Britannia RIP

Everybody is going gaga over the Windsor Framework, which is a sure fire way of knowing that it is a crock. MPs on all sides are praising Sunak and Fond O’Lying’s ground-breaking deal, and such a level of agreement among politicians should sound alarums throughout the land. The very fact that  EU spokes-types are briefing that this is the best of all possible arrangements leads me to believe they assume they’ve won.

In effect, Northern Ireland remains a part of the EU, in much the same way that Crimea belongs to Russia but without a boot on the ground. If the DUP believes that the UK has abandoned its province to the enemy it may well be seen by historians as the falling of one of the last barriers to the unification of Ireland. The IRA has also won. Wales, by all accounts would be happy to split from the union, alongside Scotland, so what’s the point of clinging on to Nor’n Ir’n many will say.

And I am one of them. I see it as a gross hypocrisy to support Brexit but reject separatist arguments from within the UK. If they feel like annexed lands, then why not let them self-determine? Defence, you may suggest, except we haven’t demonstrated any will to defend ourselves in the last quarter century and the Exchequer has no cash left to support any of our services, let alone the military.

We have given away our manufacturing, our food and energy security, allowed our education system to rot at the hands of extremists who believe in everything but the sovereignty of the nation state and in all of this the judiciary have proudly help up the rights of all who would act against us. If we can’t even make our own laws – and we still can’t, in any meaningful way – how can we even begin to claim we are a sovereign nation?

The Remainers were right, there was never any plan for Brexit. Except… there was, and it was simple. Leave the constraints of the EU and govern ourselves. But our politicians have proven themselves incompetent and too cowardly to face up to the overbearing ranks of ‘international’ lawyers. It was always portrayed as a divorce but instead of decently separating and going their own ways, the departing party has hung around, stalking his ex, like a needy loser.

It was always a trap

I am still 100% in favour of England, at least, becoming a wholly sovereign nation, but that is in theory only. Stripped of the union we will have enemies instead of allies on our physical borders. The island fortress that we once were is now too easily besieged by foreign troops on our flanks. And the English have become second-class citizens in their ancestral lands. I see no way ahead except the inevitable slow retreat from Brexit and complete subsummation into the European project. What a waste.

It's Brexit, stoopid!

Brexiteers were accused of looking back with rose-coloured spectacles at an imaginary perfect Britain before the EU. The generations which came after the second world war rebuilt the country and cooperated with our neighbours in trade and regulation long before the EU came about. It was hard, but we did it largely by ourselves. By the time John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty the anti-integration movement was already blooming, because the overt interference with national governance had become obvious.

Today, I notice, it is the Remainers who are looking back through those rosy-specs at the halcyon days of free school milk and council houses, and full employment and growing prosperity and somehow in their weird dissonance accrediting all that to the Glorious Make Freedom Socialist Friends European Union Sovietska! In their view everything bad is the fault of Brexit: the climate, the value of the pound sterling, Donald Trump, Haiti… everything.

Ah, ‘twas ever thus. While, undoubtedly, decoupling ourselves from our lawmakers and rulers over the last forty years was always going to have its downsides, the saboteurs have done their utmost to turn a bump in the road into an insurmountable climb. Just when we needed all hands to the wheel, to rediscover how to manage our own affairs, meddling hands were busy throwing spanners into the works. The same old miserable quisling faces.

Having steered Theresa May into fumbling Brexit, they harassed Johnson over the most trivial of issues until he, too was ousted. Now, with Liz Truss within days of picking up her P45 they can see the next cabinet becoming a council of Europhiles with every sympathy for returning, cap in hand, to our masters. What a despicable trade politics is. Just watch people like Andrew Adonis sneering at the ignorant masses and saying, “We told you so!”

They insist that Brexit was because of inherent racism, fascism, insular, inward-thinking among the backward peasants, who were whipped up to a spitting fury by Führer Farage and his brownshirts. Yet it was the forces of remain who were deployed, time and again, to mob Brexit gatherings and hurl foul-mouthed abuse. What a way to win hearts and minds, eh? Those voting to leave the EU were the objects of hatred, not the spreaders.

I saw Matthew Syed putting forward the theory that Brexit was the product of a cult, whose unthinking acolytes had no ability to draw their own conclusions and would double down on their beliefs in the face of all the contrary evidence. Yet again I was intrigued at how those who so readily sling around accusations of cognitive bias seem unable to recognise it in themselves. No leavers were expecting an immediate upturn in our fortunes, yet everybody voting remain seems to believe they were.

Angel or devil?

Our current tribulations are the result of many things, and many of those things are out of our direct control. And yes, admittedly, we seem unable, currently to even control those things over which we most certainly do have jurisdiction. But I can’t see how more than a small portion of the blame attaches to Brexit. I can, however, see how pretending it does plays right into the hands of those who would wish us to embark on the biggest u-turn of all.

Get us out

The Tories are metaphorically holding a telescope up to their blind eye and declaring “I see no rocks!” while steering a course directly for the lighthouse. But then they are also pretending that the Conservative & Unionist Party still has a cohesive identity. It is clear that the EU issue which has riven the party for decades should now precipitate a serious discussion about their purpose and their future. It is too late for the local elections, far too late for the unnecessarily upcoming MEP elections and given the parlous state of their leadership contender list probably too late for the next general election... and the one after that.

In the meantime, frantically bashing the Brexit Party isn’t helping either Conservatives or Labour, rather it is aiding and abetting the BP and the Tories are probably receiving the worst caning of their electoral lives. It’s like they just haven’t ‘listened’, or ‘learned lessons’ as they so often insist they must. Have they not seen the ginger ninja over the pond and how his popularity grows with ever publicised excoriation?

Vituperative comments about Nigel Farage - Mr Brexy M^cBrexit-Face himself - are just recruiting slogans for him, especially enticing for the literally millions of people disenfranchised by the open contempt in which they are held by Parliament for daring to vote with their own agency and not as directed by their lord and masters. The blue rosette brigade may claim they are not afraid of Farage but, as much as David Cameron may forever seek to deny it, isn’t this the very reason the referendum was held in the first place?

And what of the non-Farage alternatives? See how both left and right (that is, far left and centre left; Labour and Conservatives) have united to condemn all pro-Brexit parties as fascistic and see how much of a dent that has made. There comes a point while you are being consistently insulted that you realise it is just a bunch of words. And when those words have no basis in reason, no factual validation, David Lamey, Anna Sobriety and Caroline Mucus can call you a Nazi until they are blue in the face and it makes no impact. If ‘they’ are against them, those parties must have a point.

As for a new politics, however, we are firmly back in the usual territory with every side expending all their resources in attacking the others and none actually plotting a course to steer us away from danger. And we are thoroughly fed up of having to vote for the least worse and knowing that our first-past-the-post system and the electoral boundaries condemn us to hamstrung, minority, same-old-parties governance.

So, as much as I know this to be mere wishful thinking, I harbour a hope that Farage and Co can do as much damage as possible to both Labour and the Conservatives and gain enough seats to hold the balance of power. I want to see the Tories recognise that their split over the EU is a genuine and deep one and that they need to burn their current constitution and form two new parties from the ashes. I want Labour to divide into a middle-class luvvies party which every other voter will despise and a genuine workers’ party, which may regain some dignity.

