How much more bovine effluent can Britain’s political ecosystem sustain? The ultimate stress test will be David Cameron’s impending referendum on EU membership, in the course of which it is already evident the ozone layer will be menaced by unprecedented emission levels of Daveguff.
To those nostalgists who remember what were formerly the basic ground rules of parliamentary democracy, the negotiations and campaign arrangements to decide Britain’s future in Europe might seem a trifle unorthodox. The man who is fronting the demand for “a new settlement for Britain in Europe” – the great Dave, whom God preserve – is an undisguised Europhile who, but for the UKIP insurgency and dissent among his own backbenchers, would be perfectly happy with Britain’s current state of thraldom to Brussels.
Only the need for some cosmetic gesture to appease mounting hostility towards the European Union among the electorate has compelled Dave to go through the motions of seeking some minor changes to the rules, while assuring the Brussels nomenklatura of his determination to keep Britain in the EU.
When did a poker player ever approach the table in such a mode? The wholly predictable outcome is that the EU will graciously concede the most innocuous of Dave’s requests and he will return brandishing a scrap of paper and exclaiming: “Rejoice! Rejoice! We have secured permission to postpone lavish benefits for hard-working Bulgarian drug dealers and Romanian pimps until four months after they clamber out from beneath the lorry that transported them from Calais. O frabjous day! What a friend we have in Juncker…”
This travesty of negotiations and a subsequent plebiscite is simply an extension of the fraudulent parliamentary system whereby all the major parties espouse the same liberal ideology and PC policies. The abscess from which the pus of political correctness is poisoning British society is the European Union. Cut that away and recovery will become possible, but escape from the bonds of Brussels will be very difficult when the “leader” who is supposedly pressing to assert British interests is as much a Europhile as his alleged “opponents”.
Dave is not very skilful in his duplicity. Back in March, he set out the seven “specific changes” he would demand to prevent Britain being “sucked into a United States of Europe”. This agenda betrayed the flawed mindset of the Tory approach: an aspiration to obviate further future integration, rather than to undo the damage already inflicted on Britain.
Dave wanted new controls to stop “vast migrations” when new countries join the EU; tighter rules on benefits for future migrants; new powers for groups of national parliaments to work together to block undesirable European legislation; freedom from red tape for businesses and access to new markets through “turbo charging” free trade deals with America and Asia; British police and courts liberated from “unnecessary interference” from the European Court of Human Rights; power “flowing away” from Brussels to member states; and abolition of the principle of “ever closer union” within the EU.
That programme was classic Daveguff. What national parliaments, with the honourable exception of Hungary whose resistance to EU diktat could teach Britain a lesson, would cooperate with Westminster against Brussels? Red tape is endemic to the EU, the only direction in which power will ever “flow away” is from Britain to Brussels, while ever closer union is irretrievably in the DNA of the European Union and its abandonment would require treaty change, an unacceptable concession so far as Brussels is concerned.
In May, Dave announced he had already begun negotiations with EU leaders. This turned out to take the form, a month later, of Dave outlining his already modified requests to European leaders during a five-minute interlude at an EU summit, described derisively by one participant as a commercial break.
Simultaneously, the leaking of a diplomatic note in which Dave told one European leader that his “firm aim was to keep the UK in the EU”, further confiding: “He believes that people will ultimately vote for the status quo if the alternatives can be made to appear risky.”
Does that sound like a patriotic prime minister vigorously pursuing British interests? Or does it sound more like a Europhile collaborationist treacherously cooperating with Britain’s EU integrationist enemies? In this note Dave’s former demand for treaty change had already been watered down to a request for a meaningless protocol “to change the treaties in due course” (i.e. the earliest possible date in 2058).
Meanwhile, you will be glad to know that “technical talks” on reform between British and EU officials (you could not put a fag paper between Brussels and Whitehall civil servants on European integration) are going “quite well”.
The EU dictators will concede nothing of substance, least of all to a complicit wimp like Dave whom they know to be “one of us”. They have recently tasted prime ministerial blood by forcing Alexis Tsipras, just 10 days after 62 per cent of the Greek electorate had rejected less rigorous terms, to accept a punitive fiscal package.
They hate Britain, which has the temerity to object to loss of sovereignty and seismic demographic reconfiguration by mass immigration, and despise Dave. So do all thinking people outside the political class and complicit commentariat.
The Heir of Blair is a buffoon, untrammelled by principles or patriotism, generating hot air and mendacity. You could not look for a more perfect exemplar of the political class nor, in his eventual travesty referendum, a more typical template of soft-totalitarian deception in post-democratic Britain.
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