Running on empty
At this stage of the EU Referendum campaign – with the opposing teams seemingly falling over themselves to be more and more outrageous [or do I mean desperate?] in their claims as to what will happen if they do not win your vote – I suspect that, like me, most voters have already (or are about to) become bored and/or disinterested.
As I hold the fundamental truth of the matter [i.e. that the Establishment has no intention whatsoever of permitting the UK to quit the EU] to be self-evident, I am still somewhat confused as to why the Referendum was ever organised in the first place – after all, if it is indeed so vital to Britain’s interests to be in the EU, why waste the time, effort and money?
Furthermore, why did David Cameron first bother to go through the embarrassing and futile rigmarole of trying to ‘renegotiate’ Britain’s relationship with the EU when it is now clear that (whatever the outcome of this exercise) he was going to lead the Remain campaign anyway?
I ask the second question because of:
(1)
the likelihood that, once the UK has ‘voted to Remain’, there remains a real chance that the EU parliament and/or its unelected bureaucrats will refuse to ‘confirm/agree’ the supposed concessions that Mr Cameron has secured (and which he claims allowed him to say that he had reformed our position to a point where we were now protected for all time against any future EU-loony drive towards full super-state unification);
and
(2)
the so far complete failure of the Remainers to explain to the public why and how the EU’s bureaucracy and 27 other (fully-integrated) countries, all clearly hell-bent upon pursuing its super-state unification project, would in the future pay any attention to protests and/or lobbying for ‘reform’ from a UK which had just voted to remain in the EU – especially now that Mr Cameron has supposedly achieved his desired uniquely semi-detached status for the UK which allows it to go so far (and no further) in that direction. The logic is simple and straightforward: how can anyone expect to be at the heart of the EU Solar System, still less reform it, when you’ve just ‘negotiated’ yourself to the outer edges of the planetary grouping that revolves around it?
Secondly, that I inadvertently ran into some incoming flak earlier this week when I pitched up at a family social gathering at which the EU Referendum campaign came up as a topic.
During the course of the exchange I revealed that I was going to break the habit of a lifetime and vote for the first time in my life on 23rd June.
My sister-in-law, who holds strong and some might say strident views on matters political, immediately honed in like a guided missile launcher sensing heat.
Having first asked for clarification (“Are you being serious, are you saying you have never voted in your life?!”) and received an affirmative response, she then launched into a predictable monologue about how this was a disgraceful state of affairs – I had a public responsibility to vote, etc. etc. [and this wasn’t with an attitude of intellectual curiosity in furtherance of a fun cod-argument/discussion for the sake of it, but with an undertone of semi-menace].
I brushed aside her lecture by maintaining that all my life I had been exercising my democratic right not to vote, which I reserved the right to do because of my lack of respect for the political classes of all hues.
I could tell that my adversary held a completely different view of the political Establishment, one that I personally have no problem with her holding.
Each to their own, I say.
She may well be correct and me wrong – indeed she may be more intelligent than me for all I know – but I’ve still got the same ‘one vote’ as she has and I can use it as I like.
It’s called democracy.
As for her condescension (I’d hesitate to say ‘incomprehension’) towards my stated position of a healthy contempt for all politicians, I am wondering this morning whether I should send her a link to this article by Martin Williams that appears on the website of The Guardian today – see here – MPs EXPENSES (CONTINUED)
