To my Loyal Lords and Commons, Greetings on this day which is to celebrate my Jubilee.
I was invited to address you upon the unveiling of the window which is draped behind me, the same window which was funded by both My Houses of Parliament.

As this is indeed a special day, We thought that, instead of issuing the usual platitudes which I have been handed to read as in times past, We thought that it might be a treat for my many millions of British subjects to hear my speaking a few home truths to the people who have been entrusted with the Governing of my Kingdom.

We find that we have been betrayed by a succession of, We hesitate to use the term ‘Governments’, as the last thing which has been done in Our Name is governing. Beginning with the traitor Heath, who lied, lied and lied again to achieve his goal of membership of the European Common Market, and moving on from that tragedy. Our Sovereignty was diminished from that day, and the effects of this traitor’s actions, as the decades have proven, have proved to be truly disastrous for the British Isles and for this United Kingdom.

That succeeding Governments, of both Conservative and Labour Parties, have both continued and increased the levels of intrusive and totally-undemocratic intrusion in British affairs by the cancerous and totalitarian European Union, to such an extent that there is hardly anything left that My Government can achieve without reference to their political masters in Brussels.

It is true that a very few of the politicians who served in Government were against further involvement in the machinations of the Brussels elite, but even the best of my Prime Ministers, my good friend Baroness Margaret Thatcher did little to defend My Realm against the remorseless advance of the ‘Colleagues’ from the organisation which an acquaintance has titled the E.U.S.S.R. Perhaps she spoke truly when she stated that she had been misled over the true effects of the Single European Act, but unfortunately the Act was placed before Me, and We had to sign it, because it was a lawful piece of legislation from My Parliament.

But the most significant damage to My Realm was achieved under the governance of the traitor Blair, under whose hand and rule came forth the damaging legislation of Devolution, and now We see the results, as the demagogues have snatched the majority in Edinburgh, and are threatening the dissolution of the United Kingdom. We have also seen the lunacies perpetrated by the inclusion of a foreign Court as arbiter in our own judicial system, the slow strangling of our remaining industries under the dead hand of a Brussels bureaucracy which never, ever forgets; not forgetting the strange sights of terrorists, murderers and rapists allowed to stay in these lands because their ‘rights’ might be damaged if they were deported.

We also had to sit and watch as the same murderous scum who murdered my wonderful uncle were welcomed into the devolved Assembly of Northern Ireland, and We were forced to welcome their representatives into our own House of Commons, instead of watching happily as they were swung high from gibbets.

We, as the Constitutional Monarch, had to watch as the Labour Government altered the whole nature of many of our towns and cities with the importation of millions of foreigners under the guise of immigration rules which did nothing but dilute and destroy the very essence of what it is to be British. They have given passports to any who asked, and to many who did not deserve; but the greatest crime is the importation of a whole bloc of adherents to a religion which despises the very freedoms which We have espoused and welcomed.

Our Governments have sat and betrayed our Armed Forces, by both action and inaction. They have left our servicemen and women without protection from danger by the purchase and distribution of ineffective armoured vehicles when what was needed was available but totally ignored. The Royal Navy, once the most effective and feared in the world, has been reduced to little more than a coastal defence force, and for not a large length of coast either. Through the machinations of an overpaid clique of so-called civil servants masquerading in the Ministry of Defence, Our Air Force has been sliced almost to the bone, with aircraft worth billions sent to the scrap[yard before even being flown in anger.

We have watched in quiet horror as a succession of illiberal Laws have passed across our palace desk awaiting My signature, a signature which was written but grudgingly, and under a mute protest. We watched as a Labour Government wasted billions on computerised projects which could and would never have worked, as well as divining Laws which would reduce the freedoms evolved and enjoyed over many centuries. We also watched as this present so-called Coalition Government also took steps to reduce those same freedoms, all in the sacred name of ‘security’.

In ending this short speech, I would like to thank the caterers for the food and drinks provided for the reception which preceded this event, but regret that they are based in South-Eastern Romania. This last is of course because my Houses of Parliament have to comply with E.U. requirements that all such events be sent to tender in all member nations of the European Union. The food itself was unremarkable, but somehow I do not feel that the Romanian catering company fully understands what a ‘Cucumber sandwich’ actually represents to any Briton, in that We always wish to see the cucumbers sliced.

