Memo to Leaders: sow arrogance, reap anger

WHY ONE SILLY DRIVING LICENCE SPAT SPELLS OUT THE NEED TO DEFEND OURSELVES

The story may be apochryphal, but word has been passed down the generations since 1789 that the real flashpoint causing the urban poor of Paris to storm the Bastille involved a small infant falling under the wheels of an aristocrat’s coach driving at high speed. An occupant got out of the vehicle, dragged the boy’s body out of the way and ordered the driver to “hurry on”, as he was late for an appointment.

Accurate or not, it is often one chance event quite apart from the general malaise of injustice that sets off the spark of widespread disobedience. The unfeeling arrogance of the ruling class reflected in a hit-and-run death suddenly becomes acid thrown into the face of the People. Shooting peasants arriving to beg the Tsar for alms causes the Russian navy to defect to the Bolsheviks.

The oligarchy overreaches itself, and something snaps in the Herd mentality. Momentum builds, the controllers lose control, and chaos ensues. From the desire for order, a “revolutionary” emerges. Old heads roll, and new heads huddle. Within a decade, there is a new élite.

For this reason alone, violence achieves precisely nothing in the medium term. Ideologue propagandists turned Horst Wessel the psycho-thug into a Nazi symbol of heroism. Liberals today seem keen to do the same thing to dysfunctional drug abuser George Floyd. In both cases, Truth and a fair trial for the sacrifical “perps” exit first window left. The new bosses behind and around President Biden will, I can assure you, be much worse than the insensitive old boss Donald Trump.

We are in the middle of a process that could easily (and quickly) evolve an existential threat to the US, UK and EU as allegedly liberal democratic entities. As a radical reformer but also confirmed pacifist, I believe the take-over people of the 2020s can be removed by civil disobedience and minimal disorder. But just one more arrogantly applied jackboot (however metaphorical) once the coming econo-fiscal plunge has rendered the citizenry uncomfortable will be enough to send the social mammaries soaring into the sky. Spineless MSM spin can make perfidy look harmless; it can’t turn burning acid into welcome drinking water.

We have one such example (involving Brexit for UK expats in France) at the moment….and others I’ll raise during the course of this piece.

The Slog has been warning its readership for a little under five years now that Brexit would face treasonous sabotage, Fifth Columnists, spun dilution, US State opposition, false heroes, and then vicious EU chicanery. All this has come to pass. But the same Remainer-infected Whitehall blobs and federalist European fonctionnaires have not so much chosen as carelessly backed into a crisis of scorched-Earth retreat on one potentially explosive (perhaps fatal) issue: leaving 11,000 innocent retired Brits in France without legal access to their cars.

The potential for spark on gunpowder in this instance is, as ever, not the serial incompetence and petulant “he said-she said” fault evasion surrounding the mess: rather, it is the blasé borderline sociopathic indifference to a deplorable human plight and a serious civil rights issue by the players involved.

To backwrite the evolution of the crisis: the UK and the EU have an agreement on swapping EU-to-British-to-French licences for expats in both directions….but it hasn’t been ratified. It’s a rum word, your “ratified”, but in this case quite apt: it means that the King Rats on each side have the formality of signing the text of the agreement off, but they have chosen not to. The agreement was reached in Brussels last October. Put to one side for a paragraph the reasons why we’re still in an ongoing zero-ratification space: incompetence, petulance, stand-off, underestimated numbers involved…it doesn’t really matter, as they’re excuses not reasons.

This is the situation today: Brits in France need a Certificate of Entitlement to drive from the UK’s issuing authority, the DVLA, to satisfy the French authorities. They’re not issuing any of these, because the French transport sub-Ministry has stopped issuing any new licences to expats (“We’re overwhelmed” they say). They will of course remain overwhelmed by simply stopping; but then this is French bureaucracy’s way with an impasse…they don’t remove it, they just go home and forget it. Except (naturally) for saying that it’s all perfide Albion, because the British aren’t issuing….andonandonandon.

But it gets worse when a British licence needs renewing per se, because the French police step in. Asked for a view, they merely remind those stranded by over-pensioned functionaries’ silly games that, “Anyone caught driving with an out of date licence will be charged a maximum fine of €15,000 and could well face a jail sentence“.

