The UK referendum on the European Union, 2016.


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A pollster has phoned for my opinion on the European Union.

No thank you. Sorry.

The following is a long put-off comment.

We don’t have a European Union.
Let me put it this way. Suppose you were a child joining a jigsaw puzzle. And when there were no more pieces to assemble, you found the right border considerably charred, a hole in the middle, and parts of the left side, either missing or broken off.

Send it back to the maker, and demand a refund!

That is the state of the European Union.

On the right border, the Ukraine is a divided nation between East and West sympathies, that have brought it to ruination. Evidently, there will have to be power-sharing government, if the Ukraine is to survive as a nation at all, as it will not be absorbed wholly, either by the European Union or the Russian Federation.

There has been speculation about the future of the Baltic republics. The Bolshevist revolution, in an idealistic early phase, granted nations their desire for independence from the czarist Empire of the Romanovs. After the Nazi-Soviet pact, Stalin moved ethnic Russians, to form majorities, in the Baltic republics.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, it is not surprising that there has been strong nationalist reaction.

Modern European history, as much in the West, as in the East, can be seen as an uncertain development towards unity. For two millenniums, men envisioned unity imposed by military conquest. In the East, the delusion of a new Caesar was the Czar. In the West the new Caesar was the Kaiser.

There were counter-vailing forces. For instance, the Russians generously went to the aid of the Austrian Empire, and Christendom, in its need. Whereupon, one of their legislators made the infamous remark: We will astonish them with our ingratitude.

When the Ottoman Empire was reduced to no more than a toe-hold in Europe, it was still the sacred duty of Christian Europe to leave in peace remaining Muslim communities. The same is true, of course, for Christian and other religious minorities in the Middle East. This sacred duty has been breached by genocides. Barbarism is destroying the cultural mosaic of mankinds spiritual journey. No doubt Western meddling must take some share of the blame.

Turkeys request for European Union membership has adequate historical basis. It would depend on whether the country was not deeply divided on the issue, as is the Ukraine. Also it would depend on freedom of speech, without government or other attacks on rivals and critics.

Similar considerations come to mind, with respect to the Russian Federation, and whether to offer, say, observer status to this vast Eurasian republic, in the European Parliament.

Conquest is not unity. Unity can only be achieved by freely given consent. Hence the current UK referendum to stay in or leave the EU. In these current early stages, the campaign is already taking on militaristic shades, with belligerent emotions running high.

The pro-EU Prime Minister assures the nation that leaving would be “a leap in the dark.” This tells the undecided to: Be very afraid. Whilst his confirmed opponents can take a running jump.

Going back to that childs jigsaw puzzle of the European Union, with the missing or damaged pieces, the gap in the middle is Switzerland, and the fragmented western shores are the absence of Norway, Iceland and Greenland.

In a true European Union, all the nations of Europe should be represented in the European Parliament, if they so wish. The only qualification for joining should be paying the subscription fees for membership of the club.

The reason for this exclusion was the unfair discrimination against the maritime nations, exacted for Common Market membership. This was the so-called Common Fisheries Policy, which amounted to legalised invasion of their fishing grounds. Unfortunately, the British government accepted this blackmail, as Peter Hitchens would say, thru “treachery and incompetence.” If they had stood up for their country, probably all the other maritime nations would have stood firm as well. And the Common Market would have had to alter its piratical ideas.

The Labour Party got back into office on a campaign against the Heath government terms of Common Market entry. I was old enough to vote on the referendum, based on Labours renegotiated terms. All Europe was still allowed to plunder Britains fishing industry. Britain was still trapped within the Common Market tariff wall, and not allowed free trade, even with historic partners, like New Zealand.

As a mockery of this total failure to redeem the nations fortunes, a few worthless concessions were offered. The UK would now have as many MEPs as Germany, France and Italy. In those days of innocence, it did not occur to me that British politicians, getting a few more jobs for the boys in Europe, could be construed as a buy-off.

Recently, the Labour Party openly admitted that it knew at the time that it had gained nothing. Fill in the dots: The implication is that the Wilson government held the Common Market referendum under false pretenses.

I remember all those giant billboards, of a big happy family, smiling down on the passing public, greatly outnumbering the few posters of the antis. I remember a contentedly smiling woman coming out of the polls, as I was going in, and her look of sudden misgiving. I was not smiling.

At the start of the 2016 referendum, the veteran pollster Bob Worcester said that the 1975 referendum was not won by arguments, but lost by “the people with staring eyes.” (Presumably an allusion to Enoch Powell and Anthony Wedgwood Benn.)

