Wednesday 22 June 2016

In The Course of Human Events

This, by the impossibly young Carl Packman, is a bit long to reproduce in full here. But I urge you to read it.

Jeremy Corbyn has said that, if elected on a platform of renationalising the railways (a manifesto commitment under Ed Miliband, never mind under Corbyn), then he would proceed with that, regardless of EU law.

Yes, staying in while threatening to break the rules is a bit ridiculous. But can you ever remember a Conservative Leader's or putative Leader's threat to break EU law?

The EU suits them down to the ground. There is nothing that any of them could ever want to do that could conceivably involve any possibility of breaking EU law. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Tomorrow is our one and only chance to reframe the political debate in this country in terms that do not exclude everything that is not unrestricted neoliberal economics, apparently limitless social liberalism and secular fundamentalism, and the violent spread of those things by means of neoconservative foreign policy, with its remorseless assault on the domestic civil liberties that also cannot be endured by unrestricted neoliberal economics, or by apparently limitless social liberalism and secular fundamentalism.

The international institutions of that hegemony are primarily the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.

Where, as in the United Kingdom, all of those institutions hold sway, then they are effectively interchangeable, and function as a permanent government, over and above any product of the democratic process.

The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from that order, and that withdrawal by popular vote, would light the fire of liberty as surely as any historical event that one might ever care to name.

But a vote to Remain would ever thereafter cause all opponents, or even merely critics, of that order to be dismissed out of hand, and worse. "You had your chance on 23rd June 2016," we should be told. "And you blew it."

We shall have our chance on 23rd June 2016. Let's not blow it.

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