[quote]After a week of mass protests, Ireland was brought to a standstill. Farmers, truckers and hauliers blockaded motorways, ports and the country’s only oil refinery, leaving a third of petrol stations dry. The immediate trigger was a sharp spike in global fuel prices caused by the US-Israel military operations against Iran and the resulting disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. But the deeper grievances were plain. Protesters demanded not only a fuel-price cap but the suspension of planned carbon-tax increases — policies that had already turned energy into a luxury for many households.

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Underlying the anger, as commentators at MCC Brussels and elsewhere noted, was the cumulative burden of aggressive green decarbonisation combined with rapid mass immigration, both of which have imposed unbearable costs on working people while delivering no tangible benefits. The Government’s eventual response — €505 million in tax cuts and a delay of the carbon-tax hike — was an admission that elite climate and migration policies had finally produced a social explosion on the streets. Yet, like their counterparts in the EU and UK, the Irish Government has for long depended on elite-managed integration deliberately insulated from democratic politics and genuine popular support.

The European Union and the UK increasingly resemble the late Soviet Union in both institutional architecture and ideological rigidity. An unelected central bureaucracy sets the policy agenda while national parliaments and the European Parliament provide little more than democratic theatre. The Commission’s 32,000 civil servants, enjoying legal immunities and generous privileges, function as a modern nomenklatura insulated from accountability. As Finn Andreen documented in his February 2026 analysis for the Mises Institute, Brussels operates through a form of “democratic centralism”, steadily transferring sovereignty from member states upward during successive crises — globalisation, Covid, Ukraine, migration.

A parallel observation appears in Russian academic commentary describing the EU as a geopolitical entity based on ideology rather than organic national interests. The result is a state that fails at classical liberal functions — maintenance of infrastructure, law and order, price stability, national defence and facilitation of voluntary exchange — while excelling at narrative management and the suppression of dissent. This is not rhetorical exaggeration. It is the observable outcome of centralised planning dressed in progressive clothing.

Where the USSR promised the New Soviet Man dedicated to collective welfare, today’s EU model demands adherence to DEI, ESG, critical race theory, ‘environmental justice’ and an ever-expanding hierarchy of victimhood. The machinery of government is geared not towards delivering measurable results in living standards or security, but towards containing the discontent of populations subjected to policies imposed by metropolitan elites with luxury beliefs and groupthink. In a furious diatribe aired last week, a caller to the UK’s Talk TV named “Georgina” accused Sir Keir Starmer of “erasing national identity in favour of a globalist agenda”. To many of the listeners, her pointed criticisms of the UK Prime Minister hold equally for the likes of European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen and for the leaders of the Irish coalition Government of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

Institutional echoes of the Soviet past

The structural parallels are precise. In the USSR the handpicked Politburo and Central Committee made real decisions; the Supreme Soviet rubber-stamped them. In the EU the unelected Commission dictates trade, energy, industrial and environmental policy while member states retain only the illusion of sovereignty. Even post-Brexit Britain exhibits the same symptoms. Labour’s 2024 victory, secured with 33.7% of the popular vote (and just 20% of the electorate), reflected not widespread enthusiasm but revulsion at 14 years of Conservative convergence toward the same cosmopolitan progressive consensus. The state’s performance on core functions continues to deteriorate.

Classical liberals from Adam Smith onward listed the legitimate tasks of government as ensuring external defence, security of property rights, enforcement of contracts, provision of public goods such as roads and bridges, maintenance of law and order and stable currency. Across Western Europe these basics are neglected while resources flow into narrative enforcement and regulatory overreach.

Britain offers a striking illustration of wage compression that exceeds even Soviet-era levels. The minimum wage now stands at approximately 66% of average earnings — higher than the Soviet peak of roughly 60%. After taxes, benefits and public services, the net income ratio between a £100,000 earner (top 5%) and a full-time minimum-wage worker shrinks to roughly 3:1. During the Soviet period the equivalent ratio never fell below 5:1 and usually hovered between 3.2 and 4.4. This is not egalitarian success; it is the stagnation produced by high marginal taxes, benefits traps and regulatory barriers to mobility.

Ideological reincarnation: from red to rainbow

...cont

The left have always been control freaks.
They have no concept of personal responsibility.
They only want the safety and security of an all encompassing nanny state.
I suppose it means they don't have to think for themselves.
Thinking requires effort and the leftie is very low energy when it comes to extending himself.

Safety comfort and conformity are his wishlist.

It's why wild man donny is so feared by the left.

He triggers their desire for timid cowardly supplicating conformity .