Corbyn comes to May's Rescue

And as for our future relationship with the EU, I want none. Nothing political at least, except recognition that we are not the same and possibly never will be. Listening to various EU leaders and their stooges it is clear they don’t give a fuck about us, so why don’t we reciprocate? I am pretty sure I am with millions of others who will abandon their traditional political allegiances and lend their vote to whatever option at the ballot box will re-send the clear message we signalled in 2016. Get. Us. Out.

Madness

If you found a community where everybody believed the same limited number of unvarying things and where to challenge those beliefs resulted in harassment, threats and outright indignation that anybody could think otherwise, you would soon realise you’d encountered a cult. Believing unquestioningly in a single narrative of the world has to be a form of collective madness; the Branch Davidians, North Korea, the Moonies and hard-line religionists all fall into this category. As do certain political fanatics.

Although there are cults on ‘the right’, the phenomenon appears to be far more prevalent among ‘the left’ including as it does, young people, idealists, old revolutionaries and many of those who fly the flag against ‘white privilege’, believing in narratives that portray simple success through hard work and ambition as sinister plots to subjugate the masses. The masses, of course, are the masses by a simple numerical fact – by definition only one percent will ever be in ‘the 1%’; to believe otherwise is folly. To demand otherwise is a delusion which tempts many of the hard of independent thinking.

I work with ‘workers’ – I always have done – people who expend their time and energy for one purpose, to provide for their families. In the main they don’t own second homes and many run their own businesses at their own risk. Self-employment is common. In the main they are strugglers and strivers and in the main they want government to let them get on with it. For most of them politics is a peripheral thing but, in the main, they fear the many-tentacled thing that the EU has become. They want out and I don’t think they are mad to do so; they are no dreamy-eyed cult members, they just want independence.

On the other side however, a collective madness can often be seen; a belief in a loose narrative that says to leave would be perilous. I listened for a while to an LBC phone-in on the subject yesterday. Admittedly there were a few tin-hatted crackpots in the out lobby, but oh, the delusions of the Inners. Like collectivists everywhere they were almost universally scathing about the Outers – calling them fools, dupes, inadequate and unintelligent – yet they had only the same flimsy set of beliefs to support their own stance.

Their ‘facts’: 1. if you want out you are a racist, xenophobic Little Englander who wants to retreat from the world. 2. Travel will become nigh-on impossible for Brits and expats will all be deported back to Blighty. 3. Outside the EU we will have zero trade, our children will starve and we will be powerless to defend our streets. 4. The only way to have influence and prosperity is to be subsumed into a borderless conglomerate under one flag. 5. The ultimate aim is one-world government, a thing to be hastened, not opposed... otherwise you’re a racist or something. (I’d drifted off by this point)

You would have to be mad – or Mandelson - to believe in one world government. You’d have to be crazy – or Cameron – to be wedded to the concept of a United States of Europe. And you would quite clearly have to be barmy - or Barack Obama – to imagine Britain, with its teeming millions, to be insignificant outside that ugly entity. Call me insane but if I have to choose between the madhouse that is Europe or the open sea it’s the open sea every time.

Out and Proud?

There can be few things more unedifying than seeing a man of principle hounded out of his job for saying what he believes. Unlike the majority of EU ‘Outers’ such as, admittedly, myself, John Longworth’s belief that Britain will be better off out is not driven merely by a visceral distrust of big state, federalist subjugation but by the very thing the Remainders have long been demanding of the Leave camp - objective analysis.

“Show me the money!” they say. Show the detailed facts and figures that prove the unprovable – that the economy won’t collapse the day after we leave. Show your working, they insist, smug in their complacent acceptance of a regime which for over forty years has remained steadfastly  unsatisfactory for even those who remember the hard years post-war. In fact it is those very people in the main, who dealt with the aftermath of World War II, who wish to return to being an independent nation. After all it is what their parents and grandparents fought for and they know it is right.

Not ‘a return to the nineteen fifties’ and not ‘a leap in the dark’ either, but a return to self-rule and the ability to hold our rulers to account. Younger people, who have never known a Britain outside the clutches of the European Union, only hear what sounds to them like old racists complaining about having to live in a diverse world. They have been brought up bombarded by soft propaganda and have been fed a diet of bullshit from birth. The whole ‘nation of immigrants’ canard is a falsehood that has been proved thus.

The population of Britain has changed more since 1948 than in the six thousand years previously, with a near homogenous genetic make-up* ever since the English Channel formed, cutting off the continent from civilisation. Not for nothing did Cecil Rhodes say that to be born English was to have won the lottery of life. We are - or were - a truly favoured race. Yet now we are in danger of dying out and which is worse, by our own hand.

They say, don’t change a winning formula. But sadly, great intelligence does not automatically go hand in hand with great wisdom and the thinkers and shapers of our modern age, liberal and guilt-ridden, have fallen wholesale for a myth; a meme which reproduces and spreads like smallpox through cloistered, privileged enclaves until it spills over and infects the general population. It seems that immunity to the socially-transmitted disease of diversity is only conferred by maturity and close observation.

They say we gain strength in diversity. So, the social divisions that are threatening to tear us apart forever is strength? Asked for evidence of this strength, as fear of strangers hardens like never before, they babble on aimlessly about ‘diverse cultural backgrounds bringing unique experiences and perceptions to the table’ and ‘diverse knowledge and skills leverage and strengthen teams' productivity’ and ’spending time with culturally diverse co-workers breaks down the subconscious barriers of ethnocentrism and xenophobia’. This sort of nebulous idiocy can be found plastered without thought on company websites the western world over and it is palpable horse shit.

Well then, they say, what about the cuisine? Curry, kebab, pizza, Chinese... fried chicken. You think because we’ve picked up a taste for the exotic that if we shored up our borders the spices would disappear? That takes a whole heap of gullible all by itself. We can have the benefit of the world outside without having to invite the whole world inside. We already did. In the new battle for Britain and in the face of forty years of evidence to the contrary, the onus is not on the optimistic leavers to prove that the future is bright, rather it is on the hapless remainders to show why staying in an abusive relationship is better.

*Professor Bryan Sykes: Blood of the Isles 

Cruise Control

They are going to carry out a trial with driverless lorries on British roads. Soon. Ten-truck, computer-controlled convoys will take to the M6 in Cumbria and if the trials work out the job of ‘lorry driver’, as has happened with so many blue collar jobs, will go the way of the wheelwright and the cooper. Once were factories and fields teeming with workers who needed no skills other than the common human ability to copy and carry on. The future appears to teem with technology replacing people and throng with ever more humans without means of making a living.

Oh sure, we’ll all become programmers, controlling the robots, except that even parts of that job is already being done by the machines themselves. Remember the Three-Day Week? Under the last days of Ted Heath’s government the industrial base of Britain was compulsorily reduced to working just three days a week from the start of January and into the first week of March 1974 to conserve fuel. This was brought about by miners working-to-rule and was indicative of the fear in the country one year before the first EU referendum; back then the Common Market offered some hope of being free of the union stranglehold. No wonder Labour swept into government on the gamble of a promise of a vote to leave. And no wonder the unions were all for pulling out.

