Who has the right?

Tiberge at Gallia Watch has found an interesting quote from a group in France called the CCIF (which, in English, stands for "Collective against Islamophobia in France").

The CCIF is a group which fights "Islamophobia" - a fear of Islam. It has had success in winning recognition from the powers-that-be:

in 2011 we won a true international recognition by forging a partnership with the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) and becoming an advisory member of the United Nations (UN).

But here is the quote from the CCIF that Tiberge found. The words were spoken by Marwan Muhammed, spokesman for the organisation:

Who has the right to say that France in thirty or forty years will not be a Muslim country? Who has the right? Nobody has the right to take that from us, nobody has the right to deny us that hope. To deny us the right to hope for a global society faithful to Islam.

So the CCIF wants to suppress the voices of those concerned that France might become a Muslim country ("Islamophobia") whilst at the same time defending passionately the right of French Muslims to hope that France will within their own lifetimes become a Muslim country.

It's an interesting example of the way that words like "Islamophobia" are used for aggressive purposes, i.e. to disarm opposition to an agenda that is hostile to the majority.

A trad manifesto

Mark Moncrieff has put together a traditionalist manifesto at his site. Have a look and see what you think.

An Australian anthem

David Ward has written a patriotic Australian anthem called Land of my Heart. Here is one of the verses:

God of the nations, our shield and our light,
Defend this our homeland, with justice and might;
Let not the tyrant, encroach on our shores,
And gently exhort us, to follow your laws;
Within your arms safely, our nation enfold;
Through light and through darkness, your people uphold

When did Australia turn?

In a recent post I discussed how the churches had pushed for internationalism as early as 1942, well before the influence of the Cultural Marxism of the 1960s.

This led to some discussion in the comments thread of when the decision to change course on immigration policy was made in Australia. I pointed out that it was made during the war cabinets in WWII. Although the Labor Party initiated the changes, they were supported by the Liberal Party.

The shift toward a multiethnic nation was supported by Arthur Calwell. Calwell believed in diversity as a matter of social justice:

As a school boy in Melbourne Calwell grew up in the shadow of his mixed Irish and Welsh ancestry. His wide reading in American history, into the lives of the English Chartists, Fabian Socialists and the nationalist struggles in Ireland and Continental Europe imbued him with a strong sense of history in which Australia was to be seen as an inheritor of the ideals enshrined in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In newspaper articles, speeches made as president of the Victorian Labor Party during the 1930s, and later after election as federal member for Melbourne in 1940, Calwell's deep concern for social justice was invariably linked with the creation in Australia of an ethnically mixed society through large-scale immigration.

...in a confidential note addressed to Chifley in 1944 he wrote of his determination to develop a heterogeneous society

Calwell, it is true, wanted to draw a particular line the sand: he wanted a diverse, heterogeneous, ethnically mixed society drawn from different European sources rather than non-European ones. But that's not a line that was ever going to hold. If it is thought socially just to build a society based on the principle of diversity, then the "moral" thing was always going to be to go the next step and to open up to non-European immigration.

Last year, the Labor minister Simon Crean gave a speech on Calwell's legacy:

He firmly believed in the principles of fairness, equality and social justice...Arthur Calwell successfully argued for the acceptance of a more heterogeneous society...In doing so he brought the union movement and the nation with him...His conviction to the cause was underpinned by his values and his commitment to equality, fairness and social justice...He not only led the debate on immigration—he was responsible for laying the fundamental foundation of modern Australia—an Australia that is inclusive, diverse and tolerant.

Calwell is a classic example of someone who wanted to take a radical principle to a certain point and then no more. But the next generation inevitably wanted to push on further and Calwell's objections were brushed aside.

As Simon Crean recognises, the principle that led to the open borders of today was put in place in the 1940s by men like Arthur Calwell, a Catholic Labor man who wanted to follow the example of the American melting pot. It didn't require the influence of the continental European cultural Marxists.

A corrupt refugee system

Well, how's this for confirmation of what most of us already knew.

Australia's Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, believes that most of those arriving by boat in Australia are economic migrants rather than refugees. He is therefore concerned that 90% are being granted refugee status:

Up to 90 per cent of people who arrive by boat are considered genuine refugees, but Senator Carr said his "impression" was that now, as arrivals spiked, most were economic migrants.

