Far To Go

It always pains me to criticise him, because he is so good when he is good. But Nick Cohen cannot resist the courtier-hacks' bile against Julian Assange (on whose accusers, see here) for daring to suggest telling things to the common people rather than ensuring that we never find out about them. Nor can he resist peddling the New Cold Warriors' fashionable gibberish about Belarus, a country of which the National Secular Society, with which he is associated, also has an increasingly obsessive hatred.

Is it just the spectacle of his own past life in the Brezhnev-era kitsch of the Lukashenko Government? Or in the spotty, unelectable adolescents who comprise the "opposition", admittedly a lot better, since merely harmless, than the neighbouring giant's Stalinists, National Bolsheviks, Islamist terrorists, and anti-urban, anti-industrial, anti-scientific fantasists (with all that such fantasies entail for people called Cohen) who are all cheered on simultaneously by the New Cold Warriors? The NSS, meanwhile, objects to the Holy See's identification as a bridge between Eastern and Western Christendom of the last nation in Europe west of the Russian border to identify entirely in terms other than those of rootless neoliberal stupefaction, promiscuity, usury and warmongering. Was the Papacy notable for its close relationship with the Soviet regime, such that it would wish to maintain such ties with that regime's last vestige in Europe?

In looking at the undoubted alliance between the Far Right and the Far Left in Post-Postmodernity, Cohen needs to look at the past lives, including the very recent past lives, of those with whom he has associated himself through the Euston Manifesto and its crossover with the Henry Jackson Society. In bemoaning those who line up with Islamists, he should consider Bosnia, Kosovo (also a trend-setting mix of Nazism and Maoism), Chechnya, Xinjiang, NATO and putatively EU Turkey, what is indulged by our dear friends in Egypt, what has been done to Iraq, and who is agitating for the nuking of Iran.

But his point about Hungary is well-made, although he falls short of pointing out that the root of the problem is the enforcement of neoliberal economic policy, with all of social, cultural and political ramifications. Thanks to the EU, we are subject to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, of neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis (including Jobbik), of members of Eastern Europe's kleptomaniac nomenklatura, of neoconservatives such as now run France and Germany, and of people who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland. When Jörg Haider's party was in government in Austria, the totally unreconstructed Communist Party was in government in France. In the Council of Ministers, we were being legislated for by both of them. In the European Parliament, we still are, because we always are. And so on, and on, and on.

Therefore, will Cohen call for an amendment to the forthcoming Bill on the EU, not for some pointless In-Out referendum (a Pythonesque position for defenders of parliamentary sovereignty, and for which perhaps 20 Conservative and 10 Labour MPs, plus the DUP, would ever vote), but instead to restore the supremacy of British over EU law, to use that provision in order to repatriate agricultural policy, to do so in order to restore our historic fishing rights in accordance with international law, to require British Ministers to adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard, to disapply in the United Kingdom anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons, and to disapply in the United Kingdom any ruling of either European Court (or of the "Supreme Court") unless ratified by a resolution of that House? If not, why not?