Times change, and how. But one thing that hasn’t changed was the prospect of men being displaced by machine and what would we do when it happened? Job-sharing was seriously considered, effectively doubling the jobs available and offering a life of leisure supported by a mere three working days a week, but of course, only half a wage would be due. Back then, a labourer could support a family of two or three children on a single man’s pay packet without direct assistance from the state. The power of the unions in negotiating pay deals was demonstrated when in 1974 Labour increased miners’ wages by 35% and then again – another 35% - in 1975. The source of that power was their ability to withdraw labour – no wonder management wanted/wants more machines.

There was once some dignity in manual labour – a hard day’s work for a fair day’s pay. But those days are gone. Now we have broken unions, a glut of the low-skilled, with subsistence reliant on the ‘charity’ of higher-rate taxpayers. Nobody earning less than £30k even pays in tax their own simple share of the burden; the ruinous cost of the state is what it is largely because of the economically sub-optimal. If you won’t countenance population control then you have to consider how long we can go on like this. The national debt will never be repaid in your lifetime – at what point will we just throw in the towel? At what point will those who truly fund the economy ‘go Galt’ and abandon Britain altogether?

The EU has exacerbated the population problem but at least we have the Channel (for now). The French of course, are terrified of a Brexit because then they will be left to pick up the funding gap, so they are threatening to actually load the inhabitants of the Calais ‘jungle’ onto ferries headed for Britain, who will be under no obligation to take them, but will anyway. We seem to be incapable of preventing the rush toward a future where ever increasing numbers of economically functionless people rely on a dwindling pool of net taxpayers; a socialism where everybody gets progressively poorer.

The EU Juggernaut rolls on...

It is hard to imagine that this is the intention of the EU, but it is where their policies and intransigence appear to be leading. By the time the union is abandoned as an insupportable failure, the whole of Europe will have been lost to a ruinous idealism. We must get out before it is too late, while we still have the tiniest chance of wresting back control. Driverless lorries seems an apt metaphor for the unelected leaders taking us down the road to ruin.

Power Play

Yesterday I tweeted, slightly tongue in cheek, “...in the alternative universe I inhabit on weekends, my entire class of wannabe electricians have all forgotten Ohm's Law.” This turned out not to be a joke. Later in the day one of the class asked me what a twin-and-earth cable was. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know, but it’s just about the most common form of cable used in smaller electrical installations; for somebody who has been supposedly studying the subject part-time for over a year it is a scarcely credible knowledge gap.

I guess what disappointed me most was the lack of interest on display. This particular student is a typical product of our age, from a school system which churns out lacklustre, unengaged non-scholars with an expectation that qualifications are achieved by mere attendance and that personal effort need not be applied. Twas ever thus you might protest, but here is a young man paying for a vocational course, presumably with the intention of making a career out of the wiring game; you would think he might show a smidgeon of a modicum, of a morsel of a spirit of enquiry.

But maybe this exactly meets the expectation of modern world governments? Displaced by floods of migrant labour, a pointless extended education pushed upon them, unreasonable aspiration dangled in front of their noses and rendered utterly incurious about pretty much everything. Exactly the kind of non-voter a state can rely on to not even notice the roof falling in until it is pointed out to them, whereupon such alarums can confidently be relied on to be accepted uncritically. Certainly those who issued the proclamation from the G20 summit must believe so.

The Financial Times reported three days ago that ‘Britain’ was lobbying for such a warning to be issued and now it is official; if Britain leaves the EU the sky will actually fall in. A major shock to the world’s economy? Oh, purlease! How desperate are Cameron and Osborne for a result in the referendum that they stoop this low? It was only a few days ago that the ‘Remain’ tack was to insist that if we left we would become an irrelevance; now our leaving would shake the business foundations of the planet? How stupid must they think we are? Oh, wait...

Meanwhile, back on the subject of electricity, we hear news that the EU is delaying its imposition of power restrictions on things like kettles and toasters. Delaying, mind, not cancelling. The imposition is ludicrous, by the way. Quite apart from restricting commerce and innovation it demonstrates that the EU’s finest minds don’t understand Ohm’s Law and basic physics either, because a litre of water takes the same amount of energy to boil whether it is done quickly or not; a less powerful kettle will cost just as much to boil the same amount but take longer to do so. Maybe the plan is to drive us mad by proving the adage that a watched kettle never boils?

London. The day after Brexit...

Project Fear rumbles on and with each passing day the claims for apocalyptic calamity grow more extreme. We will have all the downsides to membership without any positives, they insist. Our towns will be overrun with immigrants and our children will be out of work. Terrorists will roam the streets and occupy all the houses and the health service will collapse under the tsunami of brown babies and mental illness. Industry will disappear forever from the land that invented it and, yes, the sky will fall in. Unless, they say, we allow all of our policies for every matter to be decided by Martin Shultz and his pals. How soon before EU Thought Control takes over the information services and - like state terrorism everywhere - pulls the plug on all inconvenient news sources? If you thought ISIS was bad enough, wait for the telly-ban.

A piece of paper...

A long time ago, in a country far, far away from the nominal ‘Britain’ we know today, a former Prime Minister said the following words: "This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.” Until that point we had been on a path to appeasement; history tends to vindicate our decision to take more drastic steps.

Today it is as if we are right back there again, except that this time, instead of the carefully controlled and relatively meagre output of the establishment press we are bombarded by facts, factoids and downright lies from all quarters. Ah, the lies we tell: If the wind changes while you’re wearing that expression your face will stay that way. If you swallow chewing gum it will glue up your insides. You’ll have somebody’s eye out! Children grow up and eventually realise the absurdity of such folk tales but we are still unable to immediately detect untruths, especially when they pander to our suspicions of conspiracy.

The EU, therefore, is variously a New World Order plot, a Communist resurgence, a Capitalist power play, the Ultimate Battle Between Good and Evil, a Fourth Reich... or The Matrix. Whilst I tend towards a cleaner explanation, that it is a simple replacement of national democracies based on sincerely held beliefs that the demos is insufficiently equipped to handle the truth, it’s hard at times not to be seduced by some of the more outlandish theories that float, like scum atop the murky waters of international affairs.

Oil and gas, trade protectionism, agricultural subsidies, banking and finance, fisheries, boundaries, history and allegiances, real life is always more surprising and complex than the most carefully scripted plots. But you have to worry when previously opposing sides get together to spin a tale of the famine and war and pestilence which await the remnants of the custodians of the once greatest empire on Earth outside the breath-restricting embrace of a huddle of mutually mistrusting former nations who have lost their identities.

Never poke a sleeping lion, they say. But now the lion is firmly poked, what else accounts for the proliferation of scare stories that have flooded the UK and world press about the consequences of Brexit than that it is showing its claws? Britain leaving the EU will ‘imperil’ global security. The situation is potentially so dire that the president of the United States – despised lame duck though he now is – must intervene. Leaving the EU will end cheap flights and put an end to foreign holidays. And on and on go the negative reports as the EU lines up Brexit to be the potential cause of the third World War that many have been predicting for years.

Mrs Merkel assures me...

Realising that nobody knows what the future holds, in or out, the latest tactic is to spread so many wildly variant prophecies of doom that eventually even the rabidly ‘Little English’ will put away their union flag waistcoats and quietly accept their fate. But the problems of the EU will not go away. If not Britain, then the focus will shift, most notably to the new border countries under the increasing strain of become processing centres for the welcoming of our future islamic masters. 