"They're people seeking an improvement in their economic circumstances, and therefore they've got to get into the regular migration stream," he said.

Senator Carr said immigrants who were not part of any ethnic or religious minority could not argue they were being persecuted in their home country.

"There have been boats where 100 per cent of them have been people who are fleeing countries where they're the majority ethnic and religious group," he said.

"I think it's unarguable that if someone is leaving a country and they are part of the majority religious and ethnic group, then they're not being persecuted in the way that the Refugee Convention describes."

So why are so many accepted as refugees? Part of the answer is that those on the refugee tribunals have been threatened with the sack if they reject too many claims. Also, refugee activists with a clear bias have been appointed to the tribunals. From 2010:

The two members of the Rudd Government’s Refugee Review Tribunal say they operate under a “culture of fear”, with their jobs under threat if they reject too many claims.

They believe two members have already lost their jobs for being too tough, and more could follow when the next round of appointments (and dumpings) are announced next month…

...the four-man panel which decides on RRT appointments includes a refugee activist with a conflict of interest.

John Gibson is also president of the Refugee Council of Australia and works as a lawyer for asylum seekers who are turned down by the RRT.

Here are some appointments from 2010 to the Refugee Review Tribunal:

There’s Charlie Powles, a Refugee and Immigration Law Centre solicitor, and Anthony Krohn, a Melbourne barrister who has worked for many asylum seekers and the Refugee Advice and Casework Service.

Add to them the director of the Brisbane Catholic Archdiocese’s Centre for Multicultural Pastoral Care; a solicitor for the refugee advocacy group Southern Communities Advocacy Legal Education Service; and a solicitor for Sydney’s Immigration Advice and Rights Centre.

Samantha Whybrow, who was recently a visa officer in Sri Lanka, was told in 2012 by a Regional Director not to worry if 90% of humanitarian applications were false "because the numbers are so small".

She believes that many visas were being granted on the basis of false information:

In my interviews with family members of people granted humanitarian visas (who were then applying for visas themselves) I asked why their family member had gone to Australia.
  
In a large number of cases I was provided with responses such as, “the gem business was not good”, “I don’t know”, “business was not good”, “our children are in Australia”, “Australia is giving visas for Sri Lankans”.

When I compared these statements with the statements the humanitarian visa recipient had made to officials in Australia I found extraordinary contradictions that lead me to strongly believe the (humanitarian) claim had been fabricated.

Let me repeat here what I think should happen with the refugee system. The current system, in which refugee applicants are resettled in Western countries, encourages economic migration. A better system would be for the wealthier nations in the world (and not just Western nations) to contribute to a central fund for refugees. This fund would be used to resettle refugees in those areas which are most similar to the refugees' country of origin in both ethnicity and living standard.

That would remove the incentive for economic migrants to claim refugee status and it would also avoid cultural dislocation for both the refugees and the members of the host society.

Did the institutions in 42 really need marching through?

There are people who blame Cultural Marxism/The Frankfurt School for what has gone wrong in the West.

The argument runs as follows. In the 1950s the West was going well. But a group of European Marxists (the Frankfurt School) had developed a new strategy. Instead of relying on a class war to win power they would instead begin a long march through the institutions. The 60s student rebellion gave these cultural Marxists their opportunity and they began to win influence in the institutions. This has then led to Western decline.

This theory of decline does have its merits. It refers to something real that did have seriously negative consequences in the West. It's worth understanding the particular theories generated by the Frankfurt School and how they influenced university life in particular from the 1960s onward.

But there are problems with the theory as well. And a major problem is the timing. The theory suggests that things were basically OK in the West until the 1960s. I don't think that's true and I'll give just one bit of evidence for that in a moment. Apart from this, the theory also suggests that the liberalism which dominated the West up to the 60s was also OK and that it was only when Cultural Marxists subverted this liberalism that things went wrong. That seems to me to let Western liberals off the hook and to discourage the kind of rethinking of liberal orthodoxy that needs to take place.

So what is some evidence that things were going seriously wrong before the 1960s? In 1941, when the Axis powers were triumphant in Europe, there was a conference of liberal Anglicans in Malvern, England. Led by the Archbishop of York and 23 bishops, these Anglicans wanted to lead "the ordering of the new society" which they were sure would emerge following the war.

