As the figures for the third quarter come in, I am growing very worried about the future of Europe. Coronavirus has unleashed a disaster there that is hard to comprehend. The numbers are extraordinarily terrible. Let me show you what I mean.
Read the rest of this entry »On the 12th, the British Labour Party suffered a devastating electoral defeat at the hands of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party. There have been lots of pieces about why Labour lost. Having taken the better part of a week to think about it, I’ve come to a view about where the trouble lies. Let me share it with you.
I’ve done a piece for the newly launched magazine Topical. You can read it here:
https://topicalmag.com/europes-nationalists-beating-federalists/
Italy finally has a coalition government–consisting largely of Lega Nord and the Five Star Movement, two Euroskeptic populist parties. The new coalition was elected to take Italy in a new direction, but this will prove difficult to do. Italy is a great example of what’s gone wrong in Europe. Let me tell you its story…
All over the western world, anti-establishment movements are pushing for immigration controls. They argue that immigrants from developing countries are willing to work for too little and there are too many of them. Because there are so many and they are so cheap, these immigrants take jobs which might otherwise go to native-born westerners. The workers who support immigration controls are right to point out that they have not been receiving a fair shake in the last few decades, but this is not due to immigration–it’s due to capital mobility.
Benjamin Studebaker 