Sunday 11 December 2011

The majority is always wrong


“Heavy fog in the Channel – Continent isolated”, so a headline in an unspecified newspaper at an unspecified time is alleged to have gone. True or not, it immediately came to mind when I read the reports that a mouse had roared; that David Cameron had said no to the latest scheme to shore up the crumbling euro. After surrendering so much over so many years we, as a nation, were finally fighting back.

Yes, he really did say no, exercising a British veto for the first time ever. We stand alone but we have, throughout our history, a proud tradition of standing alone against excitable French and German bullies. Personally I welcome the rediscovery of Splendid Isolation, a splendid policy for a splendid period in our national story.

This for me was a reverse Neville Chamberlain moment – there will be no appeasement, appeasement of the likes of France’s President Sarkozy, a man I find more laughable by the day, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s pig-like Chancellor.

Despite their differences the pair seem to blend into one another, the German woman and the French man, the pig and the frog - Merkozy, a monstrous synthesis that might very well have been tortured into existence on the Island of Doctor Moreau!

This is the Minotaur of the new European Union, a new Thousand Year Reich in the shaping, that looks set to end the forms of democracy and direct accountability that at least some on the Continent fought so hard to attain in the first place.

I’m going to come to this in a moment but first a few words on Cameron’s stand. It was all perfectly simple: he gave assurances to the government, his own party and the country beyond that he would not agree to a new European Union treaty that did not contain safeguards for Britain’s financial services industry.

This was hardly surprising, considering the amount of revenue the City of London generates for the Exchequer. But, no, Merkozy did not like this; the bumbling giant growled and slavered, whereupon David lifted his sling.

Now the other governments of the European Union, Britain apart, have to manage to form their ‘more perfect’ union in the best way that they can. All of them have agreed to a plan that that will allow for more centralised control of the tax and spending decisions of those countries that have the euro as their national currency, seventeen at the present. Why on earth those outside the euro have allowed themselves to be steamrollered into this is wholly beyond my comprehension.

Supposedly a way of introducing forms of fiscal discipline, the new arrangements effectively make a mockery of the last vestiges of national sovereignty. In future it really will not matter who the Greeks, the Poles or the Spanish vote for. The real decisions will be made in Brussels, not in Athens, or Warsaw or Madrid.

What irony there is in this; how strange it is to see history standing on its head. It makes a mockery of the Greek War of Independence, makes a mockery of that country’s struggle to re-establish itself after centuries of domination by the Ottoman Turks. And then there is Poland, a country served up as lunch time and again by the Germans and the Russians, a country that not so long ago freed itself from the one unrepresentative bloc only to cast itself into another, from Soviet Union to European Union. Democracy did not come easy to Spain, established by stages after the death of General Franco. It did not come easy but it’s going easy. At least Franco brought prosperity.

Setting the politics aside, the deal itself, another conjuring trick to reassure the financial markets, is little more than a promissory note – we will all be good girls and boys in the future. From the outset the euro was based on vanity, or the economics of the madhouse, I’m not sure which. It was based on the belief that it was possible to have monetary without fiscal union, that it was possible to bed down countries like Germany and Greece, the lion and the lamb, all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Now we are to have fiscal union, a European Super State. The horse may have bolted but at least we have shut the barn door at last, is that not something? Meanwhile the debt gets bigger and bigger.

As for Cameron, well, bravo, that’s all I want to say, other than to remind him of some words from Enemy of the People, the play by Henrik Ibsen, that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone, and that a minority may be right; a majority always wrong.

19 comments:

  1. 1600 years ago the ancestors of the French and Germans combined to challenge what was then the world's greatest empire; that empire ended up moving its capital from Rome to Turkey. The light of civilization was extinguished in the West and Europe descended into a Dark Age for 1000 years. Some Reich!

    Little more than 200 years ago, a French nut determined to unite Europe in a new empire and plunged half the world into destruction and chaos for 20 years. That insanity was followed by various German and French ambitions that ended in bloody failure until some 60 years ago they decided to pool their ambitions and change tactics from violent confrontation to slow, stealthy conspiracy. But does anyone really imagine the end result will be different?