How did they envisage this new society? Most notably, they were keen to build a European Union:

After the war our aim must be the unification of Europe as a cooperative commonwealth

There were also debates about dropping the importance of the mass in favour of social activism and of switching from private ownership of property. But what is really noteworthy are the speeches about how the old order must be swept away in favour of a completely new society - and this new society was envisaged in modern liberal terms.

Anyway, in 1942 an even more significant conference took place of American Protestant church leaders. This occurred in March around the time that the Japanese were invading Java (in other words, when the Axis powers were still predominant). 375 representatives of 30 denominations met together at Ohio Wesleyan University. What did they decide?

It was their view that the U.S. should lead the way in creating an international system of government. Here are some of the post-war policies they favoured:

• Worldwide freedom of immigration
• A world government of delegated powers
• Elimination of all tariff and quota restrictions on world trade
• International control of all armies and navies

The ultimate aim to be achieved was the following:

a duly constituted world government of delegated powers; an international legislative body, an international court with adequate jurisdiction, international administrative bodies with necessary powers, and adequate international police forces and provision for enforcing its worldwide economic authority.

So the question to be asked is this: did the churches really need to be marched through and captured by cultural Marxists? Or had they already reached a point of post-nationalism under the influence of liberalism as early as the 1940s?

I think it's clear that the rot had already set in. Liberalism had already done the job by the 1940s - there was no need for the cultural Marxism of the 1960s to swing the churches.

Another significant Benedict quote

In 1997 the then Cardinal Ratzinger, later to be Pope Benedict, gave a long interview to a German journalist, Peter Seewald.

In this interview, Pope Benedict rejected the idea that men and women are interchangeable in their roles in society. He explained the belief in interchangeable roles in a similar way that I do. According to Pope Benedict, moderns think of freedom as being a liberty to self-author or self-create. But to be free to self-author means rejecting the given parts of our nature.

Pope Benedict described the modernist mentality this way:

The idea that 'nature' has something to say is no longer admissible; man is to have the liberty to remodel himself at will. He is to be free from all of the prior givens of his essence. He makes of himself what he wants, and only in this way is he really 'free and liberated'. Behind this approach is a rebellion on man's part against the limits that he has as a biological being. In the end, it is a revolt against our creatureliness. Man is to be his own creator - a modern, new edition of the immemorial attempt to be God, to be like God.

Moderns believe that in taking this approach they are maximising individual freedom. That's supposed to be the selling point.

But what kind of freedom is it really? In the traditional view, my identity as a man connects me to a masculine essence, which exists independently of me as an objective value. But in the modern view, there is only an arbitrary, invented identity that doesn't connect me to anything outside myself. It seems that in adopting the modern view I am losing something rather than liberating myself.

Murders of Afrikaner farmers

There's a report in the Daily Mail on the situation in South Africa which reveals some disturbing statistics regarding Afrikaner farmers.

There were 25 white farmers murdered last month alone in South Africa:

Last month alone there were 25 murders of white landowners, and more than 100 attacks, while Afrikaner protest groups claim that more than 4,000 have been killed since Mandela came to power.

Last year the President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, was filmed singing a song called "Shoot the Boer":

At a centenary gathering of the African National Congress last year, Zuma was filmed singing a so-called ‘struggle song’ called Kill The Boer (the old name for much of the white Afrikaner population).

As fellow senior ANC members clapped along, Zuma sang: ‘We are going to shoot them, they are going to run, Shoot the Boer, shoot them, they are going to run, Shoot the Boer, we are going to hit them, they are going to run, the Cabinet will shoot them, with the machine-gun, the Cabinet will shoot them, with the machine-gun . . .’

And a political rival of Zuma, Julius Malema is open about wanting to drive Afrikaner farmers off the land:

Malema wants all white-owned land to be seized without compensation, along with nationalisation of the country’s lucrative mines.

Ominously, Malema, 32, who wears a trademark beret and has a fondness for Rolex watches, this month promised his new party will take the land from white people without recompense and give it to blacks.

Malema wants all white-owned land to be seized without compensation, along with nationalisation of the country’s lucrative mines.

‘We need the land that was taken from our people, and we are not going to pay for it,’ he said.