With or without Britain, the EU of the future is going to look a lot different and a lot less prosperous from how it looks now. I don’t like the look of either version, but only one offers the British, if they dare to take it, a chance of avoiding the very worst. David Cameron's piece of paper from Brussels is worth no more than that of Neville Chamberlain, all those years ago.

Lucky Dave?

Some people have put forward the theory that Cameron is really a new Churchill in disguise, treating with his enemies in public but, back in Blighty, secretly plotting their overthrow. He is playing a long game, they say, seeing what meagre scraps from the table will eventually be offered, only to overturn that table and - in a flourish worthy of Tyrone Power himself - whip out his rapier and carve Z-for-Zorro across the invasion map of Europe. I don’t buy it; it’s not happening. Cameron is as committed a Europhile as the cowardly Boris Johnson, trying to look undecided but already signed up to the United Kingdom Clearance Sale. Everything must go: sovereignty, currency, law and order, identity, tradition and when they get round to it, history itself.

When future generations read about how the European Union held fast against the Romans, Napoleon, the invader Nelson, Hitler and Stalin, united under the glorious star-spangled dishcloth, what was once the United Kingdom will be consigned to a footnote in history. Those great EU cultural heroes will be celebrated with many bread and circus days named for them: Shakespeare, Mao, mohammed (of course), Charlemagne, De Gaulle, Obama, and – naturally - Zorro himself. A mask may be worn on his day as it must on V-Day; the mask of Occupy who liberated Europe from the oppressions of free speech advocates and restored the power of the banks. This history is already being written in the minds of your infants. (If you want hard proof, I just miss-typed ‘Brthsi’ and the spellcheck didn’t even offer the name of our realm as an option! Even Microsoft is on board!)

We are not going to see any more ‘concessions’. What we haven’t even already got is a poor request for the other countries to assist in keeping the truth from the British public as the straps are buckled tighter still. Even the supposed alternative strategy of ‘Flexcit’_[sic] is just a disguise for a mechanism by which our uncomfortable stay can be prolonged, possibly indefinitely. I reckon I have, at best, twenty years to go and I genuinely don’t expect to see any meaningful change in that time. So, David Cameron, you can go and fuck yourself unless you are prepared to rise to your office. I expect to be kept waiting.

Lucky Dave - whereabouts unknown

In other news, Lord Lucan is alive and well and living in England. Despite the reclamation of the title I believe the only Lucan anybody will remember is the one in that photo. Many since have copied his modus operandi, at least the one they believe, and vanished into obscurity. There will be no need for David Cameron to ‘take a walk in the woods’; when his time comes to leave the stage he could just do a Lucan... the only difference being that nobody will ever remember him.

Growing Pains

Are you a proud parent? Were you there for all their rites of passage, supporting, lending a hand, lending an ear, lending a shoulder to cry on and occasionally daring to dish out advice? Do you want the best for your kids? Did you encourage their dreams? Did you tell them they could do whatever they put their mind to and that if they work hard they will succeed in realising their ambitions? You did good then... well done you.

If you’ve done your job right you have bright, eager, young, energetic offspring straining at the leash to embark on whatever comes next. College, university, apprenticeship, or straight into the workplace – secure in the knowledge that the world is now their oyster. You look forward to sharing all their future successes; seeing them try and stumble, get up and have another go and eventually hurdling all their obstacles and having the best life they possibly could.

But imagine if you now had to tell your child that the fun is already over; the career she chooses when she leaves school is all there is. That’s it; the way it is now will be how it remains until retirement. Steady, yes, but not exciting. Progress, yes, but only according to a pre-set plan. And if the industry they choose should go into decline they can look forward to little more than a life on redundancy pay followed by state benefits. Would anybody now go into coal, steel or Betamax development?

The choice she makes today will have to hold good for a lifetime. Where’s the incentive to try harder? Where is the excitement at changing careers, pursuing a vocation, trying something new? Getting stuck in a rut from which you can’t escape is the province of the old and worn out, the hopeless and uninspired. The same old groundhog day until it’s all over; it’s the fate we all hope to escape. Welcome to Britain’s prospects in the Europe Union.

We already know exactly what it is like being in the EU. Since 1973 not a year has gone by without us bemoaning our lot, sitting here in our rut. Butter mountains, wine lakes, distorted markets, French farmers, straight bananas, metric martyrs, etc, etc, etc... The same old shit, day after day after day with no prospect of fulfilling the persistent call for a wholesale realignment of our relationship with it. Sitting on the ‘top table’ of the EU brings us no influence of any significance; it just means that along with a small number of ‘rich’ countries we get to pay to subsidise the rest. It’s like paying to be a member of an exclusive golf club that is then forced to let the unemployed play free of charge while we’re at work.

Time to cut those apron strings!

Staying in the EU is driving down the road to nowhere, but life on the outside, that is the high road to adventure, untold possibilities, sky-high prospects and no artificial imposition of restrictions designed to dampen competition and aspiration. No gravy train for the yes-men, but everything up for grabs, for all who have the will. The case for leaving is the optimistic voice, while the case for remaining hinges on scaring you into believing that all the EU gives us will be lost. Stay in, though, and you perpetuate the political dynasties of greedy pigs like the Kinnocks, grunting at the trough we continually top up. Britons travelled and worked across Europe and the rest of the globe long before the EU was even conceived; that won’t change. So what, we may have to show a passport? At least it will be a British one. 

Come the referendum vote hope, vote for optimism... vote LEAVE.

Going Dogging?

Britain has never been a part of Europe. Not really. Oh you can point to the land bridge that existed long before anything resembling civilisation emerged in the region. We have developed separately from the continent that we are only geographically part of for over 8000 years and were most likely concerned with mere survival for much of that time. Relationships with and forays into France were less to do with common heritage than contemporary gain. And even the regular infiltration by trade, bringing with it foreign languages and some customs still does not make us a part of Europe.

Even those of our population – the vast majority - who have never put to sea in trade or conquest nevertheless understand our history and our former dominance to be that of a maritime nation, not a land-locked region of uncertain borders, shifting with every geopolitical fancy that blows along. Island nation, that’s us and the Chunnel is a mere ephemeral undersea connection which could be closed forever at the touch of a pen... or a few explosive charges.

Our childhoods – at least, for those of a certain age – were filled with tales of the strange proclivities of our near, yet so, so far away neighbours. The French never washed, the Germans had square heads, the Italians... well, the least said of the Italians, the better. As for Belgium, apart from Poirrot and Tin-Tin, both as fictional as the notion that we were somehow European, we had little knowledge of the place; how miserably ironic that we should now be ruled from a parliament on its soil?

Now that the EU is struggling for an identity, struggling to find reason and resource to stay together even as its people are finally giving vent to their fears and doubts, it is more than a little ironic that its borders, the erasure of which is one of its central planks, are its weak point. Britain has never been a part of Europe because it has real, not a political perimeter, which in theory at least should be our bulwark against whatever an invader dares to throw at us. Dave Cameron’s latest gambit is to use the word ‘security’ as often as possible. Being an island, security should be the least of our worries, but membership of the EU surrenders that security to a dispassionate administration which cares not for our concerns.

