Jonathan Freedland (The Brexit camp is wrong: we’re already sovereign,
27 February) is right to say sovereignty is not like virginity in that it can
be taken back – and that’s why those of us who want out are campaigning to
regain the sovereignty that has been surrendered by our membership of the EU.
However, sovereignty and virginity have one thing in common: they are
indivisible and cannot be shared or pooled. Sharing sovereignty is as absurd as
sharing virginity.
However, contrary to Jonathan
Freedland, cooperation between nations on matters of mutual interest is not
sovereignty lost or shared. It is in fact an assertion of sovereignty. Did the
US, Britain and the Soviet Union lose their sovereignty by their cooperation to
defeat Hitler?
On the other hand, the fact that David Cameron, having won
a general election on a promise of making changes to the benefit system,
was unable to do so without the consent of 27 foreign countries does indicate a
loss of sovereignty.
As for the argument that we have
to be in the EU to have a seat at the table where decisions that affect us are
taken, it is just a device designed to avoid discussing the nature of the EU.
You wouldn’t join the local mafia just to have a say in its decisions unless
you agree with its smuggling, money-laundering and blackmail activities.
And
the EU is no less of a mafia – a mafia of big corporations. Its
pay-up-or-we’ll-break-your-country treatment of Greece is a quintessential
racketeering technique that would have warmed the heart of Al Capone.
Whether it’s the TTIP free trade
agreement with the US, the imposition of austerity or the incessant attack on
collective rights of workers in Greece, Spain, Romania and other member states,
the EU has little to commend it to trade unionists and working people in
Britain.
Fawzi Ibrahim
Trade Unionists Against the EU
""However, contrary to Jonathan Freedland, cooperation between nations on matters of mutual interest is not sovereignty lost or shared. It is in fact an assertion of sovereignty. Did the US, Britain and the Soviet Union lose their sovereignty by their cooperation to defeat Hitler? ""
ReplyDeleteYes. And in so doing we surrendered Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union (see the shameful Yalta episode) and surrendered our Far East Empire to the United States.
He literally couldn't have picked a worse example.
He hadn't read my second book.
Delete""On the other hand, the fact that David Cameron, having won a general election on a promise of making changes to the benefit system, was unable to do so without the consent of 27 foreign countries does indicate a loss of sovereignty. ""
ReplyDeleteCorrect.
Though it also indicates how useless the Left is to our cause. For they didn't even support that trifling change.
Never mind the things he promised fo achieve but failed to renegotiate at all; withdrawal from the Charter of Fundamental Rights, an end to free movement of peoples, an end to European courts interfering in our criminal justice system and repatriation of social and employment policy.
Meanwhile the rest of this article is so dated it's almost quaint. It reads as if it was written by a child transported in a time machine from 1972, when some the EU still pretended it was just about trade.
The first of the nine Great Deceptions listed by Christopher Booker this week in remembrance of his great book The Great Deception, which remains to this day the most comprehensive account of the history of the EU ever written.
The author of this should read it.
Why? And I write as one who has read it.
DeleteRight-wing opposition to the EU, real opposition rather than just wanting a second referendum on something else, consists of five few blokes down the pub, and four of them are not in the Conservative Party, indeed have not even voted for it in anything up to a decade.
The leader of the Leave side, the real Leave side, is George Galloway.