Marine Le Pen is spoiling for a fight. The leader of France's Front National vows to smash the existing order of Europe and force the break-up of monetary union, if she wins the next election.
It is no longer an implausible prospect. "We cannot be seduced," she said, brimming with confidence after her party secured 46pc of the vote in a by-election earthquake a week ago. Her candidate trounced the ruling Socialists in their own bastion of Villeneuve-sur-Lot.
"The euro ceases to exist the moment that France leaves, and that is our incredible strength. What are they going to do, send in tanks?" she told the Daily Telegraph at the Front National's headquarters, an unmarked building tucked away in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Her office is small and workaday, almost austere.
"Europe is just a great bluff. One side there is the immense power of sovereign peoples, and on the other side are a few technocrats," she said.
For the first time, the Front National is running level with the two governing parties of post-War France, Socialists and Gaullistes. All are near 21pc in national polls, though the Front alone has the wind in its sails.
Yet it is the detail in the Villeneuve vote that has shocked the political class. The Front scored highest in the most Socialist cantons, a sign that it may be breaking out of its Right-wing enclaves to become the mass movement of the white working class.
Interesting article and something I have felt is coming for a while. The obsessive loyalty to the Euro among the French political elite has led to the conditions for the National Front to seize power.
UKIP are in a similar situation, if they ever break out of the Tory shires into the mass white working class than they could drive the lump Labour party into a nationalistic direction.
Peace always has been and always will be an intermittent flash of light in a dark history of warfare, violence, and destruction
Driving a country further into deficit by mechanisms such as PFI is hardly a laudable alternative. Left or right, the policies are always to increase debt, this is economic growth. How many times do you hear the expression ".....expand or die....."? It's just an excuse for BAU, which surprisingly suits the bankers, politicians et al.
To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with. Cass Sunstein
What Hollande is demonstrating admirably is that if you try to appease the poor by aggressively taxing the rich all you end up with are more poor people.
woodburner wrote:Driving a country further into deficit by mechanisms such as PFI is hardly a laudable alternative. Left or right, the policies are always to increase debt, this is economic growth. How many times do you hear the expression ".....expand or die....."? It's just an excuse for BAU, which surprisingly suits the bankers, politicians et al.
The increasing debt is a very temporary answer to the problem of wages decreasing in the west to keep up, or down, with low wage competition from the east and retain continuing growth at the same time. That debt has peaked and plateaued already which is one of the reasons that the UK economy has been bumping along the bottom for so long.
The problem for the west, and especially for the UK, is that we have high land and property values built up in a more prosperous past which can be treated as an asset and borrowed against but are ultimately not real values and will collapse. As incomes fall property values have to fall to become purchasable by the majority so the current situation is a bubble which is about to burst with a sudden price collapse unless something is done by government to manage the situation into a long term decline in value. Either way there is a problem for banks and building societies whose whole asset base value is based on the land value bubble.
woodburner wrote:Driving a country further into deficit by mechanisms such as PFI is hardly a laudable alternative. Left or right, the policies are always to increase debt, this is economic growth. How many times do you hear the expression ".....expand or die....."? It's just an excuse for BAU, which surprisingly suits the bankers, politicians et al.
The increasing debt is a very temporary answer to the problem of wages decreasing in the west to keep up, or down, with low wage competition from the east and retain continuing growth at the same time. That debt has peaked and plateaued already which is one of the reasons that the UK economy has been bumping along the bottom for so long.
The problem for the west, and especially for the UK, is that we have high land and property values built up in a more prosperous past which can be treated as an asset and borrowed against but are ultimately not real values and will collapse. As incomes fall property values have to fall to become purchasable by the majority so the current situation is a bubble which is about to burst with a sudden price collapse unless something is done by government to manage the situation into a long term decline in value. Either way there is a problem for banks and building societies whose whole asset base value is based on the land value bubble.
Property and land prices don't have to drop if we return to a pre-twentieth century model of property ownership. That is to say, a rich 10% own and a poor 90% rent off the rich 10%.
kenneal - lagger wrote:That debt has peaked and plateaued already which is one of the reasons that the UK economy has been bumping along the bottom for so long.
The bottom? You optimist!
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
Our local radio, on the news, has said the 'Halifax' has just said that property prices have risen at their fastest for the last 3 years, still wonder why the 'media' think it's news worthy to tell us this, funny thing is they never mention that oil prices are at their highest for 14 month, maybe having to inform us that fuel prices will probably rise too, might not sound great.
The new govenor of the BoE is going to have his work cut out here......mmm I wonder what he'll do......
One day people will say to me, you were right mate.....
