We are doomed

Or we shall be if the story in the Daily Express has any real steam in it. Bob Crow, they tell us, possibly the most hated man in this country is launching a new anti-EU party, which will be a "workers against the EU" one, differing from UKIP in that it will not be against immigration. Well, that should make it popular in working class areas. One wonders where Mr Crow spends his time.

I am not very worried about him fielding candidates in next year's euro elections and neither should UKIP be. His lot will get somewhere around 1 per cent if they are lucky.

However, there will be the referendum campaign in a few years' time or so we think. One reason for that heavy loss in the 1975 campaign by the NO side was the vocal support of the unions and the left-wing of the Labour Party. Both were known to support the Communists and be immensely partial to the Soviet Union. I recall people saying in despair that the choice was being ruled by Brussels or by Moscow. The answer was obvious.

Times have changed and Moscow is no threat. But Bob Crow is and you can bet any amount of money on it that the BBC and the rest of the europhiliac media will be interviewing him every day as the representative of the OUT campaign.

More grandstanding

For some reason this sort of nonsense is taken seriously:

BORIS JOHNSON is not reading from David Cameron’s script at the Tory party conference in Manchester. While the Prime Minister described a "modern and compassionate" party on Sunday, the Mayor of London went wildly off-piste by discussing his new demand for tough laws against swearing at policemen.

Johnson is to address the conference this week and as a true darling of the party he will be a major attraction. His words will be carefully scrutinised for signs of friction with Cameron, or of increased ambition.

So Boris Johnson is ambitious. Well, well, well. Any stories about dogs biting men or supermodels taking drugs? No? Well, I guess one about an ambitious Tory politician will have to do.

Apparently, he is grandstanding at the party conference. I am shocked, I tell you, shocked. And there is a biography that shows a continuing rivalry between the two, Cameron and Johnson. Are we going into another stage of the "political rivals in one party" soap opera, last seen starring Blair and Brown? Surely not. (Excuse me while I yawn.)

Meanwhile BoJo as he is known by the hacks, has been boasting about his achievements as Mayor of London and telling us to re-elect him. As the alternative to him is Ken Livingstone, I see no real problem about that re-election. But is Hizonner the Mayor going to boast about this?

Tube drivers in the capital will see their pay go over the £50,000-a-year mark under a four-year wage deal negotiated between London Underground and union leaders.

The Rail Maritime and Transport union began consulting on a four-year pay deal, which LU said offered the prospect of no industrial action over wages until at least 2015.

Under the deal, staff will get a 5% pay increase this year followed by RPI inflation plus 0.5% in the subsequent three years.

Industry sources said that if RPI inflation stays reasonably high, some tube staff will receive a pay rise approaching 20% by the end of the settlement period.

This will not be popular in London and among people who struggle into London to work here, work a darn sight harder than those drivers and mostly for considerably less money.

Bob Crow has been crowing:

General secretary Bob Crow said: "We saw major movement from LU and we now take this improved offer back to our local reps.

"In these days of austerity we have shown … trade unionism is the best defence from attacks on jobs and living standards. I doubt you will find a better offer than this anywhere else in the public sector."

He is, of course, one of the prominent supporters of the People's Pledge Campaign that is fighting for that referendum we are likely to lose. All of a pattern, I'd say.

In a way it was middle England

I see that Brendan Barber, the TUC's completely unknown GenSec (where are the GenSecs of yesteryear whose names were on all our lips?) has called the 400,000 to 500,000 who turned out today for the big demonstration against the cuts Middle England. (The World Service says more than 250,000. Clearly, hedging their bets.) In a sense it was, as a great part of Middle England now lives off the state and is not happy at the thought of it being cut back.

What I saw of the great rally in Trafalgar Square and the demonstration that moved off towards Piccadilly did, up to a point, remind me of the great Countryside march. It was well organized with a great many stewards supplementing the police, good humoured with people who had brought their children and the police, at that stage, quite relaxed. There was also the small counter-demo to whom I chatted and whose picture I took (see above).

Even at that stage there were differences. There were far more police out and they were lined up in close ranks. At the Countryside march they stood around with big smiles on their faces and were ready to chat. Nor were several of the National Gallery entrances closed for fear of violence.

Later on, I watched the police off Regent Street putting on their riot gear and realized that the peaceful atmosphere may well have been dissipated. Later still, I went past some seriously vandalized bank machines in Charing Cross Road. It is unlikely that the vandals managed to get any money out - that not being such an easy process. What they succeeded in doing is making life extremely difficult for people out in Central London for Saturday night. Oddly enough, there are very few bank machines around Charing Cross Road, Covent Garden and Chinatown.

In other words, despite the TUC and other union control, several hundred demonstrators, who came in order to cause trouble, did just that, smashing shops, banks and occupying Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly, a store that is owned by Whittington Investments Limited that is, in turn, owned largely by the Garfield Weston Foundation, one of the largest charitable foundations in the world or, in other words, an organization that actively helps people through various targeted charitable donations. But that is not what UK Uncut is interested in. All has to go through taxes because otherwise there will be no employment for that section of Middle Britain that turned out in central London today.

The organizers of a demonstration are responsible for its conduct. It is true that the groups that came to cause trouble could not be controlled but I still think that those who suffered should send their bills to the TUC, Unison and the other unions. Let them collect the money from UK Uncut and whoever else there is in those groups, docking the welfare payment at source, if necessary.

Oh yes, there was another difference between this demo and the Countryside march. There were many slogans in both but the overwhelming message of the Countryside march was simple: Liberty and Livelihood. The word liberty did not feature on any of the posters today.

What is all the fuss about?

There is a certain amount of fuss and bother about a rather silly statement made by Commission President Barroso who is clearly desperately trying to ensure that the various PIIGS are rescued by everyone else. Might the European project collapse? As I have said before, my view is that it will collapse when the Germans would have had enough of being made to feel subservient to the French but the financial debacle will contribute. Let's face it, the euro was a very bad idea from the europhiliac point of view.

Democracy could ‘collapse’ in Greece, Spain and Portugal unless urgent action is taken to tackle the debt crisis, the head of the European Commission has warned.

In an extraordinary briefing to trade union chiefs last week, Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso set out an ‘apocalyptic’ vision in which crisis-hit countries in southern Europe could fall victim to military coups or popular uprisings as interest rates soar and public services collapse because their governments run out of money.

How odd. I thought being part of the European Union meant that those European values among which democracy and human rights come top are secure for ever. You mean member states are capable of reverting to their own historical precedents? Who knew?

There are a couple of aspects to this event that need to be noted. In the first place, President Barroso is not an elected president of anything, let alone the European Union, so the notion of him pontificating about democracy is absurd.

Secondly, he was addressing trade union chiefs. Whatever may have been the case long in the past, recent experience with trade unions is that they are not precisely in favour of democracy either within their own ranks or outside them. In fact, this briefing is about as undemocratic as can be, not because President Barroso is not allowed to brief trade union chiefs but because it is all part and parcel of the EU's effort to create a post-democratic structure of civil society organizations, set up by the Commission in the first place, consulting and being briefed by the self-same Commission as a substitute for accountable democracy.

Thirdly, the EU is and has always been an undemocratic, indeed an anti-democratic structure. What he means by democracy disappearing is that the democratic institutions that have already been hollowed out by the EU might disappear. That is not the same thing at all.