Dogging for Britain

‘But the EU isn’t Europe’ many of the soft-outers still repeat, ‘Love Europe, hate the EU’ they say as if that absolves them from a charge of entirely natural xenophobia. Yet the EU is precisely that; a new country called Europe is what it wants to be, with an army and an anthem and half a billion worker drones. We parted that geographical union 6-8,000 years ago, why didn't we leave it at that? But if you want the clincher, the final closing statement to the argument over whether we leave or remain in the crumbling, failing state of the proto-nation called Europe? When we were joined at the hip, that hip was called ‘Doggerland’. I rest my case.

Euro-File

The fake ‘deal’ is doing the rounds in pre-PR as various apparatchiks signal they may be prepared to accept David Cameron’s sub-optimal, unilateral ‘demands’ on Britain’s place in Europe. They are sounding out the reaction to them pretending to yield to Call-me-Dave’s irresistible negotiating skills; expect a blanket, if low-level coverage of the biggest non-event since Barry Manilow came out. This is merely the preamble to the final flourish when in February, Dave the Conjurer performs his trick and appears to pull a rabbit from the Euro-hat. A mangy, under-nourished, moulting rabbit with myxomatosis... and missing a lucky foot.

Meanwhile the plunge in the value of Chinese stocks market affecting western share values, together with a strong pound affecting exports plays right into the Europhiles’ wet-dream scenario  – ‘look how vulnerable we are’ goes the narrative ‘to jump ship now would be disastrous’. Don’t believe a thing, nothing has changed. And nothing will change; the EU is hell-bent on completing its mission even if it has to sacrifice all of its European values and traditions, if not actual human populations to do it. It will be an interesting race to see which comes first – Federal Europe, or Euro Caliphate – and I wouldn’t fancy calling the odds.

Don’t believe for a second, however, that voting to remain in the EU means maintaining any kind of status quo. The grip that Brussels has on us right now is already unacceptable; ever closer union means tighter bondage and anathema to lovers of freedom. If we do vote to remain we will assent to the acceleration of that process and we will be assimilated into the mire, directly subject to the hive-mind of the Eurocrats. Kicking and screaming will be irrelevant; we will relinquish home rule in a way that will simply not give us an option to leave again. Only bloody revolution would in future allow us to disengage from the matrix.

Representative democracy in the EU is a sham as all our barely-elected ‘representatives’ (do YOU know who your MEP is?) vote like sheep, like automatons, for whatever the unelected heads of the EU institutions put before them. They are unthinking rubber stamping machines for law after edict after regulation which further restricts the freedoms of individuals. The people the elected bods should be representing, we, are of course, beyond the pale. The lumpen proletariat of whom Marx was so fond; these are not your Islington intelligentsia but the horrible, clamouring needy, greedy masses, the sort of people any person seeking office would cross the road to avoid outside of election time. The great unwashed are the sort of people who need instructing in how to behave.

Those waving banners saying ‘immigrants welcome’ are nothing to worry about – the brainwashing has run deep in them; they will be no trouble. It’s the rest of us, the sensible majority who need fixing. Already the behaviour of ordinary citizens has moved away from allowing discretion and self-control and toward a system of statutes which decree what is acceptable; every ‘ism’ now has a criminal charge all ready to be deployed. You can say what you like about poor, white, straight folk, but woe betide those same who dare express fear or dislike. Policing by consent is steadily moving towards policing by force.

The sheep would have to vote against the dogs for Brexit to happen. But what if we did get a majority for common sense and self-determination? How long afterwards would EU lawyers decide the majority wasn’t large enough? Or the turnout insufficient? From past referendum performances it is entirely uncertain a Leave vote would be honoured and it is likely, with EU propaganda already arriving on people’s doorsteps, that the result would be overturned. Or the ballot re-cast. Ever closer union is what awaits us when we vote to remain. Unfettered, unchallenged. It would not surprise me in the least if the future involved the chipping and tracking of all individuals with summary trial and execution of sanctions without appeal becoming the norm.

The only way is out...

Organised opposition may not even be possible in future. Every minute aspect of your lives will be a matter of record – all public places surveilled from all angles, face recognition advanced to near 100% accuracy, voice recognition, iris scanning, automatic fingerprint scanning, number plate recognition. You won’t be able to take a shit without the NHS being instantly informed of your over-consumption of pies, by the internet of things working as spies in your home – spies that you have paid to take up residence. If you think that government rarely works for the people already, the EU future is not optimistic.  Don’t bother watching Big Brother. Big Brother is already watching you.

Swinging the vote

Normal blog service is resumed following a couple of days of being incapable of sitting upright long enough to type the thing. I wish I could say I was that drunk, or so far incapacitated by hallucinogenic intoxicants I thought my fingers were enormous burning cauliflowers and too big to hit the keys accurately; sadly the real story, as is usually the way, is somewhat more prosaic. Damn you, lower back strain! (Surely there’s a much more complicated and tortuous phrase that doesn’t tell the truth that you just lifted and twisted like you’ve been told not to?)

Anyway, once again I was engaged in the odd sally regarding the supposedly forthcoming open and honest debate about Europe and the EU and how the vote will be won... or lost. And here, I think, lies the root of the problem; nobody - and I do mean nobody – knows how the UK would fare outside its suffocating embrace. So all the YES campaign has to do is stay all nice and fluffy, calm and controlled and act like your dad: “You may hate me now, son, but in the end you’ll see, I had your best interests at heart all along.” And given the current cost of housing the lad may well stay on in the family home... although the resentment will simmer beneath the surface forever. Prescient or what?

Meanwhile, the NO campaign is struggling to find a positive message for life beyond because, in the lives of most who will vote, there has never been a world outside the EU and for those who remember Britain before we were railroaded in, it was a pretty shitty time all round; two world wars and the poverty and blight that followed. Although many of those my age and older are anti-‘the EU’ a good proportion will abstain or vote to stay in because they believe their pensions depend on it. This means that the bias of the OUT campaign will necessarily be negative, stating what is wrong with the EU – principally the whole political union thing – rather than what could be beneficial for an independent UK.

Like general elections though, the majority of minds are already made up, with a near fifty/fifty split for each option, leaving only the undecided 20% of those who intend to vote to influence. For the IN lobby to be positive all they have to say is “Look what [unsubstantiated] bounty it brings.” and then point at all the signs that tell you how this school extension and that hospital wing has been built with EU grants, leaving out that the cost of a £50million EU grant is nothing for, say, Spain, but around £100million for the UK. When the NO movement points this out it is seen as mud slinging.

Logically, nobody unsure of the facts – and there are no verifiable ‘facts’ in this propaganda war – would vote to alter a status quo which offers them no apparent harm. And why would those who have never experienced self-determination chance their arm at going it alone? As defeatist as it may sound, a crowd-pleasing monstering campaign against the EU will be much like the Jeremy Corbyn circus – rousing cheers from the converted and the odd round of applause from curious bystanders, but at best a minority translation into actual votes from outside. My forecast, for what it’s worth, is a 60/40 IN vote and just like Scotland, much grumbling and unrest thereafter. The EU won't let go its grip until it ends in total failure.

Democracy or bust?

This could be fun; Georgie boy and Shiny Dave are going to pretend to fight the EU over the Greek bailout, are they?  My honest expectation? A highly publicised bout of paper waving and finger wagging, maybe the odd raised fist, followed by ‘negotiations’ behind closed doors. Shortly afterwards the matter will be dropped, UK will be presented with a bill dressed up as part of our annual fee for doing rather better on paper than the rest of Europe put together and everybody will claim victory.

