HERE IS A LIST OF SURNAMES to ponder over, Heseltine,
Clarke, Howe, Kinnock, Blair, Mandelson and Clegg - there are more than enough
others to fill this page. But these seven are the main culprits; these are the
people who supported the single currency; and if you ask them if they continue
to believe in this EU alchemy that was meant to bring about a federal Europe,
they, like Marxists, will tell you that they still believe in the experiment;
and like Marxists, orchestrating the great historical dialectic, will say a
federal union is historically inevitable.
Gordon
Brown may have fucked things up good and proper; but he proved himself sane
when many thought otherwise, by keeping the UK out of the single currency. Much
can be forgiven of Brown for this single act of deliverance from the euro.
But our
seven will die believing they were right. Three of them, Kinnock, Mandelson,
and Clegg have enjoyed the financial generosity of the EU payroll. Both Kinnock
and Mandelson have served as EU commissioners (or cardinals as I refer to the
Commission); while Clegg had to do with a less august role as a mere European
Member of Parliament, but was nevertheless enticed by the dystopian vision of a
Federal Union.
Of
these three it is Kinnock who has the public sector to thank for his generous
retirement. He has lived of the public tit since leaving university (like many
professional politicians today). Kinnock may have worked in the private sector
at some time or other, but I cannot find an example outside of maybe, as a
student? He went into parliament representing a safe Labour constituency on an
income far in excess of what many of his constituents earned.
He
became leader of the Labour Party and served between 1983 and 1992 and earned
an increase in his salary as leader of her majesty's opposition. His nine years
as leader of the parliamentary opposition was for much of the time riddled with
embarrassment that no doubt helped extended the life of Thatcherism.
When he
left office, Tony Blair, his successor, named him as his choice as an EU
commissioner (he was awarded passage in the first class compartment of the
European gravy train); eventually reaching the dizzy heights of vice chairman
of the commission. According to the Daily
Mail he and his wife accumulated from the public tit a total £10 million
from their experiences in Europe (his wife became an MEP). Today Kinnock is a
Lord, a status which he once despised, but carries the offer of a daily £400
clocking in fee.
AS FOR HESELTINE and Clarke – well Heseltine to his credit
was a self-made man, with a self- accumulated wealth from publishing. But both
he and Clarke were part of the Conservative genealogy that Margaret Thatcher
described as wet. They remain to this day Disraeli One Nation Tories. Their love
of the European Union is unbounded and remains so even after the ship has been holed
– just, in fact, like the believers in socialism, which neither of them rightly
considered workable.
Clarke is immovable if he gets his teeth stuck into an unworkable idea that he believes in, especially when it comes to Europe. But if it is an idea he thinks at all practicable according to his own ideal, then he will, like a dog tugging on a squeaky toy, refuse to let go. Clarke is an obstinate politician who, if he believed the world to be cubed shape, despite all evidence to the contrary, would try to persuade us that the cube rather than the spherical represented the true composition of our planet.
Clarke cannot face up to the possibility that he may be wrong. As for Mandelson, he has been outrageously blatant about the European project. For instance he has already admitted that Tony Blair went out of his way to support the inflow from Eastern Europeans into the UK under part of the terms of the Lisbon Treaty (signed in 2007) which he need not to have allowed to enter under European law until 2014[1].
NEVER HAS a country been so ill served by its leaders as the
UK has when it comes to the EU. The great project that was meant to create an
Untied States of Europe is a conceit of a special order. We (or rather our post-war
leaders) bought into this potage of a European Empire, which is what federalism
amounts to.
That
appalling prime ministerial agent of all things European, Ted Heath, would have
sold his very soul to the devil if Satan could have delivered the UK once and
for all into the embrace of Europe; and Heath's hatred of Margaret Thatcher emerged
the moment she took office and stood up to the EU.
On
Europe, Heath, after he left office and sat sulking on the back benches never
missed an opportunity to try and catch the Speaker's eye in order to embarrass
his party leader and prime minister. He was joined in his ambition by Heseltine,
Clarke, and Howe. The latter, at his wife's insistence delivered the coup de
grace with a cricketing analogy, of all things.
The
European Union is a flawed concept that its proponents insisted upon to prevent
wars on the European continent between nation states that had plagued the
continent for centuries culminating in the Second World War. The idea that an
EU would end military conflict on the continent has often been used by
Europhiles as proof of the peace in Europe for the past 70 years; when
everybody knows that the peace has been kept by NATO, and more importantly by the
American contribution to it…especially during the Cold War.
THE EUROPEAN PROJECT needs to be brought to an end to be
replaced by free trade agreements between nation states, and where national
self interest applies, then allegiances can evolve. This is what happens in the
rest of the world and it should apply to Europe: and for those who believe it
could be a return to the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) or the Second World War
- then forget it.
It is
more likely that the EU will bring about the very conflict that the EU sought
to end. For example let us take Greece and Germany. The German taxpayer has
paid a large amount to the Greek economy to keep it solvent; but has demanded
in return a punishing austerity – this is the quid pro co. This has ignited old
antipathies by Greece whose experience of German hospitality during the Second
World War have been reignited – is this the peace the EU was meant to bring to
the continent? With Germany orchestrating all economic developments within the
Union; then there is plenty more opportunity for such historical ambivalence toward
Germany to emerge on the continent if, like Greece other southern European
countries, find themselves in Greece's position.
[1] My
brother's conspiracy theory is that Mr Blair was pussy whipped by Mrs Blair into
allowing open borders seven years before it was necessary to do so. His wife is
a Catholic, and he has been recruited to the same faith (by whom I leave to you
to judge). My brother's theory goes thus: by allowing in hundreds of thousands
of Catholic Poles, they would increase the Catholic congregations throughout
the country, while the Anglican congregations were in a steady decline; what
with high church Anglicans going over to Rome because of the emergence of the
women priesthood and bishop-hood. Thus the Catholic church would eventually
replace the Anglican church in terms of numbers, and become the official faith
of England – and Cherie Blair would be granted another audience with the Pope to
be promised beatification for her good works after death – well that is the
theory and the more I (an atheist) consider it, the more I am drawn to it.
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