It's interesting that Malema should claim that the land was taken from his people. The original inhabitants of South Africa were the Khoisan hunter gatherers. The Afrikaners settled the western part of South Africa after their arrival in 1652, displacing the Khoisan. The Xhosa people (the ethnic group that Mandela and Desmond Tutu belong to) had meanwhile pushed down the east coast, themselves displacing the Khoisan. The Xhosa were themselves then pushed further westward by pressure placed on them by the migration of the Zulus.

In other words, the Xhosa themselves took land from the Khoisan and the Zulus took it from the Xhosa in a series of migrations.

The Daily Mail article also reports on the Afrikaner community of Kleinfontein. This is one place that Afrikaners can live in without fear of violent crime:

Most crucially of all, in a country with 60 murders a day, there is no armed robbery, murder or rape in Kleinfontein. ‘An old lady can draw money here without any fear,’ says Marisa Haasbroek, a resident, mother of two teenage girls, and my guide for the morning.

‘It’s safe, quiet and peaceful.'

A successful meeting

I'm pleased to report that the latest Eltham Traditionalists meeting went well last night. The conversation was great, there was another new face and the general atmosphere surrounding the group is very good right now.

The aim is to get this local group firmly established by the end of the year and then to set up similar groups elsewhere in Melbourne.

I doubt that anyone would not have enjoyed our dinner together last night. I'd encourage anyone within driving distance of Eltham to get in touch (swerting@bigpond.com).

The change at the top

Australians once again had a change of PM yesterday, not because of an election, but because the Labor Party thinks they'll be better off in the upcoming elections with a different PM.

So it was out with Julia Gillard and back in with Kevin Rudd.

I find it very difficult to summon up much interest in this, as both Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd have little to recommend them from a traditionalist point of view. Rudd is a "big Australia" man in the sense of wanting open borders (and he has also pushed for the creation of a regional superstate). Julia Gillard has also been running immigration at record levels and she identifies strongly as a feminist.

That last point may be the most interesting thing in all this. In a bid to boost her popularity Julia Gillard once again played the "gender card" warning women about voting for "men in blue ties" and setting up a "women for Gillard" support group.

It backfired. Her support amongst women remained stable but support amongst men fell by 8%. This suggests that Australian men may have reached the point where they're less willing to tolerate anti-male rhetoric from politicians.

It seems very likely at this stage that Tony Abbott will lead the Liberals to victory in the election later this year. But I also find it difficult to get excited about the prospect of this victory. The left likes to portray Abbott as being fiercely right-wing, but when you look at his policies it's difficult to find much evidence for this.

For instance, one of Julia Gillard's last acts was to support a bill that was intended to make it more difficult to rort the 457 visa scheme. The bill requires employers to show that they have tried to employ local workers (by placing job adverts) before they use 457 visas to bring in workers from overseas.

It's a very modest attempt to encourage employers to hire Australians before turning overseas, but Abbott's Liberals attacked it in the strongest terms as being racist.

For once I have to agree with the Labor Party. The Labor Party Immigration Minister, Brendan O'Connor, said:

I can assure you it offends every Australian when someone suggests that because you want to put locals first you're a racist.

The warning I would give now to my Australian readers is not to expect too much from an Abbott Liberal Government. It's highly likely that Abbott will win, but we are going to see more of what we've had over the past few decades rather than a change of course.

Depression in Wales

There's an item at the Daily Mail on the rate at which antidepressants are being prescribed in a town in Wales called Blaenau Gwent.

There are 10,000 prescriptions being written each month for a community with 60,000 adults.

Now, I'm no expert in this area and if any of my readers are suffering depression I'm not the person to take advice from - consult with someone who knows you well or a professional.

But I can't help but wonder whether liberalism isn't contributing to rates of unhappiness and depression. The article mentions unemployment as a possible contributing factor, but it seems to me that liberalism undermines the sense of identity, connectedness, belonging and purpose that people once had and treats them instead as atomised individuals who exist to work and to consume.

That liberal way of doing things works best when you have a more glamorous, high status job (and when you have the social skills to understand that liberalism is to be ignored in some aspects of your life, such as family and community).

But what if you live in a working-class community where the jobs are gone, where the rate of family breakdown is high, where teenagers get hooked on drugs or booze and where the glamorous consumerist, careerist lifestyle seems out of reach? Where then are your anchors in life?