But who’s going to believe it? A mixture of threats, sanctions and the good old Gallic shrug will ensure our political class remain securely attached to their sacred cow, the EU. You have to ask yourself why… so I am. When Ukip first started out they were dismissed as ‘Shire Tories’; disgruntled retired colonels and various other products of the old empire, still clinging on desperately to their childhood memories of a Great Britain. Nobody ever referred to ‘The UK’ in all its three hundred years until very recently and those who did indulgently let the old guard wave their little flags and sing Rule Britannia at the Proms. Doing no harm; just waiting to die.

But they didn’t and when ignoring them failed to consign them to their family plots in leafy country churchyards, the charge of fruitcakes and loonies was deployed, not without some substance. But the racist tag was deployed in haste because all around, Ukip aside, ordinary working people were seeing their country change and were bewildered when their simple, accurate observations were dismissed as the very worst form of modern hate speech. Written off as Little Englanders and branded ‘nationalists’ in order to make the association with Hitlerian motives a growing number of British citizens found they had nobody to represent them any more.

Worse, they discovered that it was systemic, a built-in, knee-jerk response from all who had been manipulated by that machine to see simple beliefs as regressive, backward, primitive and label those who displayed the most British of values as ‘not British’. Politicians, liberal broadcasters, the police forces, judges, trades unionists, teachers, lecturers and their charges were so vociferous in their condemnation of this rise in nationalism and what they labelled – and still do - as ‘the far right’ – that some faltered and questioned their own souls. Did they really ‘hate’ foreigners? Was love of your own country really an animal instinct, to be overcome and reviled? Why?

Which brings us right back to Greece and that ignored referendum. The Germans and the French are so afraid of democracy they will do anything to thwart it. Nazism was a popular movement, fuelled by a majority of the German public’s belief in the supremacy of their people. In the detached groupthink engaged in by left-thinking ‘intellectuals’ nationalism, driven by popular support, otherwise known as democracy, inevitably leads to extremism. But they conveniently forget there was another ideological component of Nazism… National Socialism and concentrated instead on eroding the national bit.

A direct democracy lets the will of the majority prevail and the majority know not what is good for them. Left to decide, a direct democracy would have the death penalty and fully actionable treason laws. It would act to repel invaders and any who threaten their way of life. Far better, thought the thinkers, to have the semblance of participation by only allowing a representative democracy to elect leaders who would then govern on behalf of the better instincts of the better thinkers. Relegate the popular will to a periodic exercise in bewilderment, voting for personality, rather than policy. The fewer voters the better, as long as they voted for more of the same.

But nationalism is encouraged in sport and in business too; the papers are full of commentary and reports about ‘British business’. And when we trumpet excellence we often put the ‘B’ word ahead as an adjective of pride – we were even once proud of British education. A collective love of country is never far away and so-called ‘leaders’ are always tempted to revert to following the will of the people – look how the dangerous ‘progressive’ idiots in Labour are abandoning their anti-nationalist stance and trying to appeal to we plebs by suddenly noticing the downside of uncontrolled immigration, like they had no hand in it.

A step forward, or one step back?

So, the demos can’t be trusted and their leaders are weak. Better then, that true government is removed a step further away from those stupid herds of human cattle who must be prodded into behaving the way their superiors just know is best for them. Come our own referendum on continued membership of the EU the voters will be manipulated by fear, but if enough of them vote the ‘wrong’ way, the EU will simply take that as an indication that we are really asking for more 'guidance' from better people. Nationalism is a bad thing? The EU commissars might just want to ask themselves where the blitz spirit came from – we rescued Europe from itself twice before. Don’t think we won’t do it again. 

Partial to the BBC?

It’s a nice idea, forcing the state broadcaster to be impartial during the referendum campaigns, but how would that work in practice? Seriously, how would you do it? Labour party officials actually complained to the BBC about its ‘blatant’ right-wing bias, while those on the right see the Beeb as one step removed from outright communism. But most neutral observers – or as neutral as you can get – would have to conclude that overall, try as it might, Lord Reith’s gang naturally lean to the left. It is the inclination of instinct for most ‘creatives’ and it shows, over and over again in its output.

Bending over backwards to achieve diversity in the face of all logic, they recently tried to recruit a disabled weather presenter regardless of any actual aptitude to present or understand the weather – the affliction was to be the most important part of their CV. Nobody at the BBC’s HR department, apparently, anticipated the reaction they experienced; presumably they believe everybody thinks as they do and who can blame them? As a great institution they care about representing their audience and imagine them to lack robustness if confronted with ugly reality. This is a problem with many public bodies’ policy makers, introducing quotas for ethnic and other minority groups into recruitment, which inevitably causes resentment from those in the majority group passed over for selection or promotion in favour of somebody less suited to the job.

While pragmatism and with it a certain brusqueness and the possibility that a few may take it upon themselves to take offence is a feature of so-called right-wing discourse, the left care so much about not causing offence that they stray into caricature… with hilarious consequences. Well, hilarious if you are ‘normal’ but a cause of great anguish to the dashing knights of the court of King Equality. So while they trumpet diversity they take care to try not to draw attention to it and in so doing make it the biggest part of the story. It’s the black man in an ID parade syndrome, it’s Gordon Brown’s ‘bigoted woman’ and it is at the heart of genuine tragedies such as Rotherham.

Time and again the BBC reports careful spending as ‘austerity’, efficiency savings as ‘deep cuts’ and any attempt to introduce rigour into the education system as ‘controversial’ or ‘far-reaching’ or ‘brave’ when to many listeners it is simply high time something was done. For my part I don’t believe the BBC is deliberately left-wing in its output, it just echoes the sentiments of its staff. So when it comes to the EU, where the purported intelligentsia are fully wedded to the whole shebang it is little wonder that they report shenanigans from Brussels with a certain matter-of-fact acceptance which many listeners hear as cosy agreement; there is bias in receiving as well as giving.

It's all a big conspiracy!!!

Asking the BBC to be impartial is like asking miners to love Margaret Thatcher. She could be resurrected, return to save the planet, give everybody a gold Rolls Royce, a £100k p.a. pension and life and love everlasting and they would still want to spit in her face. Intransigence is a feature of the left and it’s not likely to change; Labour members even jeer their own leadership candidates if the party line isn’t toed and they dare to voice concerns about the cost of the state. So, I don’t blame the BBC for its natural lefty bias, but I do blame the left in general for a society too in thrall to the power of the state. Be your own man in the coming referendum, however 'impartial' the BBC tries to be. 

A Question of Competence

Well it’s pretty clear from the last forty-eight hours that neither the Conservatives nor Labour have any intention of giving up their sacred mission to keep the people of a once-free nation shackled to a project doomed to end in war. If it’s not a war between neighbouring states forced to comply with laws and regulations that don’t meet their best interests, it will be war between the drastically weakened armed forces of Europe and the invading and accelerating army of islam. David Cameron’s open hand holds no cards of any concern to France and Germany and there will be absolutely no repatriation of powers whatsoever. We might as well start learning German… except they already speak English more better than what we do.

