Speaking of walls

The Labour party schismed badly under Foot-in-mouth. Leading to the formation of the not very long lived Social Democratic Party (SDP) by the original gang of four. Liberal Democrats absorbed them later.

Looks to me like the time is right for another big Labour schism. The Labour Party doesn't have any divine right to continue to exist. (their annual convention this weekend should be hilarious)

I think Unelectable Tendency have won now. It is odd to have a Tory government with a tiny majority able ride roughshod over parliament.

The big question now is what are the Labour MPs going to do about it?

Electing a wild and unruly serial rebel as their leader was a novelty but it isn't even remotely close to being an effective opposition.

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Jeremy Corbyn.

Doubt it. The last one was such a disaster that it's unlikely to be repeate d.

Not a divine right, but the political wing of the trade union movement is p retty much a fixture in the political set-up of any advanced industrial cou ntry.

The delusion that the most electable tendency is the one that hardest to di stinguish from the Tories has done a lot of damage. Blair decided that the way to beat Major was to be more like Thatcher than Major was, and while it didn't stop him getting elected, it was totally unnecessary - a government that had just had a cabinet minister imprisoned for perjury wasn't going t o win an election.

Corbyn is an consistent and reliable idealist - which made him a whole lot more attractive than the stock of pliable weather-vanes on offer.

Unfortunately his idealism doesn't seem to have much to do with the bread-a nd-butter economic issues that matter to the broader electorate, and he doe s need to be replaced by somebody a bit more interested in winning election s.

Not an aspect of British political life that is perceptible from Australia.

They've just tried to replace him. They will probably try again.

Corbyn wasn't wild or unruly, but rather principled. When he didn't agree w ith party policy, he stuck to his principles. This may have been inconvenie nt, but it was neither wild, nor unruly. If anything, he was a bit too rule

-bound and predictable. A complete antithesis to Donald Trump.

Cameron and Blair don't seem to have had a principle between them, which al lows a lot of tactical flexibility, but since it more or less eliminates th e possibility of any kind of strategic plan, it's a long term disaster.

Corbyn's replacement will have to find something useful to be principled ab out. It shouldn't be too difficult, even for a UK politician.

Oh yeah. The Globalists (thank you for being their spokesman) only want to make the world a better place. George Soros and his cronies are real humanitarians, I'm sure. Funny thing is, however, if they have such great plans for the world, why do they discuss everything in total secrecy? One would have thought that if they were acting with good intent for the best of reasons they'd crawl out from under the rocks and show us their plans in the light of day?

no matter who you are statements like this are rather concerning:

George Soros looks a lot more like a humanitarian than the Koch brothers.

Would you want to listen to anybody talking in press releases?

Cursitor Doom's imagined abilities are unlimited by mere reality. The rest of us have to infer his actual abilities from what he has done, which seems to be nothing.

The UK is is 25th of the list with a GDP of $41,159 per capita.

France and Germany are both higher - Germany appreciably so at $46,893 per capita, and both are larger than the UK. If you had anything to sell to the m that they couldn't make better for themselves, they could afford to buy i t.

The average across the European Union seems to be about $30,000 per capita, which makes the UK about a third again richer than the average, but they a re still reasonably prosperous, and there's every reason to expect that tha t they will get to be more prosperous, which is more than can be said for t he UK

Cursitor Doom's vision does seem to be limited to what he's told he should be able to see by the UK right-wing press.

Those are definitely worthwhile advantages, especially the moving of goods.

For self-interest? For the same reason the United States enters into agreements with countries that are not part of the United States?

You're right, I've experienced it myself.

More likely there would be one treaty, and interested nations would sign it.

The Obama administration is promoting that story because they want to spend a lot more money.

The United States has spent $1.34 for every dollar it collected so far in this presidency. Obviously that cannot continue.