I myself remember that all the sensible people, on centre stage, were on the yes side, and the marginal figures on the no side. And it was with some effort, that I made up my own mind, on the basis of the actual miserable terms the ungrateful Europeans had stuck their British war-time rescuers.

The bright and personable Shirley Williams, of that charmed crowd of yes advocates, probably wanted membership, to follow her parents idealistic motives of a united Europe, never going to war again. Her mother, Vera Brittain mourned a lost generation, in her first world war Testament of Youth.

But the abject terms of British Common Market entry was rather as if the Weimar Republic had ceded, in perpetuity, French occupation of the Ruhr for war reparations. By the 1970s, Britain had lost the peace, and was paying peace reparations for it. The British government betrayed its unjust belief that commercial might is right, and must be succumbed to.
Further ignominy followed, in the form of Britains unjust Cod Wars. Solzhenitsyn waxed sarcastic over Britain daring to stand up against Iceland.

Nor was that the end of it. For, European factory ship harvesting of seas, even further afield, in their rapacity, drove Somali fishermen to piracy. Needless to say, the Somali pirates got all the blame, instead of those European pirates who stole their livelihoods.

The European project confounded goals of economic co-operation with political co-operation.
The grand design of the unification of Europe was to follow sound historical precedent. The political unification of Germany was preceded by the zollverein or customs union. Likewise, the European Union was first called the Common Market, and underwent a transitional stage, as the European Economic Community.

The Maastricht treaty of closer union failed to achieve majorities in Holland, France or Ireland. Ireland was made to take it again, this time with bags of business loot weighing down the yes scales. PM Cameron defaulted on his “cast-iron” promise of a UK referendum on the treaty. Presumably, he knew the treaty would lose, and didn’t want it to.

History is repeating itself in the second UK referendum on Europe, which, this time, he could not get out of, without the Conservative vote being split by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Like Harold Wilson, David Cameron sought to renegotiate the terms of Britains membership. Some minor administrative adjustments of detail have been permitted. Promises about associate status are not treaty changes legally liberating from a European bureaucracy.

Had not the first negotiations been botched, there would not be a second referendum. And an unsatisfactory relation with Europe will not be solved by putting-off genuine reform, for another generation, by another referendum.

The man, who, more than any other, made possible this second referendum, UKIP leader, Nigel Farage says we just want free trade and friendly relations with Europe.

EU supporters say it is a free trade area, the worlds largest, according to one claim.

Where is the truth of the matter?

When the EU constitution was being revised, British Premier Tony Blair agreed to dropping mention of free trade.

I remember a prevaricating writer saying that free trade would actually be strengthened in the EU.

That is besides the point. Free trade is not a principle, if no more than convenience of internal management.

The greatest fear of Britain not being a member of the Common Market was being disadvantaged by its trading tariff barrier. The greatest weapon against Britain leaving the EU is the threat of economic excommunication, recently voiced by an Angela Merkel “attack dog” that The Mail editorial asked her to call off.

There is no difference in principle from this tariff wall and the Napoleonic Continental System of a trade war against Britain, to their mutual impoverishment.

The European Union is a protectionist super-state, similar in spirit to Joe Chamberlain policy of Imperial preference. After leaving the Liberals, he converted the Conservative party to a protectionist British Empire, subjecting outsiders to trade tariffs.

Chamberlain joined the Tories against Gladstones great cause of Home Rule (tho he did favor a measure of devolution).

This left traditional party supporters in a dilemma. Liberal Unionists could not vote Conservative, because they now opposed free trade. Conservative free traders could not support the Liberals, because they now opposed the Union (at least as the Tory party conceived it).

That is why the Tory grandee, Lord Hugh Cecil favored the single transferable vote. With STV, he could first prefer Tory Unionist free traders and next prefer Liberal Unionist free traders. That would avoid the partisan dilemma.
Of course the democratic STV system works both ways. Others, of the opposite opinion to Lord Hugh, could also avoid the partisan dilemma posed by being a home-rule protectionist (tho there weren’t many of those).

The dilemma is not of democracy, as STV makes democratic decisions relatively straight-forward matters of individual preference. The dilemmas are of partisanship. Partisan-monopolised elections in single-member systems and/or party list systems cause partisan dilemmas.

The Independent Irish MP (TD) John Bruton, who became Fine Gael leader and Irish coalition Premier (Taoiseach) works for European integration. He recommended STV as common system for the European elections. Certainly, if that came about, the EU would become a serious democratic proposition.

