Saturday 4 June 2016

An Opportunity To Re-Engage?

If you absolutely must vote to Remain, then do so for the reasons set out by my learned friend, Adrian Pabst.

If the Leave campaign cannot answer this, then it will be directly, and perhaps deliberately, responsible for its own defeat.

16 comments:

  1. Reinforced by French statism in the traditions of Colbert and the Jacobins, the dominant method of European integration in 1980s and 1990s engendered a Europe that imposes top-down harmonisation with all power to the Commission and the Court of Justice – rather than upholding the mutual recognition of national diversity (with some basic minimum standards) that is negotiated by the member-states. In practice, the EU has put in place a regulatory regime that enforces uniform standards

    All utter rubbish. The EU has been based since its inception on Jean Monet's model of a move towards a single unified political superstate, conceived at the League of Nations in the 1920's. Harold Macmillan, Jim Calaghan and Ted Heath were briefed about this and begged European leaders not to talk openly about it.

    The idea it was ever intended as anything else is a fantasy.

    This writer should read The Great Deception by Richard North and Christopher Booker.

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    1. As if he hadn't!

      And you really should meet him. Like Maurice, who put the opposing case, he is a professional academic in the field, not one of us jobbing hacks like, oh, Richard North and Christopher Booker.

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    2. Quite. He has read more than one book, and they weren't all written (not even that, co-written) by a satirical journalist. In fact I doubt Anonymous 19:56 has actually read Booker's book. But even if he has he needs to read a bit more, too.

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    3. Although, in all fairness, Booker was right about Charlie Hebdo, taking the view straight after the attacks that pretty much everyone does now. Potent stuff, coming from the Founding Editor of Private Eye. I doubt that Anonymous 19:56 agreed with him, though.

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    4. This HAS been left to the Right. That's why we are going to lose. That was always the idea and it is going to happen. Allowing the Right out of wherever it is they are kept the rest of the time is now weeks away from keeping us in the EU for ever.

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    5. I fear that you are right.

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  2. Vote Leave are losing on purpose, that's what they were created and recognised for. I actually think Labour's official line is the most persuasive to the public: "The EU is rubbish but there would now be chaos if we left. We'd never have held this referendum that nobody wants, but we did tell you not to join the wretched thing in the first place."

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    1. Unchanged since 1988, when Labour stopped being the only major party ever to have been opposed outright to British membership, and, at that official level, regretfully resigned itself to the monstrosity.

      Unfortunately, you are right that that is exactly where much of the public is.

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  3. Booker and North's book was excellent journalism of the old school; retrieving Cabinet Office briefing papers released under the 30-year-rule, investigating the origins of Monet's political superstate ideal and why Europe rejected Churchill's proposed intergovernmental model of a Council of Ministers (which it still dishonestly confuses with the present one) in favour of Monet's supranational political superstate.

    Labour's position on the EU is correct from their point of view; without the rule of the EU , a future Tory Government would be able get rid of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the Human Rights Act, the Health and Safety Act, the Emmissions Trading Scheme, the Equality Act, maternity leave, minimum working time, holiday pay, agency workers rights, full access to the social security system for immigrants, and the right of terrorists and gangsters to stay here under the pretext of their "right to a family life."

    Of course, I think that would be a good thing.

    But Labour doesn't.

    Their argument, perfectly sensible from their point of view, is that the EU helps protect Britain from the Right.

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    1. They didn't discover anything. Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Peter Shore and Barbara Castle had said it all at the time.

      Journalism is just journalism. Nothing less than that. But nothing more, either.

      The Right has been given free rein in this referendum, and its incompetence and unattractiveness are going to keep Britain in the EU forever. I hope that it is pleased. And I fully expect that it is.

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  4. Labour did not "regretful resign itself" to the EU in 1988; they invited Delors to adress their conference!

    He's never been given that privilege by any other party.

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    1. That was the TUC. Never the same thing.

      Anonymous 19:58's summary of the official Labour position over the last 28 years and counting is spot on: "The EU is rubbish but there would now be chaos if we left. We'd never have held this referendum that nobody wants, but we did tell you not to join the wretched thing in the first place."

      The official abstention on Maastricht, to which two thirds of Labour MPs adhered while all of six voted in favour, pretty much summed up the mainstream attitude, then and now.

      Of course, Jeremy Corbyn was one of the far more Labour than Conservative MPs who voted against Maastricht, and I wish that he had stuck to his guns. But here we are. What would you have instead in 2020? George Osborne?

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  5. Quentin Letts has a lovely piece today on the real reason we should leave the EU. And why the arguments of both sides have failed to capture the imagination.

    Peter Oborne is also excellent today on the immigration debacle that lets Albanian murderers stay here while we deport Australian businessmen who have actually helped our country and lets hundreds of thousands into our country in flagrant breach of the Conservative Party's manifesto commitment to reduce immigration below tens of thousands.

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    1. I haven't read Letts's piece (again, a humorous writer; you do realise, don't you, that he is joking?), but I can guess.

      Views such as his have dominated the Leave side, and we all see what the result is going to be.

      Oborne is channelling his inner George Galloway, who has been saying all of that since ... well, pretty much forever. Oborne is of course a fairly regular guest on Galloway's television programme, and always a welcome one.

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  6. The truth is the reverse; the Left was given free rein in the last referendum and Foot and Benn's contribution was to get overwhelmingly defeated and keep us locked in for the next 40 years.

    Now, though, the problem had nothing to do with the "unattractiveness of the Right" (indeed you'll notice that when Vote Leave finally started making the case against mass immigration central to the debate in the last week, as UKIP had always told them to, the poll figures completely reversed as a result).

    It's the same problem as in 1975: a referendum held by a government to solve its own internal divisions.with no major party to campaign for the Leave side.

    George Galloway is a committed supporter of mass immigration and has never pretended otherwise.

    Indeed, he's himself a Muslim convert who has nothing culturally in common with this country.

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    1. Bless.

      I'll say this for the referendum, it is always good to see the hysteria of "the silent majority" when it is confronted with the fact that it is neither.

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