British drivers over 70 are required by law to renew their licence every three years. Hence the 11,000 older drivers stuck in France without transport….the vast majority of them some distance from a main town.

There are some factors leaning towards a conclusion of Parisian mendacity here. There appears not to be a problem for French expats in the UK: they are being given their licences in dribs and drabs, and to date the MoT in England insists there’ve been no complaints. In turn, highly-placed informants in Paris say the hardball is coming from Junior Minister Jean-Baptiste Djebbari. Monsieur Djebbari has form when it comes to curved balls: devious in his negotiations with both the Gilets Jaunes and SNCF, he is a Macron protegé acting largely as the Boy King’s default attack dog. It is alleged that this man’s unwillingness to sign the ratification is at the core of the problem.

For myself, je m’en fut….I couldn’t care a fig. The individual murkiness of the issue does affect me and is already proving a costly inconvenience. But it is what the case demonstrates about the risible social contract between State and Citizen in 2021 that matters:

• It is every taxpayer’s civil right to drive a motor vehicle if their proficiency is certificated
• For the police to threaten prosecution of the victim (not the State’s flunkeys) for their crime does tend to show who the cops really work for
• Some of the victims have been waiting for a French replacement for their UK licence since 2018. The EU has known about this eventuality since the 2016 referendum. But as with vaccine supply, Brussels chose denial and woffle rather than effective action
• Lord David Frost has been getting heavy again with Brussels over obstructionist foot-dragging of late. The Prime Minister’s response to yet more bullying from what is now a foreign power was to tell Frost to “cool it”. This too suggests fairly clearly where Johnson’s loyalties lie
• Not a single demonstration in any shape or form has emerged from the UK expat community here in France
• Not a peep has been heard from the British MSM. No tits, see? No love-rats, deadly viruses, harmless vaccines, Kardashian ass, Piers Morgan, women of colour or calls for all men to be castrated. Car licences? Dead old people? Civil rights? Not quite our thing, loves.
• The Johnson administration has offered nothing more than Churchillian puffery on the question. Man at the helm Grant Shapps (*rolls eyes*) commented – sick bags at the ready –

“Changing the designs of our driving licences and number plates is a historic moment for British motorists, and a reassertion of our independence from the EU one year on from our departure. Looking to the future, whether it’s for work or for holidays abroad, these changes mean that those who want to drive in the EU can continue to do so with ease.…..”

Oh how I am going to make Shapps regret those words.

In short, today’s post is illustrative: it spreads the blame for this outrage exactly as it should be: on all of us. All of us who write about “human rights”, a civil police force, green projects, leaving the EU behind, being accountable, calling themselves journalists, sitting on sofas and moaning, or stressing the need for “accountability”. The Establishment is laughing at us: two weeks ago, The Slog led with this headline:

I hope that you now see what I mean. In a sickening sandwich of false emotion, BoJo tweeted this about the Sarah Everard murder last Wednesday evening:

“I am shocked and deeply saddened. Like the whole country my thoughts are with her family and friends. We must work fast to find all the answers to this horrifying crime”.

No you aren’t, Prime Minister: you don’t give a chimp’s minge about it: that’s merely something your mistress told you to say. You don’t care that the lead suspect is a secret policeman offering an insight into the kind of psycho Sedwill’s merry men hire, you don’t care as to why his head got bashed in while ‘alone in his cell’, and no doubt one day soon you’ll ask Michael Gove to look into whether all men should be curfewed after five pm.

You don’t care if Brexit fails, you don’t care about your citizens in dire straits, you don’t care about liberty, but you want license for yourself, all power to yourself and a major role in Biden’s dystopian transhuman future. As a former journalist, you don’t care about their lies because that was your stock in trade too.

Despite his previous escapades in government, you don’t care about Shapps’ unfitness to govern: the same applies to Sedwill’s maintained biowarfare brief (being followed while he’s safe in his Rothschild eyrie) despite his previous attempt to usurp elected Brexit ministers.

Worms must turn, or turds will triumph. The action starts today: tune into Twitter and take a ringside site as bits of blood and bone zip through the ropes. There’s plenty more where that came from. And by all means join in.