It will be this way, but it need not be. There is no way Britain can get more than token support from any other country; once again we stand alone, but that’s where our strengths lie. Taking on the evil axis and winning is what we are supposed to be made of, not cravenly kow-towing to an authority most of us refuse to recognise. Remaining in a political affiliation that nobody in this country ever voted for is plain insane. It’s a protection racket where we pay the dues but still get beaten up. Britain will always be the odd man out in a Europe which was never designed with us in mind; we have no true friends or allies there, just those we pay to hang out with. It’s like a political brothel.

It’s not about benefits it’s about borders. We can change the benefit rules whenever we like, but it suits the ‘renegotiation’ to pretend we need agreement from the EU apparatchiks. We have nothing to fear from the ECHR either; we had human rights long before anybody had even coined the term ‘human rights lawyer’. Ever heard of British Standards? They are not just stale old books of regulations; British standards and values once ruled the free world and shaped much of what we think of as civilisation. Our standing in the world? One of twenty eight, much of them mediocre, or a mighty one of one? There are no legitimate arguments to compel us to believe we can’t survive outside; of course we can.

In fact we could prosper like never before. Let the whingers of the IN lobby fuck off out and let the UK become a major low-tax, low-waste economy. Reject the miserable raft of strangling ‘equality’ rules and let people shine. Everybody deserves a chance but not everybody deserves the same reward; if you want to live on benefits or work for a pittance, why not move to Europe – I hear it’s all the rage over there? We should look after the sick and genuinely disadvantaged, of course, but let’s not have all this bullshit with tolerating the freeloaders. Don’t like our culture? By-bye, the boat leaves in ten minutes, mind the door doesn’t slam on your arse on the way out.

People my age can still recollect how optimistic we once were. People younger have never known a world not constrained by red tape. Years ago I can remember laughing when I heard that to be a bread baker in France you needed a college diploma. Now in Britain you need an actual degree to be allowed to wipe old people’s arses and change bandages. Not only do mere qualifications not equate to competence, there is a production line system in place that often means the exact opposite. Our politicians, our business leaders and most of our commentators have no more of a valid opinion about our future outside the EU than the millions of mature observers that have been watching their corrupt and duplicitous dealings for decades.

Conflict: The truth of Britain's role in Europe

I don’t trust David Cameron. I don’t trust Clarke and Heseltine and Mandelson and Blair either. I don’t trust any one of the talking heads who have clear mandate to tell whatever lies or unsubstantiated suppositions they think will best scare the electorate into voting against change. Look around. Are you really happy with things as they are? If you don’t want change now when DO you want it? This referendum is a once in a generation opportunity and if you get it wrong not only will you have to live with it, but I, for one, will have to die with it. Vote for hope. Vote out.

Fighting Fair?

It will not be a fair fight. And in the end the result that has already been decided will be delivered as some form of triumph for common sense and humanity. If the likes of Lutfur Rahman can rig election results and police forces and social services spokespeople can face the cameras and flatly deny they knew anything about the systematic rape of thousands of teenage girls, it will be simplicity itself for Westminster to finagle the outcome of a referendum in which nobody risks actually getting hurt. And those who can will up-sticks and abandon this land to the totalitarian socialist satellite it threatens to become.

Every day there is a thread of pro-EU propaganda stitched into the news programmes. Every day another cohort of future young Juncker Youth will be inculcated with the party line and despatched to berate their parents for daring to contemplate betraying their glorious future in the land of Oz. The choice of staying in will be presented with a matter-of-fact breeziness with adjectives such as ‘obvious’ and ‘sensible’ and even ‘conservative’ applied to people and policy in favour of in. Likewise the outcome of a vote for inertia will be peppered with happy, contented phrases conjuring up apple-cheeked vitality and children standing up to sing ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’ through lips backed by perfect, white, smiling teeth.

In complete contrast to the reality of future life in the Federation of European Soviets the IN campaign will show expensively filmed flags of all nations waving merrily alongside each other in harmony and common purpose while happy workers go about their joyous, apparently free lives. It will be shown as a Technicolor world of plenty, every bit as optimistic as those long lost days of nineteen-fifties California. The best writers and directors and ‘imagineers’ in the world will be employed in building the fictional future, because money will be no object. Our own money will be spent against us.

In contrast the OUT campaigners have an uphill struggle because whilst all those who remember free speech and genuine hope – as opposed to the ersatz, government-sanctioned, do-as-you-are-bidden, hope-lite – will have to top the golden offerings of the stay-ins. Look out for descriptors such as 'controversial' and 'brave' and anything indicative of untried theory. We will be portrayed as grey pessimists, with bad dentures and failing health, in grainy backward-looking newsreels. And every attempt we make to reveal the regressive nature of the EU project will be seized on as typical of Little Englanders longing for a never-was past. Of course it never was; the EU put the brakes on all we might have become by now.

Even as our annual and solemn reverence for the fallen war dead who gave us the freedom to now vote for our own subjugation has been slowly, year-by-year turned into a maudlin reflection of the evils of all our finest national strengths, it won’t be enough to turn the tide for us to show what is wrong with the European Union. We have to say again and again, what is so right about independence. The nations we conquered by superior force in the past we eventually delivered back to home rule. But when it came to ourselves this fierce island race allowed itself to be led into the stockade and now, like battery hens even with the door open wide we blink yet we don’t understand the meaning of the light.

Inside the European Union we are limited in what we can do. Our borders are not our own and our laws are not of our making. Our trade will be regulated, controlled and ultimately we will achieve what we are ‘allowed’ to achieve – and that will be governed by what others wish to achieve. Our farmers will work to the plan and our military will bolster the police in maintaining civil order. Our politicians will be mere administrators of the taxes we will contribute and the downward pressure of the ‘equality and fairness’ agenda will ensure that in a few generations the very thought of leaving will become near impossible even to articulate.

Just do it!

See that door, chickens? It is wide open. And on the other side are all the possibilities you ever dreamed of. So instead of trying to counter the IN argument, why argue at all? OUT is freedom, OUT is self-determination and OUT is a whole new adventure. Who’s up for an adventure?

Dad’s Army

Who do you think you are kidding Mr Cameron, if you think Old England’s won? Forget about the 1% - they will always survive - it’s the miserly 2% you’re grudgingly putting into defence of the realm that’s bothering me. There were only two whole calendar years during the entire twentieth century in which British forces were not engaged in military action somewhere in the world. Without us Europe would have fallen under Teutonic rule, but we were there to dig out for our allies. Twice. Fat lot of thanks we appear to have received in return.

Today, with multiple threats from many sources, we are running our armed forces into the ground and the government is refusing to commit to spending NATO’s agreed 2% of GDP after this year, claiming instead that they will 'adequately' fund our defences after the upcoming strategic review. When it comes to spending ‘review’ never means an increase, it only ever means cuts. And cuts can only be accommodated by the stretch of existing resources for so long; our armed forces have been stretched decade after decade, to the point where loyal senior military commanders are publicly briefing their fears.

The USA are concerned that we are withdrawing from our traditional seat at the top table of world powers and by running down our forces we will soon reach a position where, unable to project power into remote theatres it will be even easier to justify scaling back to just a coastguard and a few Dad’s Army platoons. The EU is determined to progressively dismantle national forces with sovereign allegiances in favour of a centrally ordered European army and our own pro-EU gobsticks are using this circular argument as a reason to stay in the EU in order to still wield global influence. Does anybody else think this is horse shit?

