Friday 12 October 2012

All Of A Peace

Backed by the EU, NATO actively waged the last war in Europe. And the EU has been an American-sponsored project from the start. From Ireland to the Baltic, the more pro-EU parties and politicians are, the more pro-NATO and pro-neocon. And vice versa.

A common enemy in the USSR? Not militarily. The USSR after the War had neither the will nor the means to invade Western Europe, and ended up collapsing anyway, exactly as Enoch Powell and others had predicted. died in 1953. And he was our ally for much of his time in power before that. Churchill signed over Eastern Europe to him. Including Poland, making the War a failure in its own terms.

Honestly, where does this absurd, peculiarly British fantasy come from, that the EU is "Socialist"? That only works even here by ignoring the real debate in this country over Europe, such as the media blackout around the No2EU - Yes to Democracy list at the last European Elections, including the heavy editing of Question Time when an audience member dared to mention it.

This goes back at least 20 years, to the total neglect of the three times as many Labour MP as Conservatives who voted against Maastricht (the party line was to abstain, no one broke that to vote in favour, but 66 voted against), including, in Bryan Gould, the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so. Only 22 Conservatives voted against Maastricht even at the start of the parliamentary process.

Certian newspapers crowed over the Danish No vote to Maastricht but made no mention of the strongly left-wing character of the No campaign, as also of the lobby that still keeps Norway out of the EU and which is the real target of this award, of the one that swung the French referendum against the EU Constitution (nor would figures of the traditional Gaullist and non-Guallist French Rights qualify as anything other than "Marxists" on certain websites), and of the one that did the ground work to deliver the first Irish No vote to Lisbon.

When half a dozen Conservatives lost the Whip for abstaining rather than supporting an increase in British contributions to the EU, the entire media ignored completely the 44 Labour MPs who voted against it; again, every other Labour MP abstained, whereas every other Conservative voted in favour. The 1997 Election kept Britain out of the euro by replacing Ken Clarke with Gordon Brown; George Osborne is now effectively Clarke's office boy, but he is being shadowed by the staunchly Eurosceptical Ed Balls. Media mentions? Nil.

Instead, we still see the utterly fantastical depiction of Margaret Thatcher of the Single European Act, against which voted every Labour MP without exception, as some sort of Eurosceptical heroine. What next, that she was a Unionist, or a social conservative, or a supporter of grammar schools? Lazy liars above the line feeding illiterate fantasists below it.

Only one party has ever held a referendum on EU membership, and it is the only one which is at all open to holding one now, or after the 2015 Election when it will have the chance. That was the party which Margaret Thatcher beat when she was in favour of staying in and it was in favour of withdrawal, the only party ever to have contested a General Election on that policy. And that was the party which kept Britain out of the euro by removing Kenneth Clarke as Chancellor and replacing him with Gordon Brown in 1997.

No one with Jon Cruddas's views on the EU would be allowed to take care of the paper clips in CCHQ or in David Cameron's office, still less to head the Conservative Party's Policy Review. No one with Ed Balls's views on the EU could be a PPS in this or any previous Conservative Government, still less Chancellor of the Exchequer. All of this is entirely within the European mainstream. But our media are in a private universe, undisturbed by mere facts on this as on so much else.

At most, the referendum might line up a section of the trade union movement, though certainly not all of it, with big business in favour of staying in. But there is nothing unusual about that. That section often lines up with big business in support of globalism and Political Correctness, and it gobbles up often quite asset-rich, traditional (including Eurosceptical), smaller old unions by means of tactics strikingly similar to those used to gobble up often quite asset-rich old small and family firms, which are likewise bastions of tradition in general and of support for national sovereignty in particular.

All of that, of course, is the essence of conservatism and even of Toryism to anyone who thinks of the 1980s as some sort of Golden Age. Or the essence of social democracy, if you take the same view of the Blair years, or at least of what those years would have been like without Gordon Brown.

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