Thanks for the memory

Memories fade, often faster than we’d wish. Chris Bryant seems to have very quickly forgotten that it was his party, the Labour Party, who flooded the UK with millions of low-skilled immigrants in order to change the nation’s demographic forever. He must have forgotten this because he is now bemoaning the fact that companies, whose job it is to make profits for their owners, are employing low-skilled migrant workers in order to do just that. LINK

Of course, a more cynical man might claim that politicians employ selective memory loss as a simple tool of government, but we all have defective memories. For instance, I distinctly remember Ted Heath promising, through his piano-toothed, shit-eating grin, that membership of The Common Market would not involve the loss of even the tiniest piece of UK sovereignty. Given that a federal Europe was always the plan, right from the very inception, I must simply be mistaken.

I have other examples of my own memory loss. I don’t remember when compulsory EU number plates appeared, yet I do remember that we were never consulted about it. And I do remember that when our nice, blue authoritative British passports were swapped for European Union ones, we had a hell of a fight to retain the royal crest, but I don’t recall the vote to retain a European Defence Force.

I don’t ever remember being asked to vote for or select an EU flag or anthem and I certainly have no recollection of the British public being asked if it was okay to replace British birth certificates with European Union ones. It seems that in three years’ time no more British citizens will ever be born, just EU ones. 

This little nugget must also have slipped past Shiny Dave Cameron's powers of recollection because his referendum will post-date that event, thus render the outcome of the referendum irrelevant. If Britain ceases to exist, for that is the plan, where would we go if we voted to leave the country stated on our birth certificate? We would effectively be banishing ourselves.

History, you see, has little to do with the past and all to do with the narrative requirements of the present. Around about the time that the nice Mr Heath was lying through those big white teeth of his I read Ray Bradbury’s seminal work “Fahrenheit 451”. For those who don’t know, that temperature was said to be the point at which paper spontaneously burst into flames and government ‘firemen’ were employed to destroy all the books, the records of the past and with it the memories of what had gone before.

Even as we speak I imagine the history of the EU is being rewritten, sanitised and packaged up at great expense to be taught to the new generations of EU-only citizens. National identities will simply be written out of history and past glories will be evenly distributed across the regional politburos. How long before the quiet collection and burning of great historical works begins? My treasured Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples, Antony Beevor’s The Second World War and all the rest will be consumed in the fires to be replaced with a slim volume claiming to tell the truth about the glory of Europe’s Thousand Year Reich. National triumphs will be portrayed as false and occurring before the great unification.

Thus we will hear about how the ancient Kingdom of Albion joined the EU in 1066 and marvel at the evenness of the medal distribution at the Agincourt Olympics. The great Fire of Paris in 1666 will have been recorded in the diary of Sébastien Pepys and the legendary King Arthur of Andalucia will have formed the first democratic round-table on which the European Parliament later came to be based. The great inventions of the Industrial Revolution will have hailed not from Coalbrookdale, but from the combined forges of all thirty-plus nations, pulling together to Common Purpose, while peasants throughout the entire continent will have revolted simultaneously during the first general Strike.

Folklore, religion and all the old wives’ tales will similarly be homogenised and belong to us all. Those with centuries of written legends will see their stories distributed evenly throughout those regions with lesser history or else discarded altogether. Some tales of course, are too totemic to be edited out. Thus the story of the brave hero of Habsburg, the skilled marksman who split the apple placed on his son’s head will survive the cull. In the Great History of Europe the name of William Patel will live forever.