H/T to A Tangled Web & Fire, Pillage & Plague

The Kopp Publishing Company recently held a series of lectures in Germany to discuss the impending doom of the EU and the chocolate pennies which currently pass for its currency. It was an ensemble piece of financiers, economists and casino bankers, but amidst the advice and prognostication came a warning which I suspect a lot of writers outside the MSM know perfectly well to be accurate:

"[Udo] Ulfkotte warned of impending unrest in Europe, which we can also expect in Germany. Many in the hall gasped when the secret service expert reported: Unnoticed by media and public, 'special action forces are being prepared all over Europe to forcefully put down the expected social protests. Until a few days ago, reported the ex-correspondent of FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), not even the parliamentary representatives charged with responsibility for control of the secret services had known that there has for years been a secret European organization of informants whose target above all is EU opponents and critics. “The work groups form cross-border teams, which, for example, are supposed to observe potential ringleaders and plant contact people in their environment.'"

[Hat tip: Gates of Vienna]

When the grand guignol debacle of the EU finally hits the tarmac with its undercarriage firmly locked in the stowed position, there will be blood. Our police, of course, showed themselves to be utterly useless during last summer's rioting. European police, however, the forces of naturally fascist countries such as Spain, Italy and France, will not spare the night-stick and might be less inclined to act like social workers on a lunchbreak from their latest racial diversity course.

A greater German than any living today, Immanuel Kant, posed a simple question in 1781 in his famous Critique of Pure Reason: What can I know? For those of us for whom media studies means studying the media rather than two hungover lectures a week and the occasional special-needs circus of a student demo, it's a good question. But for us, the question reduces to; What will the media let us know?
We now know that the European project was a grand folly, that the Greeks lied about their bona fides in order to ride the gravy train of the euro, that you cannot transmute the base metal of fiscal union into the glittering gold of political union and, oh yes, that the MSM was either clueless about all of this or willingly connived in covering up this Emperor-sized Ponzi scheme.
We also know that anything even vaguely resembling democracy - demos; the people, kratos; power - is viewed by the EU elites as though it were a soiled nappy. The last Greek to tentatively suggest a referendum over EU policy was back tending his olive grove before he could say autos ho Sokrates.
But more than anything we know that our political leaders have a quasi-autistic belief in their own unassailable correctness. The various, increasingly shrill, pronouncements on the inherent rightness and indubitable fortitude of the European project remind me powerfully of the opening to The Qu'ran:

"This book is not to be doubted."

How much more, and for how much longer, will ordinary people be led into socio-economic chaos because of the delusional belief systems of a self-appointed [don't make me laugh by mentioning their respective elections] cabal of Enlightenment deniers?
Almost exactly a century after Kant's masterpiece, in 1880, another great German, Nietzsche, had the following to say in his little-known essay The Wanderer and his Shadow:

"The exploitation of the worker was, it has now been realised, a piece of stupidity, an exhausting of the soil at the expense of the future, an imperilling of society. Now we have already almost a state of war; and the cost of keeping the peace, of concluding treaties and acquiring trust, will henceforth in any event be very great, because the folly of the exploiters was very great and of long duration." [Section 268]

I’ve written about this before. (And no, it’s not a sex tale).
It’s about extracting natural gas from deep shale rock formations. Last Sunday there was a long article in the Daily Mail’s colour supplement.
From the article:

Here are two visions of the future.
The first one lies at the end of a muddy track in the village of Banks, a 20-minute drive from Preston, Lancashire. It consists of a derrick about 60ft high, a few temporary buildings, a generator and some specialist machinery in a fenced square compound.
Powering the derrick and the drill at its centre is an eerily quiet electric motor. Today, on the first Friday of October, the bit it turns at the end of the drill pipe lies about a mile beneath our feet, boring steadily downwards at a rate of up to 500ft a day, depending on the hardness of the strata. It’s heading for a thick deposit of carboniferous shale, a rock made from the compressed mud which lay on a prehistoric seabed more than 300 million years ago, its upper edge some 7,500ft below the dark green fields of ripening cauliflower that surround the compound.
Locked within the fissures inside that rock is an immense quantity of natural gas – virtually pure, unadulterated methane, of a quality so high it could be pumped direct to domestic and industrial users, and to electricity generating stations……………………….

And 

The second vision is taking shape at the end of the Thames Estuary, where the foundations are being laid for the 217 turbines of the London Array, the world’s biggest offshore wind farm.
Covering 90 square miles, this too will have the capacity to generate 1GW (one billion watts). The turbines’ construction has been priced at £2 billion, four times as much as the Kentish gas plant, although this does not include the cost – perhaps a further £500 million – of connecting them to the National Grid, via 300 miles of undersea high-voltage cables.
Without the labyrinthine system of ‘green’ taxes and Government subsidies known as the Renewables Obligation, which is already adding an estimated £100 to the cost of every British household’s electricity bill, and an average 20 per cent to the charges paid by businesses, the wind farm could never be built, because it would be hopelessly uneconomic…………….

