THE EU juggernaut rolls on towards its goal of a federal superstate. National democratic government is being replaced by unelected executive rule, with parliaments becoming impotent charades. My question to Remainers is: Why is this a good thing?
We should not blame the EU for its vision of a United States of Europe ruled from Brussels, rather the ‘great deception’ practised on us by our own politicians and civil service. Arguably the EU is less the malign force in these ‘negotiations’ than the Remainers who Prime Minister May increasingly appears to represent.
They need to be made to answer questions they have so far managed to avoid. We could start, for example, with why they – and that of course includes May – can’t allow the UK to be cut free from EU regulation? (Was the EU’s Canada plus offer killed off for the very reason that it does cut us free, because it is a free trade deal?)
Supporters of the EU’s project of surrender of democratic national government to unelected management from Brussels must also say why moving to a bureaucratic regulatory regime based outside the UK is such a good idea. Why risk a hard-won democracy that saw an end to rotten boroughs, pocket boroughs, the disqualification of the poor and women from the vote, for a nominal UK government to be party to the chicanery of accepting regulation from outside while passing it as if it were not?
Why put such a fundamentalist trust in an EU that has brutally destroyed the Greek economy and held Italy in a no-growth situation for years? Is it because of a lack of trust in their own people or democratic system, or worse, ‘oikophobia – an extended sneer at Western civilisation? We have a right to know.
Likewise how do the EU fans justify France (and many other member states) breaking EU rules for years with no sanction, or Germany’s massive economic surpluses against the deficits of other member states, which is the flaw at the heart of the catastrophic euro currency? When do we hear Remainers challenged on their predominantly via negativa agenda which lives off insulting opponents as bigots or xenophobes, apparently in the absence of a positive vision for UK’s submersion into this superstate, apart from borderless travel?
The EU has prevented war in Europe, they claim. But it is NATO that has kept the peace. Arguably when the Balkans exploded, it was Germany that catalysed the conflict by recognising its wartime ally Croatia as independent from Yugoslavia. It was NATO, not the EU, which dealt with this situation. In foreign affairs the EU has provoked Russia and only made things worse in Ukraine, complicated further by Germany’s increasing dependence on Russia for its gas supplies.
So why is that it is not Remainers but Leavers who are called ‘extremists’? Why do Remainers remain ‘moderates’ when little could be more extreme than jettisoning British democracy in a favour of a Brussels superstate with a military, political, economic and social plan?
Of course we know why they are not grilled on any of this. With an armoury of Whitehall officialdom, big business, PR expertise and the greatest opinion-forming power in the land, the BBC, Remainers control the discourse and the rhetoric while avoiding any engagement in rational or moral argument to commend their vision. British communities and industries are delivered to Brussels to be carved up and dished out to other nations, as our fishing grounds are sacrificed, but the Remainers’ almost masonic loyalty to the EU goes unquestioned.
Yet like the self-styled ‘moderate’ Matthew Parris, it is they who are the supra-extremists, the slow-motion revolutionaries, who would suborn our democracy quietly, as if nothing were happening; covertly, in a great act of destruction of a uniquely successful and fair form of governance.
The historical precedents for political entities such as the EU superstate are not inviting. The Hapsburg Empire, perhaps, or the Ottoman Empire? The Soviet Union is, as Paul T Horgan has argued in TCW, the closest modern exemplar of today’s EU which, though nothing like as repressive, in its resistance to reform is highly similar.
The EU vision, philosophically speaking, is perhaps closer to Plato’s Republic: the enlightened philosopher king and a group of guardians benignly governing in paternalistic fashion over the ordinary stupid, xenophobic, racist, nostalgic plebs. But what if the EU is already moving beyond this benign model of soft fascism towards a Chinese model of government, but from the opposite end? While China moves its command economy in a more liberal direction (keeping its autocratic grip on freedom of opinion and cultural mores) is western liberal democracy starting to move towards a command economy under a single management control?
Tony Blair said quite clearly on BBC Radio 4 last year that the merit of the EU was power: to be powerful enough to fight off China and the USA. If so, the question becomes: Is the surrender of our nation state and its democracy a price worth paying for this Orwellian vision of the future? Remainers must be made to answer.
‘Every nation lives in permanent anger when not master of its own house’, wrote Indonesia’s leader Sukarno in 1930.
How do our unspeakable ‘Speaker’, Dominic Grieve and their Europhile allies propose to respond to that? With repression? Is that OK by them?