Bruton is not regarded as an acceptable representative, by certain Irish republicans. He got into hot water for suggesting, on the centenary of the 1916 Dublin uprising, that Irish independence might have been achieved peacefully, as by the Scottish route.

Given the obscenities of war, the viciousness of the troubles, which, despite eventual peace accords, smoulder on, in the north, to this day, it is a question worth asking.

This controversy has a European dimension. Britain went to war, in 1914, to defend “gallant little Belgium” against the German bully. Ireland went to war to defend itself against the British bully. Who was the worse bully is a moot point, given the history of legalised oppression by the “damnBritish” which an Irishman recalled, he grew up thinking was one word.

Otherwise, the British take pride in their parliamentary institution, as opposed to a continental absolutism. Leaving the EU is seen as a revolt, against bureaucratic centralism, by the advocates of enterprise.

But 2016 is also the centenary of the British government betrayal of the Speakers Conference on Electoral Reform (I’ve discussed elsewhere) over democratic (STV) elections.
There is every reason to believe that British politics is just as incapable of reforming itself, as the European project.

The Labour Party and the Greens see the European Commissions regulatory regime as protecting labor and the environment.

This life-long supporter of ecological wisdom might have agreed the EU was worth supporting, had it not broken its own competition policy. The Cameron government was allowed to do a deal for new nuclear power stations, that guaranteed EDF a clear profit for a generation.
Yesterday (7 march) the EDF finance director resigned at the prospect of more behind-schedule nuclear builds.
Yet it seems British government idiocracy will stop at nothing to see thru these catastrofes waiting to happen.

Austria and Luxembourg, as well as Bavarian solar power companies, are taking this unfair competition to court, against the supine EU. These are mankinds real friends and allies, against nuclear hyper-pollution, not the British government or the EU.

The Scottish government is a sensible innovator in renewable energies, looking forward to helping establish a European grid, to maximise the benefits of wind turbines, wave and tidal power. This is part of its hopes to work within the European Union, as an independent nation, with its own democratic constitution.

The constitutions of the European Union and the United Kingdom are both in need of radical overhaul.

Accountants have refused, for twenty years, to sign off the EU balance sheet. Ordinary citizens would either go out of business or be officially penalised for such inefficiency. Nothing happens to the EU and nothing changes. This tells the public there is one law for them and government is above that law. There goes respect for equality before the law.

EU law is what happens to people in their businesses. It should be the other way round. Because the European Arcadia couldn’t agree on whether Strasbourg or Brussels houses its Parliament, a farcical compromise was reached. Every six months, the whole traveling circus would move itself and its lorry loads of documents a country away, wasting, in one go, some 15% of the annual budget.

Instead, Strasbourg should stay as the political parliament, the hub of the Franco-German alliance. (My family name was found in that city. My father told me that his ancestors moved away from the border of the two countries, because they were always fighting. No further details were forthcoming.)

The Brussels parliament could become an “assembly of experts” to borrow the term used in Iran. On the national level, this is the historical and proper nature of Britains second chamber.

In the course of legally required elections to their governing bodies, vocational representatives could be sent to the Brussels parliament, as well as to their national second chamber.

Instead of laws being pressed down on the shoulders of small businesses, for instance, business and industry and the professions could pass laws up to the Brussels administration, for making their occupational lives less onerous.

In turn, the Strasbourg Parliament, representing national and regional communities as a whole, would have their laws for the public at large, scrutinised in the Brussels parliament, with regard to any adverse effects, that specialist knowledge was aware of.

This testing of general laws in terms of special knowledge is essentially the same relationship between theory and experiment, which has made the kind of progress possible in science, that has eluded political economy.

To give a British example, the current neo-liberal doctrine, of private out-sourcing public services, degenerates into a dogma, when special circumstances are not properly taken into account.

When the job of cleaning public hospitals is given over to out-siders, the priority is no longer to ensure the highest standards of cleanliness, for the health of patients and staff. The priority becomes how cheaply can the private firms afford, to stave off competition, and how much time can they save on the cleaning routine, in order to get onto the next job, and earn a profitable living.

Meanwhile, the real costs are lost lives from hospital-acquired infections.

In 2008, the Royal College of nursing voted against out-sourcing. And the Scottish government allowed public hospitals to clean themselves again.

Admittedly, this has not solved the growing conflict between the centralising tendency of modern medical equipment provision and the need for isolation of infectious diseases. Hospital and quarantine have become a contradiction in terms.

The real issue, behind the UK referendum on the EU, is the undemocratic nature of both the EU and the UK, and how both governments are incapable of democratising their institutions, to scientific standards of effective operation.


Richard Lung.
8 march 2016.


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