The toxi-city of Brussels

 

Brussels is the fortress city of the European Union, or EU (pronounced "yuck").

The EU seems to be the source of everything that's crazy, laughable, or suicidal in Europe these days. Seventy years ago a war was fought to save Europe from Berlin. It hasn't been so successful with Brussels.

Britain, which as far as I know has never formally joined the EU -- but what does that matter when Brussels Speaks? -- is particularly its victim. Recently the EU ordered Britain to give its convicts voting rights, which the country is actually resisting. I wouldn't hold out too much hope it will prevail.

What next? How about this:

As many as 100,000 migrants from Eastern Europe will be allowed to claim £250-a-week as Europe forces Britain to abolish its restrictions on benefits. In a move that could cost the British taxpayer tens of millions of pounds, migrants from the former Soviet bloc will be allowed jobseeker's allowance, council tax benefit and housing benefit.

It may sound totally mad to admit several hundred thousand "migrants" from Eastern Europe to an island that is already overcrowded and has a high unemployment rate. But multinational oligarchies like the EU are not required to observe common sense. They are, after all, the monarchs of all they survey.

But U.K. immigration minister Damian Green tried to put the best face on it. He "pointed out that at the same time that the scheme ended in the UK, countries including Germany and Austria were opening up their labour markets even more to workers from their eastern neighbours."

The implication was that the migrants would migrate to someplace closer to the countries they were trying to get away from. How quaint. When you can buy a plane ticket and be on the other side of the world in 24 hours, where's the aggro in going a few hundred miles past Germany and Austria to plant yourself in the U.K.?

A spokesman said: 'No-one can just come into the UK and start claiming our benefits.

'We have strict rules in place to protect the system from any abuse.

'For instance, to claim an income-related benefit, a person from the EU will have to pass the Habitual Residence Test alongside all of our other eligibility criteria.

'They will have to prove they have a right to reside here and will then be asked to prove their attachment to the UK; they will have to show an intention to settle here and their reasons for coming to the UK.

'We will be keeping our benefit rules to people from abroad under review to ensure it's secure.'

Prove they have a right to reside there? The EU says so. Show an intention to settle there? "Da, you bet, I staying. Where I get job-sleeper's allowance, council house? You wasting my time, let's getting on with it."

I don't know why I bother to even write about the loony bin that is modern Britain, home to water-veined mopes who have handed their lives over to computer-generated bureaucrats -- not even of their own nationality. Maybe it's just the sentimental attachment I used to have for England, so strong it persisted even after the first couple of times I visited there. Maybe I can't quite dismiss the hope, futile as it seems, that after a few more years of Eurodementia and population replacement enough British will realize the full horror of what they have brought on themselves to apply the needed remedy.

I suppose that possibility is still there, however dim, when an English newspaper (a working-class, very unrespectable one, of course) can still publish an opinion piece like this: (Tip of the hat: Lawrence Auster)

The gross annual rate of immigration has topped 500,000 in recent years, the vast majority of incomers hail from Africa or Asia. Moreover there are probably around a million illegal immigrants in our midst, tolerated by a government machine that has lost any desire to uphold our national integrity.

That is why the British public is in such despair over mass immigration. An independent survey published yesterday revealed the depth of this anger, with 60 per cent of people describing immigration as a “bad thing” for Britain and 52 per cent agreeing that “Muslims create problems in the UK”. This is not even a racial issue: 39 per cent of Asians and 24 per cent of blacks want a crackdown on immigration.  

What is remarkable about these findings is that the public feels this way after all the years of aggressive, institutionalised propaganda about the joys of cultural diversity and the unalloyed benefits of mass immigration. But then, while the politicians live in their ivory towers, ordinary people can see with their own eyes the disaster brought about by the cultural revolution.

"Despair" ... "depth of the anger" ... Those dwellers in the ivory towers might find one of these days that they are not safe from the wrath of those they hold in contempt.