Which one do you think makes sense?
How it’s done animation Click on the Link  to see the active Animation
And the scenario in the sidebar

 If only

The blogosphere is the tiniest of rebellions. My favourite blog title - and a daily mine of erudite nuggets - is Samizdata. Samizdat was the Russian word for the practice among Soviet citizens of distributing, passing on and exchanging illicit, anti-governmental literature. A man who would know about the value of illicit, dissident writing was Vladimir Bukovsky, and he defined Samizdat as follows:

"I myself create it,
edit it,
censor it,
publish it,
distribute it, and ...
get imprisoned for it."

With regards to the last line in the context of the blogosphere, not yet. But this is not the Soviet Bloc of the 1960s and 1970s. Not yet. Except, perhaps, in an increasingly pronounced difference between two tribes of, in informational terms, hunter-gatherers. The disapora is summed up by Richard North:

"Political society is splitting two ways – those who read the blogs, and the little lambs who suck the pap."

EU Referendum's sketch for an epitaph sums up something known for years by those who only read the MSM for fun. But why is it that the bloggers have consistently trumped the MSM when it comes to accurate and predictive commentary, particularly over the Eurozone? How has Samizdat been proven, again and again, to be right where the Fourth Estate has been consistently behind the curve?
On a related subject, although Douglas Carswell may not find himself hanging in poster form on the walls of EU Referendum's war cabinet room, he thickens the plot:

"The internet has started to democratise comment and opinion. Thanks to blogs like ConservativeHome, Guido Fawkes, Left Foot Forward and Coffee House, the old aristocracy of opinion formers is being displaced. Bloggers - who have to be re-elected by thousands of mouse clicks every day [my italics] - tend to be accountable for their analysis in the way that many columnists writing for a newspapers, or TV pundits, often never seem to be.

For accurate political analysis, go online."

The internet has much in common with President Barack Obama in that politicians who once used to queue up to sing its praises and bask in its glow are keeping rather quiet now that reality has done its usual audit. With Obama, now the fairy dust has all but been shaken off his wings, the political class see no furtherance of their careers in jostling for photo-op proximity. With the internet, politicians of every stripe are doubtless horrified by the democratising effect of, in particular, weblogging. You can tell, because politicians never, ever mention blogging. Unless, of course, they have their own blog. How I miss racing across the lawn of the internet years ago to visit The Rt Hon David Miliband at his faux-personable, bland, widely-travelled blog. Mr Miliband - or his BlogBot - was a little off-putting in his insistence on referring to 'doing a blog' when he meant writing a post, and it all seemed worryingly fecal. But he won me back by answering every single facetious question I ever asked in the comments section, with one exception. I asked whether, in the case of a repatriated British inmate of Guantanamo Bay committing a fatal terrorist attack in Britain, the families of any victims would be able to sue the British government. Answer came there none... But politicians keep very anodyne blogs nowadays. The king is elsewhere; we must turn to the court.
The political temperature concerning the blogosphere can be taken by examining the handmaidens to the political classes, the journalists, Peter Oborne's courtiers.
While blogging seems acceptable to the political right of the media - such as it is - the left-inclining arm of the press immediately took the weapons from the wall. Here, from 2008, Madeleine Bunting voices her fears of a voice for the journalistically untutored:

"Aggression, abuse and contempt are now the normal currency of debate among strangers on blogs. Last week two prominent columnists, David Aaronovitch and Linda Grant, added their bewilderment to the growing chorus of those arguing that public debate on the internet is being strangled at birth by the quantity of personal abuse and bullying."

As was, I believe, pointed out at the time, Ms Bunting was confusing blogging with comments left on blogs. But she was not a lone operative in the blogger witch-trials [in which Guido Fawkes, appropriately enough, featured prominently].
Inevitably, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown - a sort of MSM bargain-basement Ghandi - shrieks out her opinions here and, in the wake of the media outrage over phone hacking, those opinions may require re-reading:

"Newspaper telephone hackers are big babies when compared to those who practice the dark arts in the blogosphere."

It should be stated that she wrote this in September 2010, long before the News of the World scandal, but it exemplifies a comfortable, familiar lack of ability in Brown when it comes to feeling the collar of the zeitgeist.
Jackie Ashley, another of the left's attack harpies, finds the blogosphere a family with the wrong members in control:

"Again, I am speaking impressionistically, not scientifically: but has not the rise of the internet coincided with a rise of the men’s magazine culture? Blogworld is the future, and it will not be resisted; but at this stage in its development, it seems dominated by rightwing [sic] male individualists and libertarians."

Batting for the chaps, Jackie's wayward spouse Andrew Marr also got very cross indeed about those impertinent bloggers and their unkempt, rustic ways. 'