February 21st, 2016. A new world dawns. Hopefully.
David Cameron has been off on a series of jollies to visit the presidents and prime ministers of the other 27 states (I’m reluctant to call them countries – reasoning later) of the European Union, in order to try and persuade them that their citizens are second class and don’t deserve the sort of benefits to which we assume ourselves to be entitled, even if said second class citizens break their backs working in our fields to get them. After all, we have every right to leave our spuds in the ground, and we don’t want to have to look at eastern Europeans digging them up for us on £4 an hour. Anyway, it’s good to see Dave getting to grips with something the average voter appears to understand, viz. money to a Romanian spud digger is less fags for our own pond life as they study the prices of junk on another episode of daytime antiques-fest whilst hanging about in A&E waiting to complain.
Meanwhile, the argument for staying in that’s being put to the rest of us, who perhaps might be able to understand and analyse one, is that we’re ‘safer’ staying in, and, seriously, that we’re more likely to suffer Paris-style attacks if we’re out, or even that ‘Putin will be emboldened’ (to do what?). So the net effect of this is that half the population are worrying about where their next fag is coming from, and the other half about where the next bomb is coming from. Or maybe both, I don’t know. Dave knows that a terrified population will vote to stay. For Dave, there is no way out, because we’re already too deeply embroiled in the project.
So somebody’s getting this completely wrong. Dave meandered around the capitals of Europe, no doubt on expenses, and appears to have negotiated precisely nothing that is of any comfort to me whatsoever. My life, if we stay in the EU, will still be effectively controlled by a disparate assembly of bureaucrats whizzing backwards and forwards between Brussels and Strasbourg using my money to create regulations and laws which I will be obliged to accept on the basis that if it’s right for Croatia then it must be right for me. I have absolutely no discernable influence on the decisions these people will take, less in fact, than I am able to influence an individual Croatian. Now this was okay when there was just a few of us. We could send our diplomats and bureaucrats off on a day trip on the Sealink ferry and they’d come back with some sort of deal on bananas or yoghurt quotas after a jolly good lunch, and we all more or less understood the point of it and we could vote them out if they messed up. Trade. Easy. You buy our manhole covers and we’ll buy your drainpipes, and we can be righteously outraged with the French over the Common Agricultural Policy.
Not any more. Now we’re in a club with 27 other states some of which, let’s face it, are turkeys, and which is seriously considering admitting the real Turkey alongside such economic powerplants as Bosnia. This isn’t about the bend in a banana anymore. This is a political and cultural integration project which is out of control. For me, the question is not about migrant benefits, it is this – however politically incorrect that may be: Do I really want the terms and conditions of my life, and my childrens’ lives, to be determined by a political union which attempts to balance so many histories, cultures, political and legal systems and religions, and having signed up for this impenetrable smallprint, will I be happy then to prop up their dodgy economies forever?
Here are some numbers: UK, Germany and France all have per-capita GDP over 40,000 USD. Turkey’s is 11,000. Bosnia’s is 4,600. Romania is around 9500. Poland’s is about 13,000. So it’s a fact that there is a huge imbalance in the relative prosperity of the South and East of the continent as compared to the North and West. Now, I have a drive at my house, and I can tell you I’d be fairly irritated if a bunch of poor people (and I know how non-PC that is) parked themselves on my drive in a rusty camper van and demanded that I feed them everyday. But that’s exactly what’s happening, on an enormous scale. And then, of course, I’ll be getting admonished by the European Court of Justice for failing to comply with some rusty-foreign-camper-van-resident-rights small print which was introduced into legislation by an eastern european whose brother-in-law runs a people trafficking business.
So that’s it for me. I’m out.