How the rapidly approaching European chess stalemate can be solved by both players taking each other’s Bishop
I’ve believed for many years now that voting on the grounds of purely personal, tribal, ideological or material reasons is never a good idea. In the forefront of everyone’s mind should be the question, ‘What’s best for the greatest number?’
Doing so obviously stands the best chance of producing a stable and content society where it’s not all about memememememe and muunnneeeee. Sadly, we are all Homo sapiens and profoundly awful at following such an ethical dictum.
However, I now suspect the moment has arrived when both the British and mainland Europeans need to get real and accept that to vote in that manner is the only way out of a potentially catastrophic impasse.
The current Brexit state of play is that the English XI took tea five months ago, and is still arguing with the umpires and each other over who’s going out to bat first. The European XXVII remain firmly resolved to deny that the prow of the Titanic is at an angle of 30° to the ocean. It is indeed a game of cricket being played on an iceberg by two sides arguing over the size and shape of the ball. Success for anyone in this shambles looks highly unlikely.
We Brexiteers are not going to get what we were promised. That’s the reality, deal with it.
As so often pertains in such complex cock-ups, the best answer is a compromise – but a radical one.
Here are half a dozen empirical observations to support the perhaps odd route of ‘radical compromise’ now before it’s too late:
- The EU has not been an unqualified agent of peace….far from it. But the EEC was – in terms of no European general war for over 70 years.
- The agent of Peace was economic interdependence, not federal unity. The euro and the idea of Fiskalunion created mass opposition and market chaos within a very short time. Far from declining, resistance and crises are getting ever stronger.
- Although the MSM has made a balls of explaining it, the massive NO vote in Italy yesterday was about controlling the centralisation of power in that country into fewer, unelected hands. The Italians are now heading in a regional devolution direction….as are the English and Spaniards. As I’ve suggested for many years now, supra-national and globalist free trade are on the way out: the EU is already a diplodocus of small brain and little agility.
- Free movement is seen by socialists as worker freedom, but that’s balderdash: it is merely every Western worker’s freedom to see their incomes eroded by the poorer former USSR satellites, and can only lead to friction. More immediately, the freedom of Jihadist and thinly disguised African freedom of movement throughout the EU is calamitous. We can all sit and quote statistics until a civil war breaks out, but the anthropological reality is that a worryingly large proportion of southern migrants have cultural and religious views antithetical to European values. (See last weekend’s controversial Slogpost)
- Despite the wild claims of UK Leftlibs, UKIP is not “BNPLite’ and Britain is infinitely more culturally tolerant than most other European nations. But the combination of fanciful border controls, Islamic extremism and pc denialism have led to the rise of Geert Wilders and Marine LePen.
- For most UKIP supporters, the key issues have little or nothing to do with race: their key concerns are control of immigration numbers, control of the runaway cost overheads and corruption in Brussels, and loss of sovereignty to unelected ideologues and bankers.
In 1975, I voted to stay in the EEC because of the opportunities it held for economic growth, cultural sharing and long-term peace. I did not vote for federalism, Mogherini’s Barmy Army, Imperial delusions of grandeur, encircling Russia and a single currency.
I think, without much fear of rebuttal, that were an EU-wide Referendum to be held tomorrow – where the deal on offer was reversion to an EEC with devolved national powers, a European budget under the control of elected officials, freedom of movement for EU citizens filling a new job opportunity, one European minimum wage strictly enforced, and far stricter controls on none-EEC citizens – the vast majority of current EU citizens – including the Brits – would vote for it. As in, quite probably, 80+% of them.
Now, this obviously isn’t going to happen because neocons won’t like it, Big State socialists won’t like it, Fat Eurocrats won’t like it, Little Englanders will hate it, NATO won’t like it, and European white supremacists won’t like it.
But most citizens would, the Greeks would, Viktor Orban would, national Parliaments would and entrepreneurial business would. In short, real democrats would be all for it.
So when it doesn’t happen, the Italian, Austrian, German and British banks start falling over, all Dollars are withdrawn from European investment and the euro finds a new role (or roll?) as toilet tissue, we’ll know why, won’t we?
The Slog 