violent fringe of “extremists and anarchists”.

Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Ms Mouraud, said: “This movement has broken free of everyone, you can’t reason with people any more. Some don’t even remember what demands we made at the start.

It looks like it runs deeper than just fuel price hikes. That was just the tip of the iceberg. What other resentments lay hidden out of sight?

I found myself wondering this morning, not for the first time, whether the Yellow Vests also had yellow fingernails, from all the Gitaines and Gauloises they smoked. Once you ban smoking more or less everywhere, you create a brand new class of excluded people. And they’ll be angry at what’s been done to them.

I should know. I’m one of them. And I’m very, very angry at what has been done to smokers.

So I think that it’s very likely – in fact almost a certainty – that angry French smokers now make up part of the yellow vest movement. And if they hate Macron, it’ll be because Macron is an antismoker who wants to make the French stop smoking.

And if French drinkers and tubbies are being subjected to the same sort of bullying Public Health campaigns as they are in Britain, they also may have joined the insurrection.

The whole of Europe is at present being subjected to a monumental social engineering project. It’s an experiment of a scale that would make revolutionaries from a former era blanch. If Lenin could witness it, he’d shake his head and say, “They’re attempting the impossible!”  And Mao would say the same.

The European Union is itself one vast political engineering project. Its aim is to transform Europe from a collection of sovereign states into a single superstate or empire, by slowly and gradually and relentlessly centralising all power in Brussels. It’s completely and utterly mad of course, but the European political class are utterly mad, and so will continue with their mad project.

But the EU project isn’t the only social engineering project. There are lots of others. The peoples of Europe are also to stop using coal and oil and nuclear power, and to use wind and solar power instead. Yes, really. That’s what Macron’s fuel price hikes were all about. He believes in Global Warming. And belief in Global Warming is one symptom of the madness that currently afflicts the European political class.

And, as already mentioned, the peoples of Europe are also to stop smoking, stop drinking, and slim down. And probably stop eating meat too.

Did I mention that Christianity is to be replaced by Islam? And that millions of Muslims are to be shipped into Europe from Africa and the Middle East. Angela Merkel personally invited them!

What’s being attempted is a complete transformation of society in ways that Lenin and Mao and Castro (and perhaps even Pol Pot) never even began to contemplate. They have set out to create a New Man – Homo Europus – in a new society.

It won’t work, of course. It was utterly mad of anyone to even begin to imagine that any of it could ever possibly work. But then, these people are mad.

Perhaps the only surprise about the French Yellow Vest insurrection is that it took so long to erupt. And that it isn’t happening everywhere else in Europe.

And in fact it’s already well advanced elsewhere in Europe. Brexit is Britain’s attempt to break out of the mad EU political experiment. And it seems to me that these “populist” movements in Europe are just going to get stronger and stronger, and the situation become more and more explosive. Because absolutely everyone in Europe is being trodden on in one way or other, and perhaps also in multiple ways (just imagine if you’re a fat, boozy, Christian smoker who owns a 4×4).

Fat, boozy, Christian smokers?

And when it all finally explodes, it may well become as uncontrollable as the French Yellow Vests seem to have become.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments