Few nations manage to balance their books. They spend more than they collect in taxes and rely on bond sales and borrowing to bridge the gap. When the Labour government came to power in 1997 they inherited a balanced budget but within four years Gordon Brown had turned it into a deficit of £170 billion. The Tories tried to reduce the deficit by cutting public spending but that led to failing schools, understaffed hospitals and rising crime.
The Bank of England's promise to "pay the bearer on demand" can't be taken seriously. It has reserves of gold, foreign currencies and government bonds but it issues many times more money than it has on deposit. The BOE also supervises the commercial banks that handle our accounts. This arrangement gives us some protection from a predatory government that has raided our pension funds and would love to gain access to our savings. If they nationalized the banks, our money would become their money.
Perhaps we will devise a better monetary system in the future but in the meantime we should demand strict banking controls and reasonable interest rates. The Thatcher-Reagan banking reforms ended in the crash of 2008. Free from regulation, the banks lent money that they never had to people who could never pay it back. The result was that banks crashed, like Lehman Brothers, or were bailed out by the taxpayers, like the Royal Bank of Scotland.
The Chinese are looking into Social Credit. It's not exactly the system devised by CH Douglas (pictured) but, like him, they envisage a social wage, or dividend, funded by their booming economy. The 'unemployed' would spend their time studying or caring for the elderly. The trouble is that those working would resent those who were not. But economic reforms will have to be made before we sink under the sheer weight of debt.
People with financial problems should only pay what they can reasonably afford, and we need a limit on interest rates. If a borrower has repaid the original loan he should be excused any outstanding interest. That would upset the bankers but they have squeezed more than enough out of the system, and many of them were rescued by their tax-paying customers in the crash of 2008.
Robert Best's Letter to 'Broadsword'
Robert Best is an independent writer and researcher. His books are available from - www.stevenbooks.co.uk
Dear Broadsword, I was pleased to see the photograph of Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts at Cable Street, in Broadsword issue number42.
'Reds' and Jews still claim that they inflicted a massive defeat against British Fascism and National Socialism to this day.
However, two weeks after the 'Battle of Cable Street', Mosley spoke to 12,000 people in Victoria Park Square, Bethnal Green, East London and the BUF marched to Salmon Lane in Limehouse. They did pass after all!
Also, the BUF recruited 2,000 new members in the East End alone, in the aftermath of Cable Street due to the publicity.
Personally, I do not believe that Mosley was a "kosher fascist". By 1936 the official title of his party was The British Union of Fascists and National Socialists, (BUFNS), and he proposed in his book 'Tomorrow We Live' that Jews who abused our hospitality should be resettled in a Jewish homeland alternative to Palestine. He wrote that "Jews originate in the Orient and are more alien to us than any Western nation".
Mosley always stated that his first wife Cynthia Curzon was not Jewish, her grandfather Levi Leiter was actually a Dutch Protestant, which explains the Biblical name.
Mosley was consistently opposed to non-European immigration and the 'Jewish Money Power'; and let us not forget that the nationalist slogans "Britain First" and "Britain for the British", were first used by Mosley in the 1930's, when he was campaigning for full employment, decent housing, the abolition of poverty, and peace with Germany.
After the 'Brothers' War' (WW2) when he launched his Union Movement (UM), he was the first to call for the repatriation of coloured immigrants. If the British people had listened to Mosley we would not be in such a mess today.
Climate Change
Greta Thunberg awakened the world to the dangers of Climate Change. Predictably, President Donald Trump mocked her but the sixteen year old Swedish school girl must be admired for addressing the United Nations in a language that is not her own. She is part of a campaign that has gone viral. London has been disrupted by demonstrations and young people all over the world are worrying about the future.
The extent to which humanity is responsible for climate change is debatable but there is no doubt that it's happening. Planet Earth is a cooling sphere of magma orbiting an uncontrolled nuclear explosion known as the Sun. It is subject to gravitational forces, volcanic activity and constant bombardment by radiation and cosmic debris.
In 1815 Napoleon's army at Waterloo was bogged down by torrential rain when Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted killing 10,000 people. In 1883, the neighbouring volcanic island of Krakatoa exploded, killing 36,000 people and causing a drop in global temperatures that lasted for five years. Other catastrophic volcanic eruptions include Mount Pelee in Martinique in 1902 that killed 29,000 people and Ruiz in Columbia that killed 25,000 people.
In parts of Sweden and Scotland the ground is rising at the rate of 10cm per century because millions of tonnes of glacial ice have melted. It's therefore not surprising that the polar icecaps are receding or that the deserts are expanding. There's not much we can do about natural events but it's common sense not to pollute the air with carbon or the seas with rubbish. We must find cleaner ways of generating electricity and replace plastic with bio-degradable material.
Those of us who are old enough to remember the London smog of the Fifties know very well that pollution is a killer. 12,000 Londoners died in the great smog of 1952 and thousands more suffered damaged lungs (Kate Dawson - Death in the Air). It was ended by the Clean Air Act of 1956 which banned coal fires.
The public don't know what to believe, but scientists are more likely to tell the truth than politicians. They are not elected and they do not have to protect vested interests. Donald Trump must know that coal and oil are major pollutants but he needs the votes of the coalminers, the oil drillers, and the power workers, and the financial backing of their employers. He is a typical short-sighted politician who only cares about himself.
