Spain
and British politics: The
Spanish are reported to be unhappy about the negotiations just
ended[?]. See here. One thing they object to is the UK's ”lack of
solidarity”. But what this word usually means here is continuation
of the EU subsidies that flow to Spain. And anything that threatens
these is inevitably unpopular.
The
Immigrant Tide:
Most Brits seem
to think there are too many of these. And that the problem arises
because the UK is just too damned attractive. Firstly, because the
economy is growing; secondly because benefits are generous; and
thirdly because they speak English there. In which case, why don't we
hear of people heading for the Netherlands in even larger numbers?
All 3 factors apply and at least 2 of them are better there. Possibly
all 3. Is it because the cunning Dutch hide their light under a
bushel? Well, no. It turns out they do
have a big problem – see here – but it doesn't make the British
or Spanish media. One Dutch friend – who's usually right - cites
massive divisions, plenty of violence and the rise of far-right
political parties. I just didn't notice any of this when I was there
recently.
Britain
and the EU: If this
interests you, there are two eurosceptic articles and one pro-EU
article at the end of this post. All come from the behind the paywall
of The Times, which is
why I can't just link to them. What you might call the Major and Minor views. Or the Top down and Bottom up views. Or even the Wide and Narrow views. Only the other way round. It's impossible, of course, to choose between them on the basis of indisputable facts. One's personal decision will be visceral - involving not just the brain but also the heart and the gut. As all major decisions are. Choosing between evils.
Ms
Harper Lee: I wonder if
I'm the only person in the world who hasn't read and enjoyed To
Kill a Mocking Bird. I say that
but I really mean I can't recall reading it. But, then, since I can't
remember whatever I read yesterday - and have never been able to do
so – I may well have read it in fact.
Nice
Quotation: Life
is too short and too crowded to let oneself be distracted into
trivia. List your priorities and stick to them. Reject all else. Set
your face against the sloth which threatens to overtake and misdirect
you. Plan and execute your private life as you would your business
life. That's easy for you to
say, whoever you are or were.
Persian
Poetry: Andrew Marr has
recently published a wonderful book on British poetry through the ages.
The earliest bits are in Old English. So good luck in trying to
understand them. In contrast, Persian speakers can easily understand
poetry written a thousand years ago. And, thanks to a BBC podcast
[What did I do before these came along?], I've learnt of Rumi,
considered one of the greatest poets writing in Persian. Click here
for info on him and his works. For which there are, of course,
translations on-line. Strangely, he's been – and maybe still is –
very popular in the USA.
Finally
. . . You may not be aware it's been scientifically established that
the secret to happiness is vanilla
yoghurt. Or yo-ghurt, as
out American cousins call it. If you find this hard to believe, have
a listen to this BBC podcast from the excellent Adam Gopnick. I
venture to guess you'll be convinced. Even if you aren't, you'll get
an answer to the question of why people have found the Mona Lisa
beautiful, when I certainly don't.
THE BREXIT: CON & PRO
EU
Referendum: papering over the lies
So,
Mr
Cameron says
he has secured a "special status" for Britain within a
reformed EU. He has done no such thing. His deal pretends to be
legally biding but it is not.
He
has cobbled together a pretend treaty combining a mish-mash of
aspirations and political declarations, with no legal force
whatsoever. Those parts which promise substantive change are
dependent on treaty change at some unspecified point in the future,
with no guarantees that they can be delivered.
Thus,
the claim to have opted out of "ever closer union" - the
federalist ratchet at the heart of the 28-country project – can
have no legal effect until this future new treaty is in place.
Likewise, the supposed safeguards on the eurozone are entirely
dependent on this mythical treaty. They rest on clauses yet to be
written by future leaders, which then have to be agreed and ratified
by all 28-member states – and any others that may have joined in
the interim.
The
supposed "emergency brake" on welfare benefits is the
ultimate confidence trick. Mr Cameron and the heads of state have
simply re-cooked a 22-year-old provision written in the European
Economic Area Agreement, fiddling with minor provisions in existing
EU law which now need European Parliament approval and which can be
overturned at a drop of a hat.
The
"red card" is nothing but a hollow joke. It only applies to
a fraction of the EU law book and can only be evoked on such narrow
technical grounds, that even former Foreign Secretary William Hague
joked that if the Commission proposed to slaughter the first-born, we
would not be able to stop it.
Britain
is still in just as much danger of being dragged along in the
slipstream of the Continent's headlong rush to the formation of a new
state that will crush what is left of our freedom and democracy.
Having offered a new treaty in his 2013 Bloomberg speech, in which he
first promised a referendum, and then promised a "full-on"
treaty change, Mr Cameron has come back from Brussels with a pretend
treaty which amounts to a fraud on the British people.