The reality is that it is supposed to be difficult in this country to force the whole country to do things the whole country doesn't agree on. That's how it should be. Especially when you're throwing everyone's money into one pot, because that forces people who do not want a certain thing in their state, to pay for it in other states.

But individual states have a lot more power to do what they and their people want, and some of them do.

No, I think it's more the news outlets. They've taken sides and done their utmost to manipulate this in favor of the Democrats, and took special pains to promote Donald Trump above other Republican candidates. They wanted Trump because they saw him as the only one that Hillary might beat.

I agree that Hillary Clinton is the worst possible candidate. She's utterly corrupt, dishonest, and unaccomplished.

Donald Trump is an old-fashioned Democrat with a flair for getting free television coverage. He needs free TV to win, which is why he does it.

I think Europe and the United States are struggling with the same problem right now--how to get the advantages of cooperation between separate regions, without snuffing out the regions' independence, ability to govern themselves, and live the way they each want to.

The United States started with a group of self-governed colonies-- essentially independent countries--with a common heritage, speaking the same language. We decided on a system where the States could continue governing themselves, but where a Federal government was created to handle certain limited, common tasks: defense, treaties, trade between the states, disagreements between the states, etc.

That was a wonderful mechanism whereby States that had different opinions and different ways of living could live alongside each other in peace, yet cooperate on the areas where they needed to cooperate.

We're losing that tolerance of different ways and opinions, as big- government forces try more and more to use the federal government to force one way onto all the different states. THAT is the root of our division today--people don't want to be forced. And that is not what States agreed to when they signed the Constitution all those years ago-- the original purpose and scope is being changed from what was promised.

ISTM Europe is grappling with the same situation from the opposite direction--the EU grabbed too much control over too many things too quickly, causing tensions at the start, where we took over 200 years to get to a fairly similar place.

The result is tension, division, and dissent in both places.

Europe also has a more difficult problem than we did, because Europe has to unite very different peoples, with different traditions, speaking different languages.

Cheers, James Arthur

How civilizations mature in stages from struggle to prosperity to self- indulgence to profligacy and failure has been described many different ways, but your version is definitely a keeper.

Cheers, James Arthur

That is the attitude, isn't it?

That's the fatal conceit--the idea that some elite individual two thousand kilometers away can choose a better roll of toilet paper for you, than you could choose for yourself. Or run your retirement. Etc.

Cheers, James Arthur

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They aren't interested in choosing a better roll of toilet paper - merely i n writing regulations that make sure that whatever you choose to buy won't actually damage your bottom.

Nor are they interested in running your retirement. They do tend to be inte rested in stopping the people who sell you pension plans from collecting 50 % of the first year's premiums in commission, and in squeezing out the plan s that churn the investments, and charge you high annual management fees to cover this pointless but profitable activity. It's easy enough to find peo ple who don't - I did it when I was in the UK - but pension plans are very long term investments, and most people don't bother.

There are useful things for regulators to do. Sadly, you don't want to know about any of them.

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We explain deficit funded stimulus spending to you from time to time, but y our ideological blinkers prevent you from understanding the explanation.

Such spending only makes sense when the US economy is in recession - which is has been since the GFC, which happened just before Obama came to power, largely because the preceding Republican adminstration chose to do nothing about an obvious house price bubble. Dubbya did want to use it an excuse to cripple the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) but when denied that particul ar target proceeded to ignore the problem.

makes it clear that the Community Reinvestment Act wasn't what was feeding the bubble.

The spending has kept the US economy out of recession. It's been expensive, but cheaper than letting it slide in a 1930 style Great Depression, which managed to destroy 25% of the US production capacity before wiser heads pre vailed.

This is known as beggar-my-neighbour politics and happens to be decidedly f oolish.

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Trump happens to be good at self-promotion. The Tea Party put up a slate of no-hopers against him. Ben Carson may be a fine human being, but he was in the race just to sell more copies of his books, as the New Yorker made cle ar (without being actionable about it).

