One of the most unconsciously significant giveaways of the last three years has been the emergence of the word ‘mistakes’ in Brussels Orwellspeak about democratic votes, national elections, and political compromise in the EU. As far back as the Lisbon Treaty, the word was beginning to enter into the dead language of bureaucratic mendacity (I think it was uttered first by the cerebrally obese former Communist José Manuel Barroso) in relation to any citizen rejection of EU policy. After a series of ‘mistakes’, you probably noticed that the EU discouraged any voting suggested by its member States, and eventually Wolfie Schäuble became rather more active in telling Greece (once via Merkel and Sarkozy and then once alone) they couldn’t have any elections at all until he gave the word.
Since that time, there has been no prospect anywhere on the horizon of Brussels ever again asking any citizen a question about stuff, beyond “What are you complaining about, don’t you understand anything?” The epidemiology of this two-step-to-goose-step virus is becoming obvious both inside and outside the EU. Because Britain has no conventional mechanism for triggering referendums, we now have the farcical situation of a Government (in power on the basis of just 38.47% of the eligible electorate) rejecting the desire of 51% of the People to ‘definitely or probably want to get out’ of the European Union. Knowing perfectly well that the europhiles would lose any reasonably framed plebiscite on this issue, David Cameron chooses instead to renegotiate the UK’s relationship with a Union (a) whose currency we don’t share (b) whose fisco-economic policies could best be described as a masochistically painful sort of kamikaze, and (c) whose output and exports are flatlining outside of Germany.
The problem faced by most of we sad old naifs on the liberty/democracy/empiricism axis is that, without doubt, the politicians of the West are indeed making so many mistakes, ironically even the ESN Nazis in Belgium could put together a decent case for the end of politics.
In the US recently, as the ceiling fell in on the fiscal cliff waltz, Senate majority leader Harry Reid publicly accused House Speaker Boehner of running a dictatorship that was putting his own political prestige before the signing of a deal. There was also, of course, the disappointment among those with some degree of economic literacy re the hype and pointless posturing about an arbitrary budget hugely dwarfed by the size of (and deterioration in) America’s debt mountain.
So in that context, it was something of a letdown when their next exchange consisted of “Go f**k yourself,” from Boehner to Reid, followed by Reid’s response – “What are you talking about?” – and Boehner’s witty riposte, “Go f**k yourself.” Here was a mile-long line of newly-washed dirty underwear where the detergent clearly hadn’t had any effect, but legislator concern about it was being expressed in the form of obscenity, bewilderment, and unimaginative repetition.
In the UK meanwhile, we had a New Year message from Prime Minister David Cameron, the gist of which was an assurance that, thanks to what his Government had “done”, Britain could now look to the future with confidence. This was hard to take in the light of a hamfisted austerity drive aimed (like the US fiscal-cliff deal) at solving roughly 3.7% of the problem, but yesterday Dave dipped his Happy Feet further into the ice-cold water of Lake Eerily Contradictory by writing – in a letter to fellow G8 leaders marking the start of the UK’s presidency of the group – that it was ‘clear the world would continue to face grave economic uncertainty in 2013’.
Britain’s PM asked for ‘bold action to drive economic growth across the world by advancing free trade, ensuring tax compliance and promoting greater transparency’, adding that ‘to achieve this will require strong political leadership and months of detailed policy work ….What we are talking about are long-term changes in our countries and the rules that govern the relationships between them’. It was the kind of content-free bollocks to make “Go f**k yourself” look like an insight of awesome originality.
Now these are all very obvious, bigtime mistakes; but the balance is more than restored by realising that the financial technocrat Snafus are as much in evidence as ever. As Bloomberg reports, efforts to stabilise global investment banking have been stymied not just by Wall Street psychos and the headlight-gripped, half-baked rules of the pols, but also by the conflicting bullsh*t drafted by lawyers, and the divergent accounting standards suggested by bean boys. All of the professions involved in this oxymoronic anarchy of rules seem to be eternally incapable of understanding that any system will work well or badly depending on whether it’s Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde out there ‘cooperating’ with it.
The ‘professional’ group currently facing yet another ill-thought-out rulebook is the British media set. The UK’s Daily Express today ran a front page headline, ‘At last a boom for Britain to look forward to’. I’m sure that in April 1945, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter ran scoops about massed battalions of Aryan avenger clones driving back the Russian barbarians. I am here to tell you that the imaginary Aryans of 67 years ago are more real than the Express boom heading our way, unless you define ‘boom’ as the sound of Britain’s banking system being blown away by debt. But media proprietors today fly far above the Law….and are vital to the maintenance of 3D bollocks.
The bottom line is that – as long as lightweight politicians, scheming globalists, autistic accountants and sociopathic lawyers are cooperating with Establishment media to deliver a version of Truth using heavily smoked and distorted mirrors – the mistakes will keep on coming. More to the point (from my perspective) those making the mistakes will continue to blame the pythonically squeezed citizens of every sovereign State on the planet for their ‘mistakes’ in voting for this, that or any other thing. They will stop allowing them to make mistakes: this in turn will stop the Governments from getting vital citizen feedback…..and thus enable them never to make mistakes again.
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn satirised this essentially USSR view of the world in his short double-novella We Never Make Mistakes. The reality is that we only learn from our mistakes: we can choose to ignore the mistakes if we are stupid – or to declare that we have banished mistakes to history if we are mad. But to see democratic voting as a mistake from the past to be eradicated goes way beyond any fantasy ever imagined by Gordon Brown, Herman van Rompuy, Angela Merkel, Mario Draghi or Josef Stalin.
Related: the architects of the EUSSR – stupid or cunning?
The Slog 