The residents of Blaenau Gwent need the support of stable family relationships. They need to have a role within the family that fulfils who they are as men and women. They need to have an ideal of manhood and womanhood to give a positive direction and a sense of pride. They need to have a sense that they are contributing in their lives to a larger, ongoing ethnic or national tradition of their own. And it would help too to be supported by a church culture and tradition.

Dissociation, repression, distancing

Here's a thought that relates to political strategy.

If you think calmly and clearly about current trends in Western societies, you can't help but recognise a terrible fact, namely that the Western peoples are facing going out of existence over the next few generations.

Now, you might think that a good response to this would be to yell as loudly as you could, to as many people as you could, that this terrible thing was occurring and needed to be responded to.

But this doesn't get the desired response. It often just makes people shut down entirely. Why?

I think the answer, in part, relates to the way that people cope with bad things psychologically. If there's something terrible looming that we feel we have no control over, one way of coping is to distance ourselves from the thought of it. It's a form of what might be called dissociation or repression.

If people are already doing this, and you heighten the sense of threat, then they'll only do it more.

This happens with my wife. Early in our marriage, if she said something thoughtlessly in support of open borders, I'd remind her of the long term trends and what that would ultimately mean. But I quickly learnt not to do that as it genuinely distressed her. She told me outright that she couldn't cope with the thought of it, that it upset her and that she wanted not to think about it.

So what does all this mean for political strategy? I don't think it means that you shouldn't point to what is happening and the long-term consequences. But I don't think you should assume that this will be enough to prompt people into action. And, in some cases, it might even push people away by making them feel psychologically distressed.

So what else can we do? First, we can gather together the more psychologically robust: those who are strong enough to see what is happening and work patiently against it. We need to make sure that we achieve political clarity within this group and keep enough momentum to gradually build.

Second, we can appeal to the stronger masculine qualities in men, particularly the instinct to stand firm and to hold ground. That sets us against one wing of the men's rights movement, the wing which wants to "liberate" men from their masculinity.

Third, as we gain ground we can expect to win a wider audience as the situation will seem less daunting as individuals become less isolated from each other. There will be less discomfort from distress and therefore less need to dissociate or repress.

Fourth, and related to this, there is a benefit in the medium term in establishing local areas where numbers are consolidated. If you were to have a small area where trads were to predominate, it might not change the political scene overall, but it would provide a place where some people would feel less need to dissociate or repress.

Fifth, we need to make sure that our realism about the gravity of the situation is balanced with positive news about the gains that are being made either in our part of the world or overseas. Again, you don't just want to prompt people to shut down.

Sixth, I think it helps to make the argument that working for the good is important in itself, regardless of whether we ultimately achieve success or failure. It is part of the role of an adult male to uphold a larger tradition; it is a full expression of our masculinity; and in attempting to do so we feel right in our conscience.

Not bad for an ad!

In 2007 Steinlager, a beer company from New Zealand, released a "deliver me" ad. It has some surprising themes, but I'll let you watch it before I comment on it:



To sum up: a young white man is inspired toward a quiet masculine strength through the example of his father. This young man is connected to his identity, he "knows who he is".

The portrayal of race in the ad goes against the usual trend. Usually when the interaction of whites and blacks is portrayed in the media there is an emphasis on white guilt or black coolness. But in this case the black fighter is portrayed as being too loudly aggressive, too "in your face".

I wouldn't want every ad to have that particular slant - my trad instincts are to want blacks to find their place in the world as well. But it's refreshing to have the better qualities of young white men portrayed in the media.

The ad shows what might be done in a more traditionalist minded community. The media could be used to inspire us to be the best of who we are and to be strong in our identity.

(Hat tip: Social Pathologist)

A quick reminder

Just a reminder to Melbourne readers to check out the Eltham Traditionalists page. This is our local traditionalist association which meets regularly for evening dinners - we have another meeting coming up this week. If you're within driving distance and would like to attend email me at swerting@bigpond.com.

Women forced onto fishing boats? Not quite.

I came across a couple more items on feminism today.

The first is a definition of feminism by Susan Faludi. According to Susan Faludi, feminism:

asks that women be free to define themselves instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.