From The Archives - 400,000 Support Country Life - John Bean, Beanstalk 2004
Having been on the two previous Countryside Alliance marches in London, I can confirm that it was not just about supporting the traditional right of fox hunting. It was to draw attention to how many English, Welsh, Scots and Irish people are concerned with the constant undermining of the rural way of life, which has gained momentum under Tony Blair and his Islington cronies. For me there was the added bonus of being with more than 400,000 fellow aboriginals (whites, if I may dare say so) marching through multiracial London.
Many of those who support the Countryside Alliance share the same view on fox hunting and game shooting that I do. I have no reason to change the opinion I expressed in 1993 on the subject and which appeared in my book on the changes in a rural community, 'Ten Miles From Anywhere'. It appears on page 146 under the heading 'Thoughts of a Failed Rat Catcher'. It now has greater significance as even more city and suburban dwellers embrace the Bambi syndrome.
"Over the New Year I spent some hours in trying to kill a rat who had come from a nearby compost heap to nose around my door. My now aging cat, who in her youth would kill anything that moved as long as it was not more than twice her size, went through all the motions but didn't even score a near miss. Surprisingly to me, the only creature to nearly get the rat was a cock pheasant, who apparently objected to the rat going for his jugular.
I got to thinking. If that rat had a nice fluffy tail and his face was not so pointed, people would call me a monster for wanting to despatch him not only from my lawn but from this earth. Now if I had shot the pheasant, quite a number of people would also consider me a monster. Perhaps city-based animal right activists would demonstrate in our village, such is the dominance of emotion over common sense when it comes to the relationship of homo sapiens with the rest of the animal kingdom.
Like the rest of my species, I was born an omnivore, i.e. I function best on a diet of meat and two veg. Although I would find it difficult to kill a pheasant, I would if hungry, but certainly not 'sport'. To me, there is a world of difference between shooting a pheasant or two for 'the pot' and trying to outdo each other in seeing how many you can slaughter, to give away, in an afternoon. Yet again, pheasants are so stupid that if they were not reared for shooting, their natural predators - particularly the fox - would have probably eliminated them in Britain by now.
Then what of Brer Fox himself? If he had a rat-like tail instead of such an attractive brush would anti-hunt protestors be so keen to throw themselves under horses hooves? We won't go into the equally emotive issue of the carnage the fox can cause in a chicken run, but point out that ten times as many foxes are killed by the motor car than by huntsmen. And the hunt is certainly a quicker way than snaring or shooting, which often leads to a lingering death.
I do not hunt but respect the rights of those who want to. All I say is that if Brer Fox has gone to earth, he has won - that's his rights."
A Dangerous Illusion
The UK has now missed its third departure date and we are still in the European Union. Boris Johnson jumped on the Brexit bandwagon when it looked unstoppable. Ukip was threatening the major parties and the "will of the people" had to be obeyed. Three and a half years later we are still in the EU and the country is still divided. In 2016 the referendum result was 52 to 48 percent in favour of leaving but recent polls show that this is changing.
Public opinion does change over time. When the Berlin Wall came down thirty years ago Margaret Thatcher was sending desperate messages to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pleading with him to stop German reunification. She was not on her own in 1989 but few people today would admit to such prejudices. We have finally stopped hating the Germans.
The general election on the 12th of this month is likely to result in a Tory victory. But instead of "getting our country back" we will become a dependency of the USA. Some people would prefer the American alternative. That's fair enough, they are entitled to their opinions, but they should stop waving union jacks. They have no monopoly on patriotism.
The United Kingdom is a developed nation (GDP $2.8 trillion) located twenty miles from the European mainland. We have kept our British identity as members of the European project since 1973. Leaving the EU is proving to be difficult but rejoining would be easy; we would simply return to our old status. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned that the economy will shrink and borrowing will rise if we leave the EU. And the Office for National Statistics has released figures for June 2019 showing that we received 48,000 migrants from the EU, and 229,000 from outside the EU. Brexit is a dangerous illusion.
Matteo Salvini
He started out in the Lombard League, a regionalist movement that campaigned for autonomy for Lombardy. This evolved into the Northern League which encompassed the rest of northern Italy. Today, the reformed party has dropped the 'Northern' appendage to become La Liga and now stands for a federal Italy within the European Union.
The League's rise to power was driven by the mass migration of economic refugees from Africa. This illegal traffic was limited by the Gaddafi regime in Libya until Dave Cameron helped to bring it down. Another short-sighted criminal blunder that he will be remembered for.
Liga is the Italian equivalent of the French National Front, a populist movement opposed to Third World immigration, but unlike the NF it has risen above petty nationalism to embrace Europe.
Salvini wrote in the conservative daily 'Il Foglio':
"I say this once and for all, and I hope that nobody inside or outside my party will raise this issue again. The Lega does not have any intention of taking Italy out of the euro or the European Union. Let me be clearer still, to stop journalists from fantasizing, the euro is irreversible".
Nation Revisited
This blog seeks reform by legal means. All articles are by Bill Baillie unless otherwise stated. The opinions of guest writers are entirely their own. We uphold the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19:
"We all have the right to make up our own minds, to think what we like, to say what we think, and to share ideas with other people."
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