JUMPING
OFF A CLIFF IS EXHILARATING!!!
It’s a once in a lifetime
experience, so let’s go for it?
by Mel Cooper
I saw a headline that said: Campaign against Brexit starts now – on
positive terms only Labour can deliver!
As usual, the mildly Aspergers British Media does not get it. Labour is not campaigning against Brexit. They are
campaigning for Brexit only on their own
terms and not Theresa May’s. But they have to be cagey because even they
understand that any Brexit still leaves us worse off than we are if we stay in
the EU as full members. Not that we will, because the Mantra about the Will of
the People is all powerful in this religious Crusade against the EU and the various
cults that have emerged are incapable of questioning their own positions and
are totally ignoring the 16.8 million who voted for Remain all for the same
consistent reason while pandering to the 17.2 million who voted for many
different reasons to leave the EU.
But I do not trust Labour to
get it right and I observe that Jeremy Corbyn has emerged as an arch hypocrite
and self-deluded bigot who is blinkered and tribal and proceeds with a straitjacket
around his intellect. John McDonnell is smarter; so he may be the one behind this latest
Labour announcement. The motive is quite clear. The Labour Party lives in fear
of more defections. But it doesn’t really believe in remaining in the EU and
therefore will not come across as sincere. Thus, it is incapable of convincing
any but those already convinced that we should stay in the EU. There is no
campaign against Brexit. Labour has no real heart for it and therefore cannot
come up with convincing arguments to have another Referendum, let alone vote to
Remain in the EU.
It is all very sad. I think
that for a lot of people both Remain and Leave have become like a religious
cult and no one is really listening all that much to the other. That said, I
think that Leave is a complete no-win situation, morally and economically. It
is potentially very destructive both to the soul and the prosperity of this
nation and an act of self-harm based on a Leave campaign that was essentially made
up of a series of punchy, lying slogans designed to appeal to base emotions and
covert prejudices and not to intelligent thinking.
But the Leave lies do not have
to be believed, even; because the real Brexiteers are simply after their goal
and nothing will change that, no reality check, no due diligence. And now the UK
Supreme Court has ruled that Theresa May has a perfect right to insist on the
Referendum outcome of 23 June 2016 and has no need to trouble her little head
about its all being clearly based on a fraudulent Leave campaign because it was
a Referendum and not a proper election and so the rules for elections do not
apply. No rules apply. She can challenge it if she wants; she can announce the
truth if she feels like it; but she has no legal obligation to do that if she
does not want to. So those of us who perceive that Brexit is a No-Win situation
of potentially disastrous harm for this country can do nothing about it.
The leaders of Brexit, like Michael
Gove and Jacob Rees-Smugg and Boris Johnson and David Dumbo Davis all have
their own, individual hidden motives for self-promotion, I fear; but what
unites them all is a wish to take over the country in a Thatcherite way. They
want to avoid the risk that the EU will finally get itself together to bring
their offshore money back, for example. Jumping off the cliff will give
them that and control over whatever may be left of our social and legal
structures.
They want to be able to
"take back control" so that they can override EU laws about working
hours (Rees-Mogg has said that we need to reintroduce the 48 or even 60-hour
week) and really get down to exploiting the workers in the ways that Thatcher
dreamed of but never quite managed.
And so how are they going to
do that? By continuing to work at convincing a lot of gullible people to vote
for their project by appealing to a visceral hatred of Europe. I think one real
problem is that all the EU countries have experienced occupation and real loss
of sovereignty and are aiming to avoid that ever happening again; but Britain
has this mythic belief that it was never invaded or conquered or occupied
(well, not since 1066 and before that by the Romans?) and that the EU is simply
not grateful enough to us for having stood up to Hitler and kept things going
long enough for the Americans to get involved and really we not only broke the
Enigma code but saved the whole of Europe and so they are NOT our equal
partners. Or something like that. And so it is time to become an island and not
a part of the main once more, and screw Europe; and doubtless God will give us
back our Empire if we do that.