What
this amounts to is the Prime Minister trying to cover up the brutal
truth that he has made a promise which he can' t deliver. When he
called for EU treaty change in 2013 during his Bloomberg speech, he
had assumed (wrongly) that a new treaty was imminent. In fact, this
had been proposed by Angela Merkel has already, the previous autumn,
put it on hold.
Unaware
of this, Mr Cameron thought he could go to Brussels and emulate the
actions of his heroine, Margaret Thatcher, and "handbag"
his way though the summit, demanding changes to existing treaties in
exchange for approving much needed powers to manage the eurozone.
It
was against that timetable that the then opposition leader set the
timetable for the end of 2017 but, even by the time of his election
victory in May of last year, it was already apparent that there could
be no formal treat in the time set. Mr Cameron was already doomed. He
was tied to a promise he could not deliver.
Since
then, we have seen the dance of the seven veils, as the Prime
Minister has sought to conceal from the British public this brutal
truth, culminating in last Friday's charade when he pretended to have
negotiated a "special status" which isn't worth the paper
it's printed on.
Mr
Cameron may have in his mind’s eye the image of Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich in 1938, triumphantly
waving his "piece of paper" at Heston Airport (where the M4
service station now stands), but at least Mr Chamberlain’s "deal"
bought us critical time, allowing us to re-arm sufficiently against
the Nazi menace.
But
this piece of paper is nothing but a fraud – a pretence. This Prime
Minister has brought nothing back, nothing of substance, and is now
intent on using is as the basis for a referendum where he is intent
on selling his snake-oil "special status".
Yet,
all the time, Mr Cameron's efforts have been a sideshow besides the
main event – the real renegotiation under way to transform the 19
members of the Eurozone into a single state. That is the EU real
agenda not the stage-managed drama of the Prime Minister emerging
blinking into the light and announcing he has secured our future for
a generation.
Nor
should we assume that the Brussels barons will treat us kindly if we
vote to remain in the EU. They will brush aside future British
protests, telling us that we have had our chance to do things our way
and rejected it. Our prospects sitting uneasily on the margins of the
emerging superstate will not be promising. Unloved, ignored and
marginalised, we face an uncertain, even risky future, on the
outskirts of the new European empire.
This
is why, on 23 June, we have to vote to leave the EU. To buy into Mr
Cameron's pretence is to give him and successive politicians a
license to lie. If as a people, we accept this garbage, we will take
anything – and deserve what we get.
EU
Referendum: a gap in the market
Once
or twice, I may have mentioned the need for an
exit plan.
And now, from the Prime Minister's statement announcing the date of
the referendum, we have another
good illustration
of why one was needed.
When
Mr Cameron announced that we would have referendum in May last year,
after his general election victory, Flexcit
was ready.
If the leave campaigns had adopted it, and promoted it, we would not
now be having a prime minister saying that leaving the EU was "a
leap in the dark".
Nine
months later, we are still no further forward in agreeing a coherent
exit plan. Instead, we have an incoherent babble from the eurosceptic
"aristocracy", while the fool Cummings is seriously
proposing
we start by repealing
Section 2 of the European Communities Act.
The
stupidity of this has been
explored
by Pete, who has also
ventured
that the lack of a coherent exit plan "is why we will likely
lose the referendum".
I
believe he is right. We have wasted too many months. When we could
have been locking a plan into the consciousness of the public,
reassuring them that leaving the EU is a safe and credible option, we
have been frittering away precious time, time that we no longer have.
Had
the Prime Minister chosen to go long, as I constantly, predicted, we
might have had time to catch up. But my suspicion is that the lack of
coherence in the leave side was one of the reasons why he chose to go
early.
Now,
despite his campaign being built on a foundation of lies, he must be
confident that the inability of the "big leaves" to come up
with a coherent plan outweighs his obvious handicap. He is stressing
that to remain in the EU is the "safe" choice, and there is
nothing lodged in the public mind to counter that.
Having
given the Prime Minister a head start and, in my view, left it too
late, in the high-noise environment of the next four months, there
will be insufficient time to recover from this unforced error.
However,
the deed is done – or undone. We have laid down a marker, to which
we will return in due course. For now, we have to fight with what we
have, and for the next four months that's what this blog will be
doing. After that, there will be plenty of time for the reckoning
that must then come.
Brexit would mean that we don’t give a damn
A breakaway would seriously damage Europe. The West are the good guys, after all, the torchbearers of civilisation.
It is possible these eleventh-hour shenanigans in Brussels really are make or break. It’s possible they’re phoney, scripted to inject theatre into an already done deal. Frighteningly, it’s also possible that what was meant to be scripted has taken on a life of its own. Michael Gove may be forgiven for his decision but he will not be forgiven for the timing.
