“The society which has abolished every kind of adventure makes its own abolition the only possible adventure.” Paris, May 1968


Saturday 10 December 2011

Continent Cut Off.

Of all the ideas to come out of the 19th century, you would be hard pressed to find one that has resulted in quite so as much human misery as has nationalism. To that extent, and because I favour inter-nationalism over the tired, spiteful world of the nationalist, I tend to be in favour of a united Europe rather than a disunited one. The EU, for all it's many faults, has at least prevented us from tearing each other apart. As the dust settles over a new relationship between Britain and mainland Europe we can ponder what kind of mess (or otherwise) Cameron has got us into. It might also be a time to ponder the nature of federalism and, perhaps more to the point, the nature of the opposition to federalism. America has far more experience of dealing with this than we do, yet even today, after all that history, the American Right can always guarantee votes by appealing to that powerful undertow of feeling that maintains , "those fat cats in Washington DC are telling us what to do again". Civil rights legislation imposed from Washington and kidney in pork chops directives from Brussels do not compare - but frequently the opposition to them does. Sarah Palin would fit right into UKIP.
So Cameron has traded on the goodwill of the Tory backwoodsmen, the rednecks of Surrey and the Yorkshire Dales, to save his chums in the City from regulation. So Britain is to be an offshore tax haven. A Bahamas without the balmy weather. All that regulation, all that health and safety, all that nonsense about working time, it's holding us back. Holding us back from our destiny as the next Dubai. On the run up to the festive season perhaps I can paraphrase Tiny Tim in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, "God help each and every one of us".

3 comments:

james walsh said...

Pull up the door bridage and start a proper space program. We where fine in 1940 if Germans hadn't been tryin to drop bombs on us & Yanks putting us in to debt. We should just make Britian into a post war type system- we could call it capitalism with British characteristics.

Journeyman said...

I'm no fan of Europe as a supra-national bosses' club.

But my missus has family in the Strasburg region - Alsace. Over the past few generations they've done the hokey-kokey in and out of France and Germany several times. They've been conscripted into both sides and the region fought over in three wars.

From that perspective borders and nationalism pretty ridiculous and you can see where the motive for European unity comes from.

henry said...

Good article by Michael Hudson on the historical power of credit and debt in shaping the world...

http://michael-hudson.com/2011/12/democracy-and-debt/

... just not sure which set of banks - Euro vs Yanky - are the lesser of two evils when it comes to assessing the reality of Cameron's act of "True Blue Bulldog Bravery".

But it was nice, anyway, to see him so publicly snubbed by Sarkozy et al.