17 december 2019

Something I try to understand already for a while is why so many immigrants want to reach the United Kingdom, even at the risk of their lives.

Based on what I find in newspapers, I come to the conclusion that the immigrants are not interested in the sunny climate, the delicious food, the friendly or handsome natives but in something completely different :

1. There are no identity cards in the UK which makes access to the labour market much easier. Both the left and the right would consider the introduction of such identity card as a threat for privacy. (The same goes for the United States.)
2. There are not so many rules in the labour market.
3. The wages are low which again explains an easy access to the labour market .
4. In the UK, society is organised in a more communautarian way than on the Continent. As an illegal it is easier to hide in your own community.

14 december 2019

Now that Brexit will have been done, it is clear that the unity of the United Kingdom is under threat. That unity is not evident; it requires an explanation why it exists in the form that it does.

I dare to believe, and indeed this is speculative, that the United Kingdom lasted because there was an Empire built around it and this Empire allowed all creative and energetic powers of the English, Scottish, Welsh and even Irish populations to make a career in that Empire.

Once the Empire was lost, the unifying power was lost and we only had to wait for some careless politicians to shake the tree.

14 december 2019

Ursula von der leyen, the new President of the European Commission, presented the “Green Deal” to the European Parliament. The intention is to make “Europe” carbon/climate-neutral by 2050.

On 12-13 December the Green Deal was discussed at the level of the European Commission which reached a “unanimous” decision (with an exception for Poland) to support the Deal. The new Council president, Charles Michel, showed that his previous experience as Prime Minister of Belgium, had prepared him perfectly to explain the inexplicable.

Some concerns should however be addressed.

The Green Deal is in this phase only a vision without a clearly developed transition path and without financial support. The transition path should be made available by mid 2020 and the new long term fiscal plan for the Union by end 2020 at the latest. It remains to be seen if the high level ambition embedded in the Green Deal will be backed by the transition path and the financial means by then.

Von Der Leyen referred to the Green Deal as “Europe’s man-on-the-Moon moment”. I understand that VDL tries to create a “nationalist” European moment, an event which will unify all Europeans in a common project, like a long term HR European event. The comparison is however not fit in the sense that the man-on-the-moon was an event that did not impact everyday life of the Americans. The Green Deal however has a “totalitarian” character (which I want to use here in an objective, neutral way); The Government takes decisions which will impact all apects of our everyday lives : transport, food, living, factories. Private enterprise and the free market have a clear frame within which they will have to work.

Both the need for appropriate financing and the totalitarian impact might raise a revolt of the people, a “Europan Gillets Jaunes”, so to speak, if the European elites do not handle this with care.

Lastly, the Green Deal offers Europe an opportunity to free itself from some doubtful friends in the Middle East. However we should take care that our new friends are better than our old friends.

10 december 2019

De Brusselse Minister van Meertaligheid heeft een beleidsnota in dat verband neergelegd. Die roept een aantal bedenkingen/vragen op.

1) Meertaligheid is een zeer ruime term en het risico zit er dik in dat de Minister overambitieus is. Hij lijkt er vanuit te gaan dat een goede Brusselaar zowel Frans, Nederlands als Engels moet kunnen leren. Maar daar bovenop moet ook de thuistaal voldoende gerespecteerd worden.

2) Dat is heel wat, zeker als we rekening houden met de meest recente Pisa-resultaten. Daaruit blijkt dat het voor Nederlandstaligen en Franstaligen steeds moeilijker wordt om zelfs hun eerste taal goed onder de knie te krijgen. De oplossing van Gatz is geniaal. In plaats van een enkele taal zullen de Brusselaars er drie goed leren. Meertaligheid kan er toe leiden dat de Brusselaar 4 talen slecht kan spreken en/of lezen.

3) Meertaligheid leidt de aandacht af van het feit dat het Nederlands in Brussel onvoldoende aandacht krijgt, ook en vooral in het Franstalig onderwijs.

10 december 2019

From now on we (= all citizens of the world) have to think in two currencies.

One of them is the monetary currency, the other one is the CO2-emission. Every investment decision will have at least two dimensions, the monetary and the ecological one.

Whether you are a believer or a negationist, the CO2-reality starts to percolate the whole economy in the same way as the monetary currency already flows through the financial veins.

And of course we should also start to organize demonstrations to ensure that we reach strict goals for our debt reduction.

10 december 2019

In this small book, JWM proposes a definition which describes populism as a style of performing politics (and NOT as a set of political statements). For him populism is a way of performing politics in a democracy which claims to make the democracy stronger while in fact it erodes key elements of a robust democracy. Populism is therefore, according to JWM, a threat to real democracy.

Key elements of the populist style are that populists claim to fight the elites while, at the same time, they claim to be the representatives of the people. Hereby they believe that “the people” are a homogeneous group and that they are its representatives. People who do not fit in the homogeneous mass are outsiders or even enemies. Populists are therefore no pluralists and their ideology always contains some kind of identity politics (to determine the real people).

Once in power, populists try to occupy the state apparatus, they are corrupt, engage in “mass clientalism” and try systematically to suppress civil society. Sometimes they even re-write constitutions to outlaw pluralism.

JWM is strongly against the use of a concept like “illiberal democracies” because according to JWM a democracy without the necessary checks and balances, the liberal context, is no democracy at all. Critics of a regime who call it an illiberal democracy admit implicitly that it still is a democracy, quod non, according to JWM.