“The voters of Ireland left the EU’s constitutional plans in tatters last week by
rejecting the Lisbon treaty. Now the European political elite is desperately
trying to find a way to get round their verdict.”
So, inevitably, I found myself wondering just how to create international integration without giving up national integrity, when the main problem seems to be a confusion within the A-list governments as to how exactly that is to be achieved. Personally, of course, I would be quite happy for Britain to be run from either Brussels or Berlin. There wouldn‘t be many jokes, admittedly, but all the trains would be on time, people would be able to get medical treatment before they dropped dead, and women wouldn‘t have to shave their armpits.
But Alice, a diehard isolationist, said I was taking a treasonous political stand.
Although a stout supporter of the Gender Recognition Bill, she nevertheless espouses the theory that Berlin and Paris exercise a detrimental influence on the attitude of the EU towards Westminster. My own suggestion that if there was one endeavour more formidable than teaching English to the world, then undoubtedly it was to teach the world to the English, seemed to be a trifle over her head. But both Alice and I agreed on the essential point that Zeno, in 300 BC Athens, already preached the doctrine of a World State, while the Romans introduced a common currency that extended from beyond the Tigris to Hadrian‘s Wall, whereas today even a £ 10 note issued by the Bank of Scotland arouses fierce xenophobic suspicion. It was all too retro for words.
“Just get over yourselves!” I said.
Naturally, she was sympathetic, Alice said, but nothing could alter the fact that a Kraut was a Kraut and the common European currency nothing but a Franco-German plot to flood Britain with worthless banknotes, causing massive inflation and, ultimately, the collapse of the British economy. Frau Merkel, after all, had long since promised to resurrect the “core” of the constitution — whose provisions include the creation of an EU foreign minister and the scrapping of national vetoes on justice and home affairs — “despite its rejection by French and Dutch voters in 2005”. Alice’s eyes veiled with a deep melancholy. And even more ambitious plans by the German Chancelloress to revive the defunct European Union constitution had set Britain on a collision course with Berlin, “and most of the EU’s 27 member states.”
Wasn’t Britain the odd one out, I asked?
Alice demurred, less than thrilled at the prospect of sharing a common economy with an overheated, overly familiar Frog, let alone start dating a Hun and dye her arm pits as well. “And, at any rate,” she said, “God does not approve of foreigners.“
I’m sceptical of this.
Some things simply don't translate well into English. Foreign interference, foreign government, foreign relations, are all hauled into the pillory. The element of humility is missing from Britain’s protestations, however. Truth to tell, they’re murdering one of mankind’s greatest dreams. The dream of Human Brotherhood. Reasoning from a rather jaundiced post-Empire perspective, there is no notion of the common weal so heartily embraced for over three centuries. No suggestion of national sacrifice. The doctrines of moral and social progress have buckled and bowed. Once pioneers in the use of the stick and the carrot - or a “a good thrashing first and great kindness afterwards” - over time, the imperial dream morphed into a multicultural nightmare. The converted native has come home to roost. While Magna Carta has degenerated into a series of Hate Laws and “protective“ legislation, the Mother of Parliaments is tainted in her own blood by a cumulative inheritance of nepotism and corruption, which in her indigenous population has taken the form of drunkenness and delinquency.
This is Great Britain’s apotheosis - Albion is decomposing!
Having prematurely delivered her African dominions to the machete, even Scotland has begun to tire of the benefits of the Act of Union. Looking like something from an old history book, Britannia has become divided against herself, even dysfunctional, stripped of virtually every territory, a melancholy spinster weary of her suitors, badly governed, atrociously taxed, caked in multicultural make-up and massively spied upon, her post-imperial depression has been compounded by a deepening sense of what the Conventions of the European Union have done to her former moral authority in world affairs.
But, trust me on this, the people never come of age.
With the general public's unerring capacity for getting it wrong, they represent number, mass
, the limitless amorphous. Nor does the pivot of history turn upon public processes of majority decision-making, but upon the effective exercise of responsible authority and independent judgement. But there’s John Bull, hiding in his garden shed, the first refuge of the thwarted egomaniac. He will rather die in poverty and misery, as all self-centred people do, then surrender to the common weal. Once the arbiter of nations and the defender of the liberties of Europe, it is hard to see him as anything other now than a backwood little Englander with a chip on his shoulder, an irreconcilable opponent.Poor Britannia, neither by the grace of God nor the consent of the people, but by a sort of conjuring trick, she is trying to accomplish the hardest thing on earth, international assimilation - for England will never be England again, or we are both mistaken...
Dreamy