Britain has traditionally punched well above her weight and has been renowned as having some of the best fighting forces the world has ever seen. Run it down and you lose that knowledge, that tradition and the pride that makes it all possible. Reduce manpower and you inevitably let things slide; those skills take a generation or more to rebuild, so if we are not handing them down, intake to intake, it is inevitable that very quickly we lose the ability to recruit and train our own successfully. They already did it in the NHS and Education; how soon before we look like the sort of slovenly, ill-disciplined buffoons toting ancient weaponry that we used to snigger at on arriving in foreign airports?

Don't tell him, Pike!

Ever seen two blokes arguing in a pub? The posturing, the chest bumping, the shoving? It’s our equivalent of long, colourful tail feathers or a bright red inflatable neck goitre and it’s about measuring up, bluffing it out and avoiding getting hurt. Both sides huff and puff but nobody throws a punch; both sides get to retreat unmarked and pretend to their own supporters that they won, really. That is the truth behind Cameron’s faux ‘renegotiation’, making insignificant concessions look like big wins. The alternative is out in the car park, sleeves rolled up and ready to slug it out, prepared to take a few bruises. But you need real balls to do that. And the knowledge that you can look after yourself. Soon that will no longer be a possibility.

The Battle for Britain

Daniel Hannan wrote very recently that we should beware of the scaremongers and he is bang on the money. The forces of ‘in’ have been waging this war for many years and they have a wealth of material all ready to put the fear of god up the little people. A few months ago Channel 4 aired the blatant propaganda of ‘Ukip: The First 100 Days’ showing Britain degenerating into a fantasy neo-Nazi regime after a surprise Ukip victory in the general election. The pro-EU lefties must have been wanking themselves into a froth at this depiction of what, in their shallow, unidimensional loathing of anybody not bowing before the diktat of the little red book, would happen if actual democracy was served.

Then, last week the BBC aired a reframing of history, thinly disguised as a warts and all examination of Britain’s greatest wartime Prime Minister. ‘Churchill: When Britain Said No’ was nothing more than an anti-British polemic giving an unwarranted amount of time to the unsubstantiated opinions of rabid communist agitator David John ‘Danny the Red’ Douglass. He claimed that the man for whose funeral virtually the entire country stopped was utterly hated by those very same people who lined the streets in solemn tribute. Of course Douglass has form and was no doubt instrumental in whipping up hate mobs to burn Margaret Thatcher in effigy after her death. They do so love to hate, the left.

And now another gob-on-a-stick, the Canadian UN envoy, Francois ‘Crapeau’, has waded into the issue of the UK replacing Tony Blair’s blunt-trauma weapon the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights, with the ridiculous statement:  "We have to remember the 1930s and how the rights of the Jews were restricted in Germany and then the rights of the whole German people.” And "Countries that go down the path of reducing the rights of one category of people usually don't stop there." Like the Nazis, Frank? Seriously, you little shit? Curious, isn’t it, how those whose allegiances are to such ideals as world government, common purpose and wielding immense and unaccountable power over billions of helpless citizen-slaves are so quick to conjure up the Nazi comparison.

The trouble is though, it does actually work. So powerful is the notion and so indoctrinated are people – it’s practically all that is taught in history at school, by all accounts - that all you have to say is “that’s how the Nazis started” and the sheer terror of the monsters they might become pushes them to vote for the nearest form of socialism available. Of course British National Socialism could never ever be like German National Socialism, could it now? After all, they bombed our chippies!

Plenty of work in the EU... to set you free.

But make no mistake, the issue of the European Union is already a sub-military conflict with its bureaucratic battles having been fought ever since Britain’s entry through skulduggery and its retention via the disgraceful unbalanced referendum of 1975. Furthermore it is a war waged against us, paid for by us. Every penny supposedly gifted to Britain by the EU and trumpeted as largesse represents a mere fraction of what we pay in; it’s like prisoners not only purchasing their own barbed wire but paying outside labour to erect the fences around them. Brexit? It’s the next Battle of Britain. 

Razor sharp

The final scene fades in and the lone gunman cautiously approaches the Mafia don, who is alone at his desk and unaware of the presence of his stalker. The camera zooms in, the intruder filling the frame and a single green blink is seen from the dial of his wristwatch before the focus is pulled quickly out, the point of view retreating vertically upward, beyond the boundaries of the room, revolving to zoom in to a satellite. The signal is bounced twice before reaching Langley, Virginia, where a team of operatives study flashing screens. An alarm sounds and a red button is pressed.

In the grounds of the godfather’s residence three armed guards are simultaneously despatched by unseen assailants and a shadowy figure approaches the ground floor window of the Don’s study. We see the Mafia boss and behind him the stalker. A door bursts open and the main lights are turned on. Two others enter the room and cover the stalker whose pistol is aimed at the crime boss’s chest. One is the FBI field agent who has been pursuing the stalker. The other is a British under-cover cop. The gang boss grabs his pistol and shoots the intruder; the Brit shoots the FBI guy. The cop nods at the don, holsters his pistol and exits. [Roll Credits]

We are left thrilled and disturbed; what have we just seen? Wait, the Brit was working for the Mafia all along? But why then was he seen at the marina in a previous scene? And how did the disgraced FBI man get his badge and gun back? And who, exactly, was the would-be assassin working for? More questions than answers and a plot as full of holes as an Aero but a strangely satisfying outcome. Before we have tried to unravel who did what to whom and why, our memories start to become hazy and we bring our own focus back to the here and now; work, family, money. We were entertained for a couple of hours, but now it is back to reality

Twisted tales, conspiracy theories, shadowy forces controlling our world – we love that shit. But the truth is usually much more mundane. The boss isn’t trying to get you constructively dismissed; he just doesn’t like you. The Jews, sorry ‘Zionists’, didn’t carry out the attack on the Twin Towers in a complex operation twenty years in the making; the jihadis really did just fly airliners into them. And Cultural Marxism isn’t a coordinated plot involving millions of teachers, councillors, police, judiciary and trades union placemen; It’s just what we call the mess of an outcome of years of misguided beliefs in ‘fairness’ instead of pursuing higher expectations.

William of Ockham’s fourteenth century hypothesis lex parsimoniae or ’law of parsimony' states that among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. What has become known as Occam’s Razor states that "Other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones." It is a principle I like to remind myself of, once in a while, in order that I don’t get carried away by the outlandish conspiracy theories that permeate the Internet like a gullible plague of grasshoppers.

Keep. It. Simple. Stupid.

And thus to the forthcoming EU referendum. Prepare for smokescreens, a never-ending hall of distorting mirrors and unsubstantiated, complex ‘explanations’ about how everything is interconnected and like a game of Kerplunk, if we vote to leave the order of our society, nay the very fabric of our universe will be rent asunder. The EU question is not about benefits, nor is about immigration and freedom of movement. It isn’t about red-tape business regulations, the European arrest warrant, nor human rights. It isn’t even really about trade. It is about one thing and one thing only. Sovereignty. As more and more big guns get embroiled in the whole affair, forget that one, important, simple thing and you may as well step into your own shackles. Believe in simplicity, believe in Britain and vote out.