    1600 years may seem a long time in historical terms, but in terms of human evolution it is an eye blink. Today's Franks and Gauls and Huns are pretty much identical to those of 50 generations ago, and their instinctive idea of how to organize and run a society is going to bear a strong resemblance to the patterns they have followed for a very long time. That may suit them very well, but is unlikely to appeal to those who belong to different traditions. Best to leave them to get on with it.

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  2. We are not a true Democracy we are a Republic, The power lies in the senate and the president is Caesar.

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  3. As much as I do like references to Hitler's Third Reich, do you not think it is a bit strong to succumb to Godwin's law? I despise the EU with every inch of my core, but I think we should ve wary of stooping to their level with fanciful analogies supposedly measuring up their evilness in discrete amounts.

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  4. Is it all about money Ana? I had hoped that David Cameron might be as impressed with retaining some value in our sovereignty. Then again perhaps this latest news is a well rehearsed EU script designed to take the heat away from a call for a UK referendum on the EU.Time will tell but I would prefer a leader who has the heart of his country in mind rather then just London's financial services.

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  5. Calvin, that's a brilliant assessment. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, I wish I had thought of that. (Whisper: "You will, Ana, you will) :-)

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  6. Anthony, yes, I agree. It's a point I've made myself, though comparing the office of president to that of an eighteenth century monarch. The cry of the Revolution should have been 'The king is dead; long live the king.'

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  7. Spitfire, is the Godwin thing not a reference to Hitler? The analogy here was really with the concept of the Reich, an Unholy Roman Empire. I do take your point, though, that it is often best to be discrete in these matters. In the past (on My Telegraph I defended the notion that the EU was a new Soviet Union, not because it is repressive in any way but because it is based on the same distant and unresponsive bureaucratic modes of government and administration.

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  8. Nobby, money is a beginning and sovereignty is the end. I might very well take the Churchillian view here - this is not the end; it's not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning. That's my hope.

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  9. Indeed, very well said Calvin.

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  10. Don't get me wrong I think the lot of them are completely f***ing deranged.

    But it is better to let them do the publicity screw-ups (which they are masters at by now) rather than us; the opposition who should always aspire to stand above the fray and act like statesmen. For the latter is very hard to attack since his or her skin is like teflon.

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  11. Yes, Spitfire, you are quite right.

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  12. The Germans and French argue that if the EU collapses they will have no alternative than to go to war with each other.

    This is blackmail. The continental European tendency for political extremes from Marxism to Fascism ought to be shunned by Britain. So should blackmail.

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  13. Nobby, yes, I've pointed out on previous occasions what rubbish this is.

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  14. Ana, Here is another interesting link and an excellent comment on the EU:


    "There have been no benefits of any kind in belonging to the EU. The EU exports more to the UK than we export to them. The balance of power in negotiating the rules from outside thus favours us. The foreign office likes being at the top table, but when it comes to it: Serbia or Libya, the EU is useless. The rest is just lies by professional liars who have since 1975 decieved the people into believing that the EU would concede a genuinely free market in Europe (and it still has not) before the liquidation of national democracies into a United States of Europe run by bureaucrats without reference to the people. The whole thing has been a fraud from the begining."



    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/8965907/What-are-the-benefits-of-staying-in-the-European-Union.html

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  15. Good one, Nobby. The more I learn about this fraud the angrier I get at Ted Heath, the snake oil salesman who sold it to the country. How this ghastly man ever became leader of the Conservative Party let alone Prime Minister is quite beyond me.

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  16. So we're not all in it together after all! I was quite taken by surprise at friends of mine who thought Cameron made the wrong decision. His decision was absolutely right and in the best interests of this country. One just has to look at the state of the Euro to know so, not to mention instability in Greece and Spain. Britain will manage.

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  17. If only Ted Heath had protected the fishing industry as well as David Cameron intends protecting the finanacial industry. It slightly astounds me the way people have been sucked into the religious doctrine of how vital the EU is for us all (after all look ar poor Norway and Switzerland!)

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  18. Mike, I know, it drives me crazy, particularly the bias of the BBC.

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