EU Chickens Coming Home to Roost In The UK

I wonder how many people in Britain understand that their economic woes are just beginning – and that in one form or another, the EU lies at the heart of those woes. As I’ve blogged here, here and here, the EU portends to cause severe economic distress to the people of Britain because of open borders immigration, energy policy, over regulation of the economy, and rising taxation. There are several articles in the British papers over the last few days that bear out these warnings.

The Daily Mail reports that inflation in food prices and energy are rising at 7% or more, a fact that is having a severe impact on the elderly living on fixed incomes.

The EU has thrown open Britain’s borders. Possibly the best kept secret in Britain is that they do not control their borders. The strain on infrastructure, crime and the impact on natives of Britain are all severe – and in the papers today.

Immigration is at record levels, with close to 600,000 immigrants allowed into Britain. And with record immigration comes record emigration of British natives. Emigration reached 250,000 people in 2007, with most leaving "to escape high levels of crime and tax." This is up by an amazing 20% in just one year.

And as to crime, be it organized or Islamic, that ties into EU mandated immigration also. It was reported today that "most organized crime committed in Britain has its origins abroad. . . [G]un crime, drugs and people smuggling are heavily linked to overseas gangsters. . . . Most of the crimes we are dealing with are international. The source of the trouble starts elsewhere." And don’t forget the problem with radical Islamists. Contrary to what Labour posits, Orwell cannot be enlisted to make that problem disappear. And if you add on top of it a heavy layer of multiculturaly motivated bureaucracy to keep the police from offending any of the minority population, that only compounds the crime problem.

Meanwhile, the BBC has issued a startling report on the tremendous strain on Britain’s infrastructure brought about by the intersection of immigration, procreation and the NHS. The facts they state are:

NHS costs for maternity services have more then doubled in a decade to £350 million.

- "Immigration has raised the birth rate so fast that some units have closed, so that midwives could be moved to areas of urgent need."

- "[M]aternity units have turned expectant mothers away because they could not cope with unprecedented increases in the local birth rate."

- "When Labour came to power, the NHS spent around £1bn a year on maternity services, with one baby in eight delivered to a foreign-born mother. Ten years on, spending has risen to £1.6bn, with almost one baby in four delivered to a mother born overseas."

- "While the number of babies born to British mothers has fallen by 44,000 a year since the mid-1990s, the figure for babies born to foreign mothers has risen by 64,000 - a 77% increase which has pushed the overall birth-rate to its highest level for 26 years."

- "In central London, . . . six out of every 10 babies born has a foreign-born mother."

And with the massive immigration comes rationing of healthcare as there are now many more people competing for it. In a tax payer funded, government run system, supply and demand are not the decisive factors. And you thought just because you paid your taxes your entire life that you would be entitled to free NHS treatment your government had promised?

And then there is taxation. I blogged a few days ago that local council taxes are outpacing inflation – and the strain of immigration is the cause of that. And there have also been other significant, if stealth, rises in taxation that seem actually more like Labour greed than directly related to the EU. But I will include the story here to the extent that there is a relationship.

There are a few things that amaze me about all of the above. The EU role at the heart of each problem named above is clear. Yet in none of the stories is the EU even mentioned. Further, Britain is strangling under uncontrolled immigration. Yet, to even complain about that or suggest bringing to a halt is political and social suicide even now. The chattering classes have a stanglehold on Britain at the moment. But hit the bulk of Brits in the pocketbook enough times, subject them to enough crime, and eventually what you will get is a revolt.

At any rate, the EU chickens are coming home to roost in Britain. Indeed, they have just begun to cluck and mess on the floors. I wonder how long it will be before the average Brit wakes up and decides that EU chicken tenders are on the menu.

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Some Of Her Majesty's Animals Are More Equal Than Others

Leave it to the committed socialists to destroy their flagship socialist program. The socialists in this case are Britain's Labour Party and its not-so-inspiring leader, Gordon Brown. The flagship socialist program is Britain's universal health care, administered through its National Health Service (NHS).

Since the NHS was created in post WWII Britain, health care has been distributed upon a simple contract - an individual and his employer pay an annual tax for which the government covenants to provide "free healthcare for all." Or as Karl Marx would have described it, from each according to his means, to each according to his needs. It is socialist utopianism.

