Euro Lies

There’s been a lot of euro-propaganda about this last week. On the telly, on the radio, spat out in newsprint… it’s everywhere and it’s hard to refute. That’s because nobody knows what lies on the outside; while on the inside it may not be a bowl of cherries, at least it’s a bowl. Back in 1973, to a Britain less than twenty years out of rationing, when trade mostly depended on oiling the wheels through official channels and information could be strictly controlled,  de Gaulle’s repeated “Non!” was tantalising. What were we missing? How could we survive, frozen out? Ted Heath – inducement or not – probably felt he had no option; he certainly didn’t trust the workers to make the ‘right’ choice.

Since then the big question of Europe – in or out - has never changed, but all around us the world has. Today an entrepreneur can get rich from her bedroom without ever having to negotiate trade agreements and export deals. Vast industries deal in instant global communication and the processing of data and information online, so individuals can telework from anywhere. The factories have closed, or moved and fewer organisations rely on fixed sites. To mine coal you have to dig where the coal is. To mine information all you need can be in the palm of your hand, wherever you happen to be. The black-and-white days of nine-to-five are history for many in the globalised world and many have migrated to cheaper, calmer lands to work to live, rather than live to work.

Life is better for everybody than it was forty years ago, so why rock the boat at all? That’s going to be the constant mantra from the Euro-politburo and it’s very likely to work. Big is beautiful, they’ll say, the greatest trading bloc in the world… but who wants to live in a bloc? Not me and I’ll tell you why:

In a small community there may be a king but if he doesn’t do a good job of kinging he will be quickly deposed. A more benevolent dictator could rule for a lifetime, or even found a dynasty but in a small economy there is only so much wealth to go around and as the gap between rich and poor gets beyond the tolerable, again, the peasants can rise. But build a super-structure like the EU and corruption is rife; you no longer know who is to blame and the super-rich are people you will never know. And it is only in enormous corrupted economies that people can get very rich through doing very little.

Those businesses arguing for more EU have vested interests in its army of cheap labour and a never-ending supply of consumers. But if your customers are also your workers, is the model whereby they end up on the lowest possible minimum wage the best there is? The EU sells itself on providing stability and prosperity and peace for all while simultaneously exercising the most detailed social engineering on the vast majority of its citizens; mere drones to fuel the machine. The kings of the European Union cannot be unthroned and just as with Orwell’s Ingsoc they tell us what to believe. All that information on the Internet is no use unless you can think for yourself.

Tin Cam... floating

The populations will still exist. The consumers, the workers, the bosses and the leaders will still do what they have to do. The world will still be there and the sky won’t have fallen in. But outwith the EU what will be gone is the lack of accountability, the uncontrolled herd migration for greener pastures and the ridiculous notion that the cure for too much bureaucracy is more bureaucracy. Britain would not be isolated. We would, once more, be an independent nation capable of acting directly in our own best interests instead of having a succession of puppet Prime Ministers who pretend that we can. Instead of meekly accepting what we are told is the inevitable ‘in’ vote, it’s time we started listening to what the ‘outers’ have to say. Brexit does not have to be a dirty word.