My Log 518 June 28 2016
Perfidious
Albion in full view as it manoeuvres to take the good and reject what it doesn’t
like: brilliant article by Dutch journalist welcomes the Brexit
Well, here
we are, bereft under the blizzard of political change that has overcome that
part of the world we had become accustomed to thinking of as stable. Donald Trump,
a megalomaniac millionaire apparently without a serious political thought in his
head, is contending to become United States President. And Boris Johnson,
recently described, with a fair degree of accuracy, as “a clown”, is apparently
in line to become Britain’s next Prime Minister. Will wonders never cease?
It now appears that the campaign to have
Britain leave the European Union was mendacious in the extreme. But that does
not appear to have been the main reason for this surprising decision.
An excellent article published in the last few
days in The Guardian by a man who
last month completed a 340 mile walk from Liverpool to London, said that after
what he had seen en route, the result of the referendum did not surprise him at
all. He said that the political policies of Margaret Thatcher had virtually
wiped out most of the towns he passed through, whose main streets remain
boarded up, shattered and destroyed, the only enterprise having shifted to
giant box stores on the peripheries of what once were thriving English
towns. Everyone he asked how they would
vote told him, “Out.” And the invariable reason was “immigration.” These people,
chronically out of work, complained that foreigners had come among them,
willing and able to take lower pay to do the jobs they themselves once held. It
was as simple as that.
This reporter was apparently the son of a man
who had followed the same route as part of a 1981 march of miners in protest
against Thatcher’s policies, which eventually closed not only the mines, but
also much of the industry that supported them.
What seems to be the sad result of the
referendum is that the Brexit side was not led by a socially-conscious group of
reformers with a plan to change these worst aspects of British decline, but by
an air-headed group, the worst of the British Tories (and believe me, they can
be bad!) who apparently have no plan for future reform in any direction. This
suggests that Britain’s future could be parlous.
I heard Alex Salmond, past leader of the Scottish
National Party, in an illuminating discussion with the rivetting RT interviewer
Sophie Shevardnadze, claim that the only British politician who was keeping her
head, not making extravagant promises, and appeared to have a clear path to the
future was Nicola Sturgeon, who has already put into play the mechanism for a Scottish
referendum to support the overwhelming support given by the Scots to remaining
within Europe. Thus the very real
possibility for the destruction of the United Kingdom already is looming on the
horizon.
On a more cheerful note is an article in today’s
Guardian --- I don’t want anyone to
get the impression that I any longer regard The
Guardian as a really responsible newspaper, not after the recent scandalous
bias in their coverage of the US candidacy of Bernie Sanders, or their root-and-branch
propaganda for the Remain solution to the British referendum, but they still
do print the odd informative article ---
an article written by Joris Luyendijk, a
thoughtful and experienced Dutch journalist who has lived and work across much
of the world, to the effect that the Brexit is a wonderful piece of news for Europe.
His reasoning for this must make hard reading
for any Englishman who is proud of his country. For the way Luyendijk sees it,
Britain has never wanted to be a full member of the European Union, has always
insisted on exceptions, and even the Remain side agued that continued
membership would be the best way to ensure that all this foolish nonsense about
creating a Europe of shared sovereignty could be nipped in the bud and brought
to a halt. Thus, Luyendijk argues, a
European Union that drastically needs to be reformed along democratic lines,
would forever be denied that opportunity if Britain were present, ready, able
and willing to veto any changes that did not suit them.
He does not mince words in his argument:
“For decades British governments have played a double game:
getting all the benefits of EU membership while opting out of its burdens, in
the meantime undermining and even blackmailing the club from within. All of
this is now over….. Had
Remain won the referendum, the EU would have become hostage to British
sabotage. Future British prime ministers would veto any fundamental change
involving the transfer of sovereignty, arguing, correctly, that their people
had voted only for the current set-up of the EU. Britain would continue to
demand ever more opt-outs and concessions – playing to the fantasy that
membership is a British favour to the rest of Europe.
The British press and Europhobe politicians would go on portraying the EU in
the most lurid, mendacious and derisory terms, making us look terrible in the
eyes of Americans and English-speaking Asians, Africans and Russians.
“As the referendum debate has shown, the country
has not come to terms with its own global irrelevance – hence its refusal to
pool sovereignty. It continues to believe that as a sovereign nation it can get
everything it had as an EU member, and more. When Europe’s democrats talk about
‘EU reform’ they mean putting arrangements in place to make Europe’s pooling of
sovereignty democratic. Britons mean the rollback of that very pooling of
sovereignty. For this reason, Britain’s membership would have hit a wall sooner
or later.”
Although
Ludendijk does not mention him, this brings to mind Yanis Varoufakis, who quit
the Syriza party in Greece rather than surrender to the blackmail of the
European money powers, and formed his oddly-named DiEM25 movement to bring
about “radical democracy” in Europe, working, he insists, from within
Europe. Ludendijk seems to share this
view of the future, one which he says should be much easier to bring about if
only Britain would withdraw from the community. It is not without interest to
remark that various actors in Europe so distrust British honesty that one
official said he would be surprised if Article 50 that has to be activated by
any nation wishing to withdraw, will ever be activated.
Already the European leaders are warning
Britain against what seem to be their nefarious tricks, their wish for endless
delays. No negotiation can be a matter
for cherry-picking, says Mrs. Merkel, with Britain getting what is favorable
and rejecting what is unfavorable. Similarly the European leaders have unhesitatingly
rejected the idea floated by Boris Johnson that Britain might become an
associate member while rejecting the free movement of people, one of the four
pillars of he EU value-system. Norway is
an associate member, but that is a status granted only on condition that they
accept the free movement of EU citizens into their country.
Clearly these coming years are going to be full
of interest as Europe, founded as a bulwark against the internecine warfare
that has dogged the continent since time immemorial, struggles to create a
functioning, democratic and successful nation able to exist and compete with
any nation on earth.
They seem to be fully aware already of the reputation
and dangers posed by perfidious Albion.
I was working as a journalist in London when Harold Macmillan’s
government first applied to join the EEC, and as a guy who had never lived
anywhere but in what was once the British Empire, then became the British Commonwealth,
and then morphed into simply the Commonwealth, I was staggered at the naked
effrontery of perfidious Albion, ready
to cast aside as if by magic, all those countries that had supported its wars
for generations with tens of thousands of butchered young men, and all because
they suddenly realized they could make more money by trading within Europe than
in the Commonwealth.
These are going to be very interesting times.
