Stuff and nonsense. Propaganda and cheap comment, says Smug Mogg, dismissing John Major’s underlining of the idiocies of Brexit. Some gall, coming from the man who talks about the UK as a “vassal” state; who has the nerve to talk about the will of the British people when he can scarcely ever have caught a glimpse of any people from inside that ridiculous carapace he has constructed for himself; who talks about taking back control of our money and our laws, when we never gave it up. We are members of the EU. We have signed up to the rules and conventions that govern the function of a club that over the years has brought us prosperity and peace, a general broadening of our cultural, not to mention culinary, horizons, that has opened up all kinds of opportunity for study, travel and scientific cooperation and that employs substantial numbers of UK citizens in its administration, teaching us that our way is not the only way: a club that has greatly increased the security of Europe as a whole, that has freed the truly vassal states of eastern Europe from the Russian Communist yoke and brought together a whole family of peoples whose values, beliefs and general culture have been formed by the same influences: the Greeks, the Romans, the Jews and the Christians and who, by and large, have travelled very similar paths of evolution.
The sovereignty of the British parliament is no more diminished by membership of the EU than my sovereignty – or anyone else’s, come to that – is diminished by being a member of British political society and accepting thereby a certain loss of freedom in return for the greater collective security and other advantages that accrue to all of us in acquiescing in this tacit agreement. No laws have been “imposed” on us against our wishes by a bunch of hostile “foreigners.” I have yet to hear Duncan Smith or Cash or Redwood or Fox or Hannan or any of the gang, let alone members of the Brexiteering public, name a single law imposed by the EU that curtails their freedom, that in any way prevents them doing what they would otherwise do, except perhaps poisoning the environment or selling rotting fish.
Bhutan demands access to Cornish pasties
As for the fantasy brave new world in which we will make trade deals with Botswana, Paraguay, Bhutan (enormous demand there, apparently, for Cornish pasties made with American beef), El Salvador, the Republic of Sakha (big demand there for frozen sardines)… What a wizard ploy! We’ll be able to import billions of cheap Chinese hairgrips and unrestrained by the shackles of EU regulation ship them straight off to Yakutsk for a penny-farthing profit – for surely Smug Mogg will return our rightful currency of pounds, shillings and pence to us, along with the big white five-pound note, which he himself of course does not even remember.
Propaganda, indeed. We know where we stand with the EU. The cloud-cuckoo-land dreamt of by Mogg and his kind is pure speculation. There is no evidence that it will bring the slightest degree of increased prosperity or freedom or well-being of any kind.
Did the British people vote to leave the EU?
I did not. Neither did a hell of a lot of other people. YES votes were outnumbered by NO votes by a very small margin. And what were the NO votes saying No to?
For the forty or so years since our accession to membership of the EU, the overwhelmingly Right-wing and anti-European press has run an unrelenting campaign of abuse and misrepresentation against the EU. Endless rhetoric about bent bananas and super-states and Murdoch’s injunctions to bare your arse at the Continent at 11am on a Tuesday, headlines like Up Yours, Delors… Information? What’s that? Never a word about the vast sums of money that have come to British farmers, practically all of whom, having voted “Leave,” now whinge daily on Radio Four’s Farming Today about their likely post-Brexit plight. And what would they have done to the landscape without the EU’s hostility to GM crops or neonicotinoids, for example? Never a word of gratitude for the money that has poured into the country’s most ill-favoured regions. You never ever see a billboard advertising the EU’s contribution to any infrastructure projects, as you do in every other member state. You never ever see an EU flag flying on a public building as you do on every mairie in France or Greece along with the national and regional flags. There have been large amounts of money available to fund artistic projects, to fund footpath restoration, to fund the revitalising or study of local tradition or folklore, most of which has never been accessed by English people, for the simple reason that they were never informed it was there. Why not?
