Wednesday, July 8, 2015

The single currency must die – but it will not be allowed to.

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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