I’m not intending to get too political on this blog, but I decided to post this video at this time due to some conversations I have been having in online mediums. One that triggered this in particular was a fellow Englishman (I presume) who, in response to a discussion about Nigel Farage of UKIP stated that –
‘…its no good being “right”, you have to be successful.’
This is the kind of apologist nonsense that makes me frustrated. I gave a reply to this person along the lines of the fact that it’s people who are ‘right’ who are precisely what we need right now across the world, regardless of whether they are ‘successful’. Many of the ‘successful’ in the world (in this context) are currently there, not by merit but by favour. Consequently, they are only successful in one misleading sense of the word.
It’s the other types of success that count. If everyone gave up on telling the truth in order to grease the wheels and gain a dishonourable kind of success, where would that leave the disenfranchised masses? Where would that take us? We already have too many people talking from the side of their mouths in this manner.
I have no idea if Mr. Farage is purely a shill, placed there to placate those disenfranchised masses. It’s only wise to consider this possibility but I would rather have a possible shill speaking the truth than no-one at all fighting my corner. Mr. Farage is a modern day David who is taking on Goliath. Those who would criticise him in this way, for not being ‘successful’ are possibly shills themselves.
There are three quotes from Ayn Rand’s great book Atlas Shrugged that really strike a chord with me currently, because I feel that they accurately sum up the state of the world and how this affects self-starters with entrepreneurial intentions – you know, ExRats.
‘When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims, then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.’
‘When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion- When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing- when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors- when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice- you may know that your society is doomed.’
‘When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are.’
I think you’ve been taken in. Mr Von Rompuy is a pretty straightforward man, if rather dull – what you see is what you get – he doesn’t pretend to be what he is not. Nigel Farage on the other hand froths and foams supposedly on the side of the “common man” in guise of “David taking on Goliath” – and then goes and claims a staggering £2 million in expenses!
Two million! It makes bath plugs and duck ponds look like peanuts by contrast.
His justification is that it’s only “European taxpayers money”. That’s all right then. No different to any other eurocrat justifying that his money comes from some other euro nation, not his home nation. Never mind that as huge net contributors, the money likely comes from hard working Brits who can ill afford it.
He says he spent some of it promoting UKIP, but in British politics (and European politics), political spending must come from subscriptions and donations, not raids on taxpayer funds. This is miles away from Ayn Rand. I can’t believe you quoted the bit about “looters by law robbing defenceless men” and felt Farage was standing up to them! He is one of the looters!
And how pleasant for him that while he is picking his voters pockets, they are cheering him on as a “David” v Goliath. Nice racket if you can get it.
Hi Tea,
Thankyou for the response, I appreciate it. I wasn’t actually aware of the issue that you have raised, so I did some searching and found –
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/24/mps-expenses-ukip-nigel-farage
You’ve already provided me with a lesson, which is that I probably shouldn’t discuss politics on this blog. I’ll have a think about that and this post might ‘go away’ at some point if I decide to totally avoid that subject in the future. But then again, it might not.
Here’s what I see in that article, in response to how you see it. Firstly, those expenses are over a ten year period. It’s also worth re-iterating that his response to this was that he was not pocketing the money but using it to further the UKIP cause.
But on the contrary, it is clear that he left himself wide open to those claims of hypocrisy when he went on the offensive about the expenses scandal, which, in combination with his expenses claims, was clearly not a wise move. I presume that’s why he did a u-turn and decided that all UKIP MEPs would publish their expenses online. It’s also possible that you could be absolutely correct and that the man could be a liar or a fraud.
All that I know for sure is that he seems to hit the nail on the head when he discusses the EU and that this makes a lot of people uncomfortable, in a second tier of government that no one I know wants, that no one I know was asked to vote for and that just seems to provide a hell of a lot of extra taxation and a very scary looking treaty that appears to pay no regard to the sovereignty of nations.
It’s clear that politics is a dirty business. If you consider my David and Goliath analogy, it’s also clear that UKIP is a ‘David’ in terms of taking on the big two establishment political parties in the UK. When I read up about the Tom Wise affair, it doesn’t look good, but it’s also entirely possible that someone as stupid as that getting caught saying the things that he did –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wise
…could easily have been a patsy, placed there purely in order to create scandal for UKIP.
But he just as easily could have been a greedy, thieving fool.
Ultimately, I stand by one of my original points –
Thanks again for your comment and thanks again for making me wonder whether this subject is something that I want to pursue any further on this blog which is chiefly nothing at all to do with politics – I just haven’t got around to filling out the primary categories with posts about financial freedom and personal development yet.
It’s probably not a good idea to discuss politics on a marketing blog!
I’ll just make one final point before I leave it alone. You say the following:”It’s also worth re-iterating that his response to this was that he was not pocketing the money but using it to further the UKIP cause.”
Suppose you re-wrote that sentence to say “he wasn’t pocketing the money but used it to further the Green party cause” Or Socialist Workers cause, or BNP cause, or whatever, fill in the blanks. Would you still be happy about taxpayers money being filched like this? Or would you be up in arms about it?
There’s a reason the system currently insists that parties raise their own political funds – if they can’t even persuade their own supporters to put their hands in their pockets for the cause, then it’s not a cause with any following.
