Europe's political pendulum is yet to swing back towards common sense...and time is running out - Alex Story

This phenomenon is largely due to a combination of a reduction in the natural population, falling at three per cent, and a huge immigration increase of over six per cent in 2023.

That is a population replacement rate of nearly 10 per cent per year, a trend that is set to continue. Thankfully, as the Guardian daily reminds us, most of the new arrivals are male doctors, nurses and scientists.

On the side of macro-economics though, the EU’s debt levels have increased by around a third over the same period - much faster than population growth, suggesting flatlining productivity and falling wages.

Finally, the continent, apart from a few outliers such as Poland, is defenceless.

Mr Wallis’ conclusion, as pithy as it was accurate,is that “Europeans love everything about their policies except the results”.

Firstly, and to be fair, one should separate the EU, the administrative puberty blockers of European Nations, from the countries of Europe themselves.

It is they and their leaders, after all, who made the unsupported, but formerly, fashionable claim that history had come to an end, paraphrasing Professor Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the left-wing block between 1989 and 1991.

Progressive Liberal Democracy, just like Marx’s workers' paradise, having won, would remain unchallenged for eternity, it was thought at the time.

They would “pool sovereignty” (a brain-dead concept if ever there was one) and, unbeknown to them, consign themselves and their kin to future global irrelevance.

From a progressive mindset, the future was known. Internationalism became a necessity, devouring evermore vital resources for no visible returns.

And all, who stood in the way would be branded reactionariesand demonised as they still are.

This world view became deeply ingrained in our institutions.

Nations, to them, were abstract constructs; borders a relic of a disgraceful past; cultures a break on progress, anchored as these were in the deep soil of our Judeo-Christian inheritance.

And so, they sought to torch it.

They denied the fertile roots that enabled our continent to emerge from geopolitical insignificance on the edge of the gigantic Eurasian territorial mass at the turn of the first millennium into world conquerors across all field of human endeavour, delivering hitherto unheard-of riches, by the time the second one came into view.

The future, it turned out, though, was unexpected, the reality too complex and Liberal Democracies as ephemeral as St Valentine’s Day roses.

Secondly, there are two types of Europeans: one the one hand, the well-fed, uninspiring and deeply mediocre European leadership caste, who, as Mr Wallis rightly alluded to, constantly stumbles in a world of unintended consequences and shattered dreams, blaming all and sundry for her failure bar herself, and on the other, the far wiser tax-paying electorates of Europe’s exceedingly diverse continent.

The first type understands Europe, as flat-earthers would, through the lens of a ubiquitous continent-wide regulator; the second as a continent made up of a multitude of various and distinct nations.

The latter does not like where things are heading.

The fundamental problem facing him is that the concept of sovereignty, individual and national, is being denied.

JD Vance, the Vice President remarked on this during his speech at the Munich Defence Conference in mid-February 2025, sandwiched as it was between one Islamic killing spree in Germany and yet another across the border in Austria.

Contrary, he said, “to what you might hear, a couple mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy”.

From a Western cultural perspective, men and women, and by extension the nations - to paraphrase Chaucer - to be sovereign over their own decisions.

And yet, the Davos view of humanity, espoused and diffused byacademics such as Professor Yuval Noah Harari, is neatly encapsulated in the words “cog” and “educated animals”.

Indeed, if your religion is the dismal and always failing science of economics and your fetish abstract GDP growth, then “man” is only interesting as an animal the value of which is directly linked to his productive capacity.

No longer made in the image of his creator, he morphs into an interchangeable unit of production.

From this perspective, he is not sovereign, but merely a replaceable cog acting at the beck and call of his masters, destined to be discarded as flotsam on history’s inevitable onward flow.

This is where the decidedly anti-human and left-wing progressive politicsof gender, racism, eugenics, euthanasia and anti-free speech totalitarianism reside.

If the individual is no longer sovereign, neither is his country. It is merely a geographical area, which never truly belonged to him or his ancestors in the first place.

As a result, he has no valid claim to the land, which, in any case, owes him nothing. He is replaceable.

This explains why JD Vance added that the greatest threat to Europe and her security is neither China nor Russia, but Europe’s leadership and it’s “retreat from some of its most fundamental values” .

Their eyes fixed on Brussels and the international system, European leaders are in the main running away from their electorates, whose demands are as grating as they are uniform.

Electorates, on the other hand, do not see themselves as European Union citizens but as national ones.

They shake their impotent fists at the permanently taxpayer funded class that robs them of their earnings to better destroy the country for which they have given and would give so much.

And as Europe’s disappearance from the world stage accelerates, the peoples of Europe seek political alternatives.

But bad habits die hard, taxpayer funded taboos are still strong, and the current scavengers feasting on the carcass of Europe’s former greatness are too well ensconced.

As the recent and indecisive German federal election results show, things will have to become much worse for the political pendulum to swing back towards common sense. Time though is running out.

While the United States seem to have shown that political choice can make a difference, we in Europe have yet to experience that bracing experience.

In the meantime, while our leaders run away from us, it is up to us to catch up with them and drag them out of their fashionable settings and back to a place where they deal with our reasonable demands.

At the moment, though, it doesn’t matter how many times you try to teach them, they just don’t want to learn.