Soon enough the referendum campaign may be under way. Already, commentators seem agreed about what sort of campaign it will be. But I wonder. “When the shoeshine boy says ‘buy’,” a Wall Street zillionaire once warned, “sell”. If an opinion begins to feel like a cliché, it may time to think again.
Project Fear has become that cliché: whichever side can scare the voters most, wins. “Waverers,” says the shoeshine boy, “will never believe life will be better if we stay. Only fear that it will be worse if we leave can move them now.” I’ve argued this. Britain will never love the EU, and economic doubt will prove the Stay campaign’s most powerful recruiting sergeant. I’d despair of making “the positive case for Europe” with any passion.
But I wonder whether the trading of rival economic scare stories may be approaching its natural limit. This contest will never be clinched by arithmetic.
Each side can bandy figures and each can bandy rebuttals and there is no white-bearded Economist-in-the-Sky to adjudicate. Among the undecided, exasperation with the cost/benefit trench war is already surfacing.
Enter the Positive Case for Europe? Not quite. But in place of Project Fear, how about Project Care? We might pause to remind ourselves of some of the big things European unity does for the West as a whole. We might give a thought to the impact British withdrawal would have on this. Not just “What’s in it for us?” but “What would our departure do to Europe and the world?” This is a dangerous time in world history. Is a united Europe helpful to the West — and, if so, should Britain wreck it?
Setting aside, then, the bean-counting and migrant-counting that dominate the news as David Cameron brings home the bacon (or doesn’t), we should ask whether it’s only about the bacon. Is the EU good for Europe as a continent? We should care about that.
Europhiles cite a clutch of areas where co-operation makes practical sense. But I have something much bigger in mind: as important to our survival as it is cloudy and imprecise. The impact on 21st-century history of a major fracture within Europe is impossible to calculate, but I believe it would reverberate through this century. Could it be that, after all the crying wolf, this really is about the future of western civilisation?
Britain’s exit would rock the West to its foundations. And I do mean the West, to which we may add Japan and Australia; not just Europe and the Americas. An irony about both the Leave and the Stay cases as popularly presented here is that both have implicitly demeaned our own country’s importance. The Stay campaign has dwelt on the goodies the EU showers on us. The Leave campaign has preferred an underdog whine about the horrible things “Europe” does to us. One side thinks we should be grateful, the other reproachful. Either way, Britain is cast as supplicant.
But how about the other way round? We are Europe’s second-largest economy and the fifth largest economy in the world. We are Europe’s biggest defence power and the fifth biggest in the world. We’re the second most powerful (after America) member of Nato. We occupy one of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council.
If cited at all, we hear these facts cited as evidence that Britain could go it alone — and who can doubt it? But carrying the weight we do, what would our storming out of the West’s most important concert of nations do the West? A great wound would be inflicted to the clout that the continent of Europe carries, to the self-belief of European civilisation and to the image of Europe in the world.
British Europhobes, who set much store by our friendship with the Americans, should ask how Washington would see a major fracture within democratic Europe. They set much store by our friendship with the old (white) Commonwealth. They should ask Canada, New Zealand and Australia how those nations would greet the cracking up of Europe.
Use your imagination. Picture an inevitably angry and bitter British exit. Ask how Islamic State would broadcast this new example of disunity within the West. Would jihadists take fright — or heart — that European nations were dividing? Ask yourself how Putin and the Kremlin would view the news. Imagine the glee. Do you envisage apprehension in Beijing, now that they would be dealing with a disunited Europe?
For all its squabbles, for all its bureaucracy, its somnolence and its clodhopping complacency, there is such a thing as European civilisation and there is such a thing as the West. We are the good guys; we are the believers in democratic values; we are the torchbearers of the age of reason. We are on the side of light. Whether or not, postwar, we did best to clothe our fellowship in the machinery of a political association, the machine has become a fact and we have become part of the fact.
Our breakaway would be a collapse for the whole. It would carry profound implications for more than the balance of power in the world: but for the battle of ideas and values, too: a battle which is turning critical, and for which the century ahead looks ever more likely to form the stage.
With or without us the future of the European Union looks fragile. Without us I’d predict disintegration. France is no longer a counterbalance to Germany; Italy struggles; Spain is still finding its democratic feet. With Britain’s great weight removed the centre of gravity of the whole lurches. Germany, whose besetting sins are over-confidence and clumsiness, would finally topple the whole. And history would be right to cast Britain as accomplice to the wreck.
Quitting now would be an abdication of responsibility. We should care about that. There aren’t enough people in today’s world trying to get on with each other. Let’s stick with those that are. In the coming 18 weeks I would not despair of getting this argument across. Even to the shoeshine boy.
A modification by my friend Eamon in La Coruña. The obvious error is that the 'Spanish nun' is too tall. |
No comments:
Post a Comment