Once you go down the route of saying, well I don’t have many supporters, and the ones that I have can’t be bothered to donate, but hey! I’ll dip my hands into taxpayer funds instead, even though said taxpayers don’t support me – you open up a can of worms. You may feel happy that he used tax money to support UKIP, but I sure as hell didn’t give permission for MY taxes to be used this way! I feel like I’ve been looted.
Which brings me to Ayn Rand. Lots of Rand supporters don’t really fully get what she’s talking about. She’s not saying, it’s wrong for your opponents to loot, but it’s OK for your side to do so – she’s saying, it’s wrong across the board. Excusing looting by saying that politics is “dirty business” and you’ve got to do it is, well, not very Rand, is it?
Similarly with the issue of consent v compulsion. Farage didn’t get consent from the majority of voters to use their tax money to support his political interests (in the 2010 general election UKIP got 3.1% of the vote – that means 96.9% opposed). If it’s OK for UKIP to help themselves to tax money on the grounds that politics is dirty business, is it OK for George Galloway and Respect to do so too (they have similar lack of support from the majority of voters)?
Can you not see that it’s ironic that you quoted that Rand paragraph, and then made excuses for Farage doing everything she despises? He’s not the solution, he’s part of the problem. He talks a lot, but talk is cheap.
P.S. the scary treaty that removed the “sovereignty of nations” was the Single European Act, signed by Thatcher in 1985, came into force in 1991, and which destroyed the old EEC, with it’s absolute veto’s and replaced it with qualified majority voting (which destroys sovereignty as you could be forced to abide by law that your country has voted against).
Thatcher claimed that the 1983 election gave her a mandate to sign that treaty – it was an interesting election because old Michael Foot was adamantly opposed and insisted that the 1983 Labour manifesto included a provision to leave the EU (it was later dubbed the “longest suicide note in history”). He didn’t get a hearing, even though it was the most important issue that election – he was dubbed mad by the press and they focused on his donkey coat, because of course wearing the right coat is the most important thing. Labour voted unanimously against the Single European Act when it came before parliament (and the votes against included one Tony Blair and one Gordon Brown!). That was enough for the press to dub them even more barking than ever, and one of the reforms Blair undertook when he became leader was to ditch the euroscepticism in order to make his party “electable” – would he have done that if the press had not been so virulent? It’s one of the what-ifs of history.
It’s coming up on thirty years since that treaty and it’s now all too late. I mention it merely to illustrate that lots of politicians position and say one thing, and do another – some talk big and then act completely differently, others you instinctively dismiss only to discover way too late that they actually had a point worth listening to. Whenever I hear “David v Goliath” mentioned in conjunction with politics, I think “this can only end badly”.
Hi Tea,
Thanks again for your response. I fear we are talking past each other a little here and I think that we may agree on more things than is at first apparent.
I get what you are saying about him using the expenses to fund UKIP – which is why I wrote the sentence immediately after that point starting with ‘on the contrary’.
In response to your question about other parties doing the same thing, I’d have to reply that I would be as unhappy about it as I am about corporatist governments working hand-in-hand with big corporations via the revolving door and receiving many times the same amount of funding via that method, not least because in both cases the money is ultimately filched from the pocket of the taxpayer.
I do get what Ayn Rand is saying. I didn’t excuse looting by talking about ‘dirty business’ – you misunderstand me. To understand that point (which wasn’t entirely clear, I admit) read on to see what the correct context was – I proceeded to talk about a disgraced UKIP politician and about how he may have been a crook, but he may have been a patsy – either way, it emphasises that this is a ‘dirty business.’ I certainly wasn’t suggesting that this aspect justifies theft from the taxpayer by Farage, or anyone else.
So therefore the irony you refer to isn’t really there because I wasn’t making excuses for Farage.
Regarding your point about lots of politicians saying one thing and then doing another – I totally agree. But then our argument goes full circle – I don’t trust any of them, but it’s good to hear one of them at least speaking the truth, particularly on a subject that is so important and is ignored by mainstream politicans on a daily basis.
I’m still deciding whether to scrap this post and whole line of discussion, because I find the whole thing so tiring. The majority of people ultimately end up displaying some kind of left/right leaning and I vehemently oppose this stance because I feel that it is a convenient smokescreen provided by politicians (who are generally ALL of the same ilk – puppets working for their masters while pretending to be coming from polar opposite ends of the spectrum) designed to divide and conquer the majority and to keep them arguing amongst themselves over which is the best of a bad bunch.
Regardless, thankyou for coming by again and thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts, they are appreciated.
Thatcher claimed that the 1983 election gave her a mandate to sign that treaty – it was an interesting election because old Michael Foot was adamantly opposed and insisted that the 1983 Labour manifesto included a provision to leave the EU (it was later dubbed the “longest suicide note in history”).
He didn’t get a hearing, even though it was the most important issue that election – he was dubbed mad by the press and they focused on his donkey coat, because of course wearing the right coat is the most important thing. Labour voted unanimously against the Single European Act when it came before parliament (and the votes against included one Tony Blair and one Gordon Brown!).
That was enough for the press to dub them even more barking than ever, and one of the reforms Blair undertook when he became leader was to ditch the euroscepticism in order to make his party “electable” – would he have done that if the press had not been so virulent? It’s one of the what-ifs of history.