Being Secretary of State for a few years is an accomplishment. If she's cor rupt or dishonest, nobody has managed to prove it - and Ken Starr did try h ard.

By old-fashioned you mean Tammany Hall. The Democrats managed to get rid of Tammany Hall around 1960, but Trump was a real estate developer who needed political connections and the Tammany Hall pattern gave him what he needed .

He does seem to have other old-fashioned habits

It wasn't all that wonderful a mechanism, and more recent federations have adopted rather different constitutions, to some extent because the US solut ion didn't work that well. Recently, proportional representation has become practical and does seem to work better than single-member constituencies.

So you want the South to be free to bring back slavery?

The EU is entirely run by negotiations between the governments of the indiv idual states. There is an EU parliament, but it doesn't have any power.

Where the EU has common policies, it has them because the member states agr eed that it needed them. The EU isn't trying to get where the US is - it do esn't want to be an oligarchy run by it's richest inhabitants for the benef it of that particular group. It's not yet clear where it does want go or wh ere it needs to go, but the US is more a bad example than any kind of model .

The tension in the US is between the 1% who have lots of money, and the res t. The tension in the EU is between the states that have healthy economies, and those that need to develop healthier economies - which does cost money .

About the only really problematic difference within the EU is the Greek ent husiasm for not paying taxes. The languages aren't a problem - the area is crawling with bi- and tri-linguals, and pretty much everybody speaks Englis h (though the French hate to admit it). The traditions are even less of a p roblem.

You spent time in the Democratic Republic of Germany, which was a lot more foreign than any place you could go today, entirely because it had a diabol ical single-party political system. There aren't any one-party states in Eu rope any more, and the UK is pretty much the only place where two major par ties dominate politics. Everywhere else it's coalitions and they make polit ical life a lot more flexible.

If a political party suffers from an unfortunate infection - like the Tea P arty faction in the US Republican Party - it gets replaced by it's nearest neighbours rather than leaving a yawning gap.

Agrarian societies have demonstrated cyclic patterns, but modern civilisations are a lot more complex, and have a lot more flexibility.

Kondratiev cycles are usually explained in terms of technical innovation, which didn't come into Spengler's story at all, and technical innovation does seem to be happening faster now.

The moral cycle "from struggle to prosperity to self-indulgence to profligacy and failure" sounds more like a moral fable than any kind of useful predictive tool.

Sloman's idol, Zbigniew Brzezinski, stated that in the 21st century it's easier to kill a million people than to control a million people. The worrying thing is that it's bastards like that pulling the strings behind the scenes.

None of that perfectly sensible regulation requires the implementation of the distant and indifferent global government you so desperately crave, though. It can be dealt with quite satisfactorily by national governments.

Sure, if you define prosperity by the size of your national debt. But in your case that doesn't surprise me in the least.

The distant and indifferent global government that you fear has much the same vices and virtues as the distant and indifferent federal government that you have got in the UK, I've got in Australia and the American's have got on Washington.

There are areas where everybody benefits from common regulations. Getting upset because you can't get on the Underground and protest in person outside their office is a bit silly.

The url to which I provided a link - which you have snipped - was talking about gross domestic product per capita, not national debt

Where you got the national debt from escapes me - presumably it is what you are being obsessive about at the moment.

Because people like you don't seem to understand the difference between assets and liabilities. I constantly see Lefties like you on the TV telling us how we're such a "rich country" and we should do more of this and more of that to help the undeserving slobs in Africa. The same clowns are spouting the same rubbish in the US and europe, too. They seem to think all the money we've thus far been able to borrow on the bond markets makes us rich! They completely forget that's other people's money, not ours, and it has to be repaid at some point. And if we had to pay it all back in one hit, we'd be flat bust. So yeah, you can say we're "rich" if you class being "rich" as being "rich in indebtedness" - which you probably do, being a Leftie.

HTH (but I doubt it).