Meantime, the people who voted
for Brexit probably have no idea what they are giving up; and do not seem to
understand that they never gave up their sovereignty at all, they pooled it. And
laws were not imposed upon us. Apart from the fact that our UK bureaucrats and representatives
in Brussels drafted most of them in the first place because we are so good at
that, every law has to pass the European Parliament and also the individual
parliaments and we have a veto. One of the things we are about to give up is,
indeed, not only involvement at a very high level of steering the EU but also
that veto.
By voting to leave the EU we
are putting our sovereignty much more under threat than ever because of all the
concessions we will have to make as a nation to get the trade deals we will
need, and so on. I hope you are looking forward to the chlorinated chicken. But,
ironically, if we do not crash out and cause total chaos and disruption, but we
"leave" the EU on what is called a Soft Brexit arrangement, then we
still have to follow all the rules the Leavers hate and have absolutely no say
in future changes or developments, we will still pay fees (there is no Brexit
bonus, that is another lie) but are not part of the group that can access money
from the common EU pot for impoverished areas and great projects, etc.
So the real choice should be
described as: either to leave totally and risk disasters we cannot even imagine
yet or to stay and keep some sort of active presence that includes a veto and a
strong voice in the EU!!! Every scenario except remaining in the EU on current
terms leaves us utterly diminished. But Leavers do not want to hear that.
Nor is anyone talking about the fact that if we do not abort the Brexit process,
we have several more years of negotiation ahead of us; and the fact that the
Brexiteer promoters are, in effect, asking us to betray the Good Friday
Agreement.
Does no one really notice that
Theresa May has shifted from NO DEAL IS BETTER THAN A BAD DEAL, to ANY DEAL NO
MATTER HOW BAD IS BETTER THAN NO DEAL? No one is pointing out that ANY DEAL TO
LEAVE IS GOING TO BE WORSE THAN THE DEAL WE HAVE NOW.
Or that every promise of the
Leavers has disintegrated. We do not actually have £350 million a week for the
NHS nor ever will have; there is no Brexit Bonus; our EU immigrants are falling
away but everyone else in the world wants to come and we need the workers so
even this year our immigration has gone up despite the best efforts of T May,
but mainly from non-EU countries that are far afield; and if we go through with
this we are also likely to break up the UK, which is also a collection of
pooled sovereignties.
And where is David Cameron,
who loves his country so much that he has managed to destabilize both it and
the whole of the EU? Why isn’t he out there trying to explain things to the
citizens of the UK and wake them up? Or does he think he is too discredited? Or
maybe he just doesn’t really give a damn. He gambled; he lost, so on to the
next game.
And what about Theresa May who
as Home Secretary would not accept or support a deal David Cameron had actually
made with the EU to control immigration to some degree. She sneered because she
wanted more, more, and so David Cameron was sent back to try to negotiate for even
more; to bring immigration from the EU down to tens of thousands. Meantime she
was also creating a hostile environment for immigrants and has continued to do
so since.
The whole discourse of Leavers
is still based on the proposition that we must Respect The Will of the People
and that we are leaving for that reason. It is just about the details of what
kind of leaving. Though a crash out is also still an option and rather likely.
Because the whole Article 50 thing was framed to say that if no deal happens in
two years, you are out anyway. Why not? If, no deal happens then it is clearly
a bad idea and impossible and you should stay in? No one is asking: So, what if
we simply stayed in the EU.
I love one particular irony:
that Theresa May and her Brexiteers think that the EU is a terrible, Socialist
plot to undermine the strengths of all Conservative projects; and that Jeremy
Corbyn and his Momentum gang think that the EU is a terrible Capitalist plot
that is preventing them from turning the UK into a truly Socialist Utopian nation
along the lines of Marxist and Trotskyist thinking. Neither May nor Corbyn seems
to have changed an idea or questioned a received opinion from their own side
since about 1968. And they are both very stubborn. So what hope is there
for a sane and equable solution to this mess?
So, if you think that a
campaign against Brexit is going to get anywhere, I hope you are right; but
personally, I cannot see how.
More on BREXIT by Mel Cooper :
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