Now sixty years after it was first formed, the NHS is ailing. It is not quite yet broken, but it has very significant problems with the quality and timeliness of care. And to add to those woes, the NHS is coming under an ever increasing funding strain. The father of modern capitalism, Britain's Adam Smith, would no doubt suggest building market reforms into the system that would allow it to function more efficiently.

Unfortunately, Adam Smith was followed in the pantheon of influential philosophers by Karl Marx. And it is to Marx that our modern socialists defer. The Marxian solution to such a problem as the NHS now faces is, to borrow George Orwell's imagery, to make some animals on the farm more equal than others. No longer is health care to be doled out on the basis of need, but rather on the basis of social acceptabity as determined by the central government.

This today from the Telegraph:

To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the NHS, Gordon Brown plans to introduce a "constitution" setting out the rights and responsibilities of our healthcare system.

What this seems to amount to in practice are the Government's rights to refuse treatment, and the patient's responsibilities to live up to what the state decides are model standards.

There is apparently to be a clear warning that those who adhere to unhealthy habits such as smoking or failing to take regular exercise may be refused NHS care.

This threat is morally outrageous and legally dubious: if lung cancer victims are really to be left to die without medical care because they are smokers, or heart disease sufferers turned away because they have not succeeded in losing weight, this will make a mockery of the principle of universal healthcare free at the point of need.

. . . If a private insurance company to which people had been paying premiums over a lifetime were to declare retrospectively that it would not cover treatment for smokers or the overweight, its customers could rightly sue for breach of contract.

Bizarrely, while more is to be expected of patients by way of self-reliance in terms of taking responsibility for their own treatment - thus helping to defray NHS costs - they will still be forbidden the most obvious form of self-help, which is to pay for some supplemental treatment (which would help even more substantially to reduce NHS costs).

So there are likely to be more cases of cancer patients being told that they will be cast out of NHS care altogether if they purchase drug treatment with their own funds which their hospital trusts would not provide.

The inadequacy of our healthcare model has led us to a senseless (and heartless) contradictory position: the Department of Health states categorically that "co-payment" is unacceptable because it would result in an unequal system in which better-off patients would have advantages that poorer ones do not.

But it now plans to refuse care to people whose unhealthy lifestyles are usually associated with poverty and deprivation.

The extraordinary high-handedness of these proposals is symptomatic of all that is wrong with a tax-funded monopoly health system run by central government: ordinary people are encouraged to think of healthcare as a gift of the state. . .

Read the entire article here. The history of our world is that capitalism and market based solutions are always the most effective and efficient long term solutions to economic questions. Socialism is not really an economic philosophy as much as it is a populist political philosophy that exalts the government technocrat over the individual. Socialism attempts to micromanage the unmanagable, and it is typified by invasive social engineering based on the technocrat's personal belief of how each individual should act.

It may well be that we are inevitably headed in the U.S. towards a system of universal health care. At the risk of having my conservative credentials revoked, I do not think that necessarily a bad thing. But it must be a system that minimizes government influence and relies, to the maximum extent possible, on market forces. The socialist solution will never work in the long run. If you need proof, just keep a close eye on our socialist cousins across the pond.

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Interesting News From Around the Web

They are calling it a “dirty-bomb plot” thwarted. Police caught two Hungarians and a Ukrainian with a pound of weapons grade powdered uranium. Uranium is considered weapons grade when it consists of 85% or greater uranium 235. The uranium recovered by the police was 98.6% uranium 235.

‘The Prophet would have not have disapproved of 9/11, because it was carried out in his example. When he came to Medina, the Prophet had a revelation, of jihad. After that, it became an obligation for Muslims to convert others, and to establish an Islamic state, by the sword if necessary.” An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The choice of questions and questioners approved by CNN amounts to a fiasco. Gateway Pundit tells the sordid tale.

Some problems are surfacing in Britain’s NHS. More than 90,000 patients die and almost one million are harmed each year because of hospital blunders, according to a just released report.

Al Qaeda and Iran are the wolves at the door. China is not far behind, and poses a much more potent threat.

And in the “working hard for a good cause” category, one enterprising Chilean prostitute has auctioned off 27 hours of sex for approximately $4,000 to be donated to a charity for poor children. To break that down, that’s about $150 per hour or . . . well, probably best to stop the itemization there . . .

According to Sarkozy, the cause of the riots in the Parisian suburbs were the result more of a “thugocracy” than social problems. As to the social problems, Sarkozy seems likely to beat the unions in France as he seeks to reform the French economy.

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