That fits with my own claim that feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. It is liberalism which wants individuals, above all, to be self-determining or self-defining. So if your aim is to maximise the extent to which women are self-determining and self-defining what do you do? Well, you reject roles that are predetermined, such as motherhood, in favour of roles which can be thought of as uniquely chosen (career). And you promote the idea of women being independent of men, mostly through career, but also through state welfare schemes.

When you follow this kind of logic, equality comes to mean, above all, equal participation in the labour market.

And so it's no surprise that the European Union has been looking into the underrepresentation of women in the fishing industry. One member of the European Parliament, Stuart Agnew, is a member of UKIP and he challenged the EU on this policy. He used question time to ask:

What is the end game? ...Is this the beginning of a legislative process to say to people in the fishing industry, you have got to employ more women?...And if it's legislation what are you going to use, the carrot or the stick? ...In ten years' time, where do you think we ought to be with this?

Stuart Agnew wondered in his questions if the EU would force a role reversal in which the husbands would be expected to stay home while their wives manned the fishing boats. He asked the very interesting question of what the long-term aims of the EU feminists were on this issue. What was the response? The chair, Dolores Carabello, took a while to compose herself, but then gave this answer:

I was a bit taken aback, but really I think that I'm not aspiring to perfection, I'm trying to be intellectually rigorous, I'm not a clairvoyant, so I don't know what's going to happen in ten years. What I don't really want is that you've got attitudes like that of Mr Agnew, who is denying women the same rights and responsibilities that men have in the sector. That's what this is all about. We're trying to improve the situation in areas in which its been shown that women are an active part, an economically productive part, but this role has not been adequately recognised. Let's hope that in ten years that we have proper equal opportunities which the women are fighting for.

There are two interesting things about this answer. First, I think this is an insight into the mindset of the liberal managerial class. Dolores Carabello is not a revolutionary. She doesn't want to implement a grand plan through one violent, forceful action. She belongs to a class of people which is used to getting what it wants over time through its use of government agencies.

What she does have is a principle, which she frames as women having the same rights and responsibilities in the paid workforce, but which is really better expressed as the promotion of women's career outcomes. Once she has that principle, then her aim is to use administrative measures to carry it through over time. Where it leads to ultimately she doesn't know, nor does she really need to know.

I understand this, as I think much would be the same of traditionalism. We have very different principles to Dolores Carabello, and although we could lay out what our ideal society might be based on these principles, it would be difficult to say in advance how much of that would be realistically achieved over time. It would be enough to know that a community was advancing according to those principles.

Anyway, right now the intention of the EU is not to force women onto fishing boats. I read the EU document and the authors recognise that women don't want to go onto fishing boats as the work is poorly paid and dangerous (read my post on Trawlermen for some idea of the difficulties of working on a trawler in the North Sea). The EU report states:

Women on the whole don’t wish to go to sea and aren’t particularly wanted, so whilst ensuring that women can participate if they so wish (i.e. no unfair barriers) there is little point in pushing for greater involvement.

There are extraordinarily few women working on fishing boats. In Belgium there is one woman; not a single one in Denmark; none in Finland; and one full-time worker in the Netherlands and three part-timers. These figures suggest just how little this career appeals to women.

If there were more money or status in it, I'm sure the EU would be ready to push women into the field no matter what. Instead, what the EU wants to do is to promote women in the more lucrative fields (administration and aquaculture) and get them out or let them stay out of the less lucrative areas (processing/fishing boats). Here is what the EU report states on processing:

There is clearly discrimination in processing, but it is perhaps best to help women exit the industry rather than concentrate on upgrading what are likely to always be low grade jobs. So in non-FDAs there is little justification for special support other than the general education/training that will allow women to move out of these undesirable jobs

So it's not really a case of "equal opportunities" or "the same rights and responsibilities". The principle is that whatever promotes women's career advancement is right and good. Therefore, the EU is happy to leave women off the trawlers and to get them out of the processing side, whilst they boost women in the administrative and training side of the industry (and attempt to formalise and professionalise some of the supporting work that fishermen's wives do at home).

If that approach were to hold over time would women be equal in the industry? No, they would not be equal, they would clearly be privileged. They would have the cushier jobs, whilst men did the dirty, dangerous and lower paid work. But for now the principle is "promote women's career outcomes" and so the EU bureaucracy is happy to push on in this direction.