In response to Niall McCrae: Don’t meddle with the doughty Express, Robert wrote:
Interesting piece. I would take issue with the notion that the Express has simply been campaigning to get us free from Brussels bureaucracy simply to keep ‘nostalgic readers happy’. Indeed, the suggestion that getting shot of the EU is about wanting to return to pre-EU days of the past is to miss the point and is simply not possible given the current understanding of the physical laws of the universe. Obviously, if one can outrun the speed of light then the ‘past’ will be visible – look at the sun today and you are seeing what the sun was like 8 minutes and twenty seconds ago – but it is not possible, yet, to actually go back and exist in past times.
Whatever, the crucial thing is that the Express was simply campaigning about something that was fundamentally flawed from the outset. It was undemocratic and has become spendthrift, corrupt and an utterly unnecessary expense from our public purse. By virtue of these negative attributes it is patently against the interests of the British people.
It was never about ‘nostalgia’. It was about cutting our ties to something that was a stitch-up against democracy by public servants in Brussels and Whitehall. It was about looking forward to a time when we have taken back control and can decide for ourselves what laws and what relationships with other nations and overseas businesses best suit ours and their interests. The Express tapped into a growing national feeling that the EU was simply an expensive, wasteful body of public servants surrounded by assorted lobby groups – bees to the honey pot, if you will – and existed largely for theirs and its own benefit.
The Referendum result of 23rd June, 2016, as well as UKIP’s success in the 2014 EU elections, confirmed that, on the whole, the British people want their law makers – the people they can vote out and in along with the public servants who serve them – in Westminster and Whitehall and not overseas in Brussels. In this respect the Express, along with the majority of the British people, is not ‘nostalgic’ but simply concerned about who governs them in much the same way as, say, the people of Japan would be worried if some centralised bureaucracy in China started formulating all the laws for Asia or, for that matter, the concern people in the USA would have if a centralised bureaucracy in Mexico decided all the laws for the entire continent of America.
