ISN’T it good to have friends, and be welcomed into the Club, even if the fees are a wee bit steep. Oh yes, until it all starts to go sour.
Witness European Commission secretary general Martin Selmayr, who has openly stated that ‘losing Northern Ireland was the price the UK would have to pay for Brexit’. According to reports in the German media, Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s erstwhile chief of staff, said: ‘After a constructive European Council meeting, Selmayr does this. Remember that some in Brussels want no deal, or a punitive one.’ The Club doesn’t look that friendly now.
The Emperor of France has also decided to stick his pennyworth in. In a speech hitting out at direct democracy, Emmanuel Macron claimed Britain was ‘manipulated’ into voting for Brexit by ‘fake news’ during the EU referendum.
Addressing an audience of more than 600 mayors in Normandy, the French president greeted news of the British Parliament’s historic defeat of May’s super-soft Brexit agreement by declaring that ‘the first losers of No Deal Brexit would be the British’.
‘It’s a referendum that has been manipulated from outside by a lot of what we call fake news, where everything and anything was said,’ Macron alleged, claiming pro-Leave politicians ‘lied to the people’ and that what the British voted for in 2016 ‘is not possible’.
He added: ‘Good luck to the representatives of the nation who have to implement a thing which doesn’t exist and have to explain to the people: you have voted on a thing, we lied to you.’
Insisting France had already reached the ‘maximum’ it was willing to offer Britain in negotiations, Macron added that the Brexit vote ‘says a lot’ about the dangers of what ‘referendums – which may seem nice – can create”.
Previously at the event, which lasted more than six and a half hours, the globalist French president had spoken dismissively of the Yellow Vest protest movement’s demand for the right to hold Swiss-style citizens’ initiative referendums (RIC) on policy proposals which gather more than 700,000 signatures, telling the audience: ‘We can make popular decisions by referendum . . . but not difficult ones.’
Earlier this month, an online national consultation launched following weeks of anti-government protest was denounced as having been ‘sabotaged’ after it revealed widespread support for conservative policies.
If this is friendship and cooperation – who needs enemies?
Do the EU chums really understand what direct democracy means? Do they even want to? It’s all very localised and about what the people want. For example, here in Switzerland, in our little Gemeinde in Ostschweiz, the local authority wanted to change from personal monitoring to smart meters, to calculate what we all owed for electricity and water consumption. It wasn’t the authority’s decision. It had to be voted through a local initiative. And they got their local permission. How cool is that?
The importance of Swiss referenda is that they deal – above all else – with the tricky questions, that Macron wants to keep in-house. And we’ve already seen the Westminster Bubble’s notion of how it works:
Theresa May; Lancaster House; Chequers; Withdrawal Agreement.
Not a jot of cabinet, never mind, government agreement. Straight to Frau Merkel.
And now le petit Mani is endorsing the same kind of totalitarian procedure. Like the UK MP who has openly admitted that he knows much better than these thicko voters of his.
The real tragedy is that this Brexit-denial could all go through, slowly, doggedly, and with never-ending delays. Sadly, the UK electorate just don’t do Yellow Vests, far less facing up to the politicised police. They see it as all a bit plebeian. But, given the total deconstruction of individual democracy and one-man-one-vote actually meaning something, if the plebs don’t rise up, and I fear they might just not, the UK will surely succumb to the most humiliating role in its history: a satrapy of the EU, with dangerous individuals in control.
Who will lead us out of this humiliating dead end? I’m glad (and also very sad) that I’m watching this travesty from a distance, in Switzerland, where direct democracy still works.
