Maybe we’re not all we’re cracked up to be
One aspect of the British psyche that has its good and bad angles is the innate belief that in this country, unlike the rest of the world, we do things properly i.e. always in line with the rules and/or with an instinctive imperative towards fairness, dignity, impartiality and straight-dealing.
Whatever Johnny Foreigner might do, usually without regard to any rules that he has previously agreed to abide by, he tends to act with only self-interest with the result that – everywhere but within the ‘example-setting’ British Isles – hypocrisy and underhand dealing are the norm.
We don’t expect anything different (you cannot trust the Frogs) and sometimes we receive comforting support for this point of view from Johnny Foreigner himself when he openly or otherwise accepts that the British are always right, not least by the manner it which they afford us a respect and influence in world affairs way above that which we deserve when it comes to the bare evidence and facts of any given situation.
I’m reading carefully here, but when it comes to the EU – for example – the British ‘take’ on how things work is that our straightforwardness and unrelenting determination to ‘do the right thing’ inevitably leads to us being disadvantaged in comparison with everyone else.
Whether it’s fisheries, the Common Agricultural Policy, or any one of the thousands of new EU directives and rules that spew forth every year, you can bet your bottom dollar that the Brits will abide by them all without either complaint or indeed any consideration as to whether these advance or harm British interests. Meanwhile, in all the other 27 EU countries, standard practice is that each simply abides by those it wishes to and ignores or gets around the rest … or, in the case of France, simply carries on as before as if they’ve never been enacted or issued in the first place.
No doubt this is part of the reason that our fellow country members of the EU find it so hard to appreciate British frustrations with the processes of the EU bureaucracy and the randomly illogical diktats of its unelected and unaccountable politburo – and, of course, the stark manifestation of these concerns that was the result of the UK’s EU Referendum.
None of them ever pays attention to anything that the EU federalist central control decrees – well save and unless they feel like it – and they just cannot understand why the British don’t do the same.
(Oh yes, unless it’s their quant but ridiculous willingness to abide by the rules, any rules, that any club they belong to ever decides to come up with).
Well more fool them!
The above attitude is of course the reason why former UK Premier David Cameron was totally humiliated when he went on his fruitless ‘fishing expedition’ around the EU trying to get them to make the (with the benefit of hindsight) rather trivial concessions that would have set the benchmark for a ‘new deal’ that would have made it very easy for the UK to vote Remain in its Referendum.
The fact that our Prime Minister came away, if not exactly with a humiliating metaphorical flea in his ear, then a ‘deal’ which any idiot standing outside a chip shop in Barnsley picking his nose could plainly see was so pathetic and inconsequential as to be little more than an insult, was a telling manifestation of how things actually work inside the EU.
Let’s call a spade a spade – democracy has always been but an irritating and inconvenient road bump en route to the establishment of a Stalinist European super-state controlled by a self-appointed elite.
Cameron quietly and astutely immediately dropped any thought of mentioning his version of Neville Chamberlain’s famous worthless sheet of paper promising ‘Peace in Out Time’ upon returning from his 1938 Munich summit with Hitler, he (Cameron) having correctly diagnosed that to do otherwise would add a minimum 250,000 votes per day to the Leave cause.
However, we sterling occupants of ‘this sceptre’d isle’ might also do well to remind ourselves that, despite our undoubted qualities and steadfastness under pressure as demonstrated throughout history, we are not quite as immune to ‘not meeting our own, never mind the highest, exacting standards’ as just about everyone else in the planet.
See here for a link to an article by Andrew Wasley upon some analysis done on a Food Standards Agency report that appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
