Not by bread alone . . .
An interesting article in
yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph by Liam Halligan, an economist and long-term
critic of the Brit Brexit remainers, entitled Project Fear falsehoods still
give us the lie, and available for at least a while on https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-sunday-telegraph-money-business/20190915/281556587528536.
That
aside, the man who brought you Brexit, David Cameron, is currently badmouthing
everyone engaged on the ‘Yes’ side of the campaign and accusing them of lying
during the run up to the referendum. But
then there was lying on both sides—what else was Project Fear? Unless, of course, it was the outcome of
serious thought by ‘experts’, who nonetheless got it totally wrong.
The
fact is that I have long been convinced that the anti-Brexit case has little to
do with economics. What is really at
stake for the liberal elite and their followers, what they are really worried
about, is loss of the EU Social Charter and the European Court of Human Rights
and the general trend of EU legal enactments.
But
if they were to take a stand on this basis—on supporting all the
interventionist nonsense that arises from Europe and the proliferation of ‘rights’
involved, then very few would support them.
So instead they seek to artificially transfer the battlefield to the
field of economics.
If
you watched television coverage of the ‘remainer’ marches in London, what you
would have seen was a congregation of lawyers and accountants and luvvies and the
general run of bohemians, literally giving the fingers to those who disagreed
with them.
Yet
the fundamental thing is that arguably none of these people—or certainly very
few of them—are at all engaged in the manufacturing economy. In fact, they have as little respect for the
economic interests of ordinary people as they have for their votes. It is just crocodile tears.
What
we have instead is a movement by the ‘let-it-all-hang-out’ brigade to maintain
and increase their rights to let it all hang out, and to invent constantly new
categories of human existence, such as Percy French might say ‘nature never designed’,
and stridently demand rights for them, too.
It is an hysterical mass-neurosis, and ultimately a destructive one.
As
well, the attempts to bring the prospect of violence in the North into the
argument have been quite cynical. If
such is the threat, then it should be a matter for quiet diplomacy and quiet preparation,
and not for the public platform. As it
stands, those who might have an interest in returning to violence could almost
find encouragement and justification in the implications of what is being said
on anti-Brexit platforms. Like some sort
of self-fulfilling prophecy: if there is a hard Brexit, then as sure as night
follows day, there must be ructions on the border. A sort of natural process, which if it
happens it will be nobody’s fault but the Brexiteers. Everyone else will have the absolution of
being just powerless victims of subsequent events.
Now
I write this as someone who has no fixed position on Brexit. I really don’t know what its outcome will be. Nobody knows.
What one reads in the papers and sees on TV is really propaganda—on both
sides. Each of them just wants to
win. What engages me is the hypocrisy of
the whole process.
All
I can say is that if Brexit occurs it will, for better or worse, shake things up. If it fails, then Europe will continue in the
coils of the EU social and ideological python, squeezing us ever the more
closely into an increasingly secular and compulsory conformity.
Of
course, it might be possible to reform the EU from within.
Who
knows . . .?
