At some point in the future, once I get my brain under control, I’ll tap out the reasons why I think the ‘deal’ wheedled out of the EU by Dave is the worst possible outcome; but for now the short version is, the best possible outcome would have been the EU telling Dave where to shove it. But we have to go along with the farce of a referendum now, given that a referendum is the single biggest indication that your democratic system of government has failed.
Since the dawn of time (it seems) the swamp-thing that is Nigel Farage has been spluttering his fag-stained invective against anything vaguely European (apart from his missus, on account of she would lamp him), cleverly using outright lies to gain support from the hard of thinking. Various nefarious politicos have gurgled along in his bile-filled wake, demanding sovereignty and royal dominion over swarthy types, freedom from forrins taking our jobs and/or benefits and eating our babies, while trotting out the same ol’ anti-EU myths that have been swirling around in the swill since the nineties.
These include all the Ukip MEPs who are actively undermining the EU itself (in exactly the same way that company directors campaign to destroy the companies they’re working for (that’s a whole nuther post, right there)), a swarm of Conservative bellends whose world-view consists of tea and scones on the lawn and the merry thwack of hickory on arse: Jacob ‘Crackers’ Rees Mogg, Boris It-Should-Have-Been-My-Knob-in-the-Pig Johnson, Iain Dunkin’ Forrin-Kids-in-Tar Smith and Michael ‘Make-’em-Pay’ Gove; basically all the boys who want to get their own back on Dave for getting more hickory than them, plus the usual right-wing uncivilians who exist just to make my skin crawl. Oh, and the egregious Mr Galloway.
But it’s not the political animals or their media-mogul chums or their corporate masters or the brainless oafs of Little England who worry me. They’ll always be there and we’ll share an equal level of mutual loathing, whatever happens.
It’s Suzanne Moore. And others like her: journalists who should know better, columnists who could know better (if only they’d trained as journalists) and broadcasters who let their mouths run before they engage their brains (or at least a researcher or two). It’s the likes of Bruno Waterfield, who I always feel I should befriend so that I can show him around the EU institutions, talk him through how it all works, introduce him to some commissioners, ‘Eurocrats’ and the people who actually do the work, just so that he can stop embarrassing himself by writing utter bollocks.
Let’s have a look at Ms Moore’s latest outpourings…
The first time I was shown around Westminster a very long time ago, by a well-loved maverick, he took me to a large gloomy room in the midst of the rabbit warren. It was full of towers of paper. “Do you know what that is? ” I obviously didn’t. “Its EU regulation. No one reads it. None ever will. One day though …”
As with most of the tosh written these days – whether it’s about politics, alternative medicine or life-saving vaccines for children – it starts with an anecdote. There is rosy-cheeked little Suzanne, being introduced to Gormenghast Westminster by a ‘well-loved maverick’ (does she mean James Garner?). They brush off the cobwebs as they gingerly make their way through the eerily-lit labyrinthine under-guts of the Single Mother of All Parliaments, to a little-known room – not unlike the depository at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark – wherein they are confronted with ‘towers of paper’: “Its EU regulation. No one reads it. None ever will. One day though …”
A great opening to a daft film, don’t you think? And then…
I did not understand then how the EU “worked”. I still don’t, except that now I see it depends on us not knowing. Much of its power rests on a deadly combination of mystification, officiousness and being so boring that most people just switch off.
Why the quotation marks around the word ‘worked’? Was there another word she was looking for, but decided ‘worked’ was close enough? This little group of sentences needs re-writing:
I did not understand then how the EU worked. I still don’t, but I can see how my not knowing is a direct function of me not bothering to find out. Which is all to the good, as my power as a national broadsheet columnist rests entirely with my lack of knowledge, as only without knowing anything can I claim to be mystified… and anyway I’m fed up with this, it’s just boring official stuff and I’d rather be writing about school runs and why most of the weather comes from the sky.
Here’s another tasty morsel, which I shall leave unadorned and without further comment:
My instinct now is pretty Brexitty…
And some confused dribblings about ‘reform’…
The argument that we can reform the EU (er, actually banks?) from the inside does not work. Why haven’t we? Over the past few years, the more we have seen of the actual workings of the EU, the more unattractive it appears…
It’s not the actual workings of the EU that you have been witnessing over the past few years, it’s the actual workings of the governments of its member states – especially those of the UK, France and Germany – that have confounded and frustrated the EU institutions. It was the EU Commission that attempted to bring the banks to heal after the 2008 crash and it was the national governments who stepped in to protect their vested national interests… while telling their voters that they were fighting the nasty Eurocrats in order to save them from losing their ‘sovereignty’. And now the entire bloody mess of the rest of the EU having to put up with ‘negotiating’ with Dave, just so that he can tell his ‘people’ that he is fighting for them. Fighting what, for fuck’s sake?!
One more piece of mindless idiocy, then I’m out of here:
It doesn’t look to me like a democracy. Nor does it appear accountable. This matters. Not a single one of my pro-EU friends could name their MEP when I asked them
At last, here she’s got it right. But amazingly draws the wrong conclusion.
- It doesn’t look like democracy to you, because you haven’t been arsed to find out how it ‘works’ (your quotation marks).
- It doesn’t appear to be accountable because you haven’t got it together to go to the EU website and read through how it is accountable.
- The fact that not one of your friends can name their MEP cannot be blamed on the EU: if you vote for someone surely the first thing to know is their name. Here are the London ones, if that helps.
Of course, Suzanne Moore isn’t the only writer in the national press who can be accused of lazy journalism: there are many more and they should be brought to book. These are the people who influence voters in a way that mere politicians can’t, because they appear ‘normal’, approachable and represent someone you might have a chat with over a beverage. Suzanne claims to be one of the thirty percent who are undecided. I’m more concerned that the thirty percent are uninformed, and that articles like this will keep it that way.
On a brighter note, I see that Radio 4, the FT and The Guardian have all started to publish myth-busting ripostes to the likes of Farage et al. Yay. Here, for your edification and entertainment, are some EU myth-busting pages:
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