What exactly should we be Brexiting from?
This ‘EU referendum’ is about The Munnneeee. It should’t be: it should be about independence, morality, getting out from under the bullies, and dramatically downsizing the concept of ‘community’.
When it was the European Community, as a long-time traveller throughout Europe I was all for it. What was not to like? Portuguese community, French scenery, Greek empathy, Italian food: we would all play to our strengths, become a world-beating exhibition of cultures, and use this to raise our standards.
Well, that was 1975. The term geopolitics hadn’t been invented. We’d just given Nixon the bum’s rush. Britain was a dull, grey place full of old ideas. The future would be better.
Forty years on, I’m afar and asunder, and much older. Ironically, the community that became a Union is more divided and sclerotic than ever. The ‘United’ States has never been so disunited. The World has gone global, but religion and Mammonesque mercantilism have created over thirty centres of economic, cultural, political and ideological tension. The future has arrived, and it is just awful.
But one can’t blame all of this on the EU – far from it. It is the EU’s desire to join the madness that dictates the necessity for Britain to leave it.
The Dark Knights of Camerlot do not see it that way, of course. Seemingly rebellious, they’ve merely been cornered by the British People and forced to go through the motions of renegotiation. Camerlot-sur-Bullingdon is doomed if we actually do vote to leave the EU.
The Left thinks that if we do Brexit, however, we’ll wind up with Borisconia or something equally unpleasant. I have a lot of sympathy with that view. And that’s why tonight I want to pose a question that’s been in the wings of this Whitehall referendum farce, but now needs to be given some lines of its own: what should the UK be Brexiting from?
If you’re not as yet getting my drift, here are eight bullet points of clarification:
- From Day One, a United Europe was the American ideal for keeping the USSR in its place. So much has emerged to illustrate that in recent years – via memoirs, Wikileaks, exposés and so on – it’s now as close as one ever gets to an indisputable fact. The Marshall Plan was about turning a bankrupt Europe into a powerful bulwark. The outrageous forgiveness of German debt was about giving the DDR a prosperous neighbour covered in US military sites and missile silos. NATO was about (literally) getting the Free West to help actively in the policing of a World based on mutually assured destruction. (I’m not, by the way, depicting the old USSR as the innocent party: released KGB files following the Soviet collapse showed that the Red Army and its more hardline top brass were just as mad as the Pentagon).
- Although they’re good at hiding it, the American élite wants the UK in the tent pissing out because it does think we’re a reliable ally. They’re not wrong: but it’s a fine line between loyal ally and dependent pet.
- When the referendum date was declared, a diplomatic source in New York told me, “You’re going to vote to stay in the EU”. Probably, I agreed. “No” the source said, “You don’t get it: the result will be for you to stay”. Draw your own conclusions on that one: but if you think State, Washington and the Pentagon wouldn’t bend an election result to suit themselves, then I hope you’ll be very happy during your retirement on the 5th moon of Jupiter.
- Barack Obama arrived in Britain a week ago, and virtually said, “Leave the EU, and we will cut you adrift”. It’s an odd way to expresss a Special Relationship.
- From the moment the Referendum campaign started, Bloomberg – a globally influential B2B news network – has been running a non-stop torrent of Brexit scare stories, in which lots of “expert” talking heads appear several times a day to assert that the corporate world sees the prospect of Brexit as a disaster. Here’s a clue as to why that is the case:
- I have been told five times by European contacts that the EC and Schäuble’s pet Rottweiler the eurogroupe are pouring money into PR condemning the idea of Brexit….none of which mentions the obvious truth: as Britain has a massive (and growing) trade deficit with the EU, they need us far more than we need them.
- The use of Treasury money to further a political cause has rarely been more flagrant than the All Homes mailer sent out by the Remain Camp at a cost estimated to have been in the region of £9m.
- Despite Kate Hoey’s typically brilliant summary of the Big Issue in this referendum – “it’s the People versus the Establishment” – her own Party clings to a belief in the Power for Good demonstrated by a Union where all the governmental, economic and fiscal power lies within a tiny unelected clique of bubble-dwellers.
On June 23rd 2016, we will be asked to vote on whether to remain in the European Union or leave it. But the totality of Brexit we need is from an all-embracing, materialist planetary ideology.
I see Brexit from the EU as merely the first step. After that, Britain – and let’s face it, we’re really talking England and Wales here – needs to exit from:
- The Special Relationship, TTIP and everything else associated with the megalomania of the self-styled US élite
- Camerlot, Corbynania and every other element of petrified ideology destroying our ability to think creatively about what UK citizens really want
- The corrupt control of Whiteminster over our lives, tipping the power balance in favour of community devolution and citizen power.
I doubt very much if all this will happen before I die; but then, we are all at times frozen by the deadly thought, “There is so much to do, I don’t know where to start…so I won’t”.
So that’s where I’m coming from: I prefer Benthamite mutualism to globalist serfdom. I’m funny that way.
The West vilifies Hungary’s leader Viktor Orban for thinking like this. Alexis Tsipras is incapable of grasping communitarianism, and the importance of scale in social anthropology. You have to applaud Nigel Farage’s grit in the face of adversity, but he’s not the man to take us on to a genuinely new model.
The English, Greek and Hungarian peoples nevertheless have the potential to be in the vanguard of those asking the question that must not be asked: do you want to be a colony, or a country of communities?
The Slog 