The British ignorant of and uninterested in the EU
I walked across France in 2001. As I got on the train for Dover I bought a copy of The Guardian. In it was a survey that showed that British people knew less about the EU and showed less interest in it than the people of any other member state. And Smug Mogg dares to talk about thwarting the will of the British people, dismissing criticism that people did not know what they were voting for as patronising, when it is bleeding obvious they did not know what they were voting for. I am more or less bilingual in French. I speak Greek fluently. I am pretty much at ease in Italian. I have spent a lifetime interested in, following and writing about things European and I could not explain in much detail how exactly the EU works. Your average Joe did not and still does not have a bloody clue…
Leaving aside the fact that referendums are the resort of Erdogans, Mugabes and Putins (who, it has to be said, at least pay lip service to the need for a three-fifths majority before changing the constitution, even though we know they are going to cheat), it is absolutely clear that the “vote” had no more value than a collective fart of general disgruntlement. Fucking foreigners invading our country, taking our jobs, telling us what to do…Spitfires over Dover, scepter’d isles, take back control, great trading nation… The last time we were a great trading nation, half the world had to do what we said, buy what we wanted to sell them or we sent a gunboat to sort them out. Free trade, my eye! Who is peddling the propaganda?
Mogg is a dangerous phoney
Why should we listen to Mogg? The man is a fake from top to toe. No one is born speaking in that ridiculous manner. Normal people standing for election do not go campaigning with Nanny. Nor do they go about strapped day and night into a double-breasted suit that makes them look like an elongated toothpaste tube. Nor do they call their children Number Six in Latin. Is he aware that in doing so he is behaving very like the pre-Revolutionary Chinese who called their daughters Number One, Number Two, Number Three, instead of giving them names? Chuck in a couple of Bentleys, attachment to the Tridentine Mass, a fortune made out of City spivvery, marriage to a very rich woman, opposition to abortion, gay marriage, trade unions, social security… And you are dealing, not with a man of exemplary principle, an affable if eccentric English gentleman of the old school (and, God knows, most of the “gentlemen” whose word was their bond that ran the old City firms were a bunch of selfish adventurers looking after their own interests), but a self-regarding Right-wing reactionary, bolstered by prejudice and lacking in sympathy, complacent and false. What would make a man construct such a carapace for himself: an exaggerated, caricature version of an aristocratic mien, precious, fastidious and pretentious? It would have done him good to wipe his babies’ bottoms or drive a bulldozer. He is a common or garden Welsh Rees and Welsh Mogg cobbled together in aristocratic pretence. Why would you construct such an impenetrable carapace if not to hide and protect a timid, uncertain little self trying to shore up a wobbly sense of worth?
He makes me think of that satirical ee cummings poem about the “successfully if delicately gelded (or spaded) gentlemen (and ladies)”
littleliverpill-
hearted-Nujolneeding-There’s-A-Reason
americans (who tensetendoned and with
upward vacant eyes, painfully
perpetually crouched, quivering, upon the
sternly allotted sandpile
–how silently
emit a tiny violetflavoured nuisance: Odor?
ono.
comes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush
He’s got a concealed ratchet inside that double-breasted jacket. When he wants to emit one of his unctuous know-it-all putdowns he jerks it up a couple of notches and out slithers “a tiny violetflavoured nuisance” accompanied by nothing as vulgar as an odour. Oh no! “comes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush.” And, as we know, one “may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”
If, like his Hebrew namesake, he does really believe the Lord stands beside him and his seed shall be as the dust of the earth…spread abroad to the west and to the east, tous azimuts, in sum…Oh God, that is French, not Latin. Well, we just have to hope his schoolboy Latin is up to it.
When we were children, we knew someone whose first name was Undecimus. Does Smug Mogg’s Latin go as far as that? And if his manhood is up to it, what happens beyond that? In the sixties we were warned about the danger to our virility of Y-fronts.Very little, I should think, compared to that suit!
Ridiculus mus…
Except, of course, these people are not ridiculous. They have an agenda, a rich man’s agenda, which certainly has nothing to do with looking after the interests of the poor and the feeling-left-out whose prejudices and resentments they play to. And which party’s policies, pray, have largely contributed to that resentment? Thatcher’s mania for deregulation and her pitiless assault on the industries that had for generations sustained the finances and the dignity of the northern working class, Slater-Walker’s asset-stripping, big bangs in the City, bestowing a kind of respectability on the even cruder forms of gambling by calling it an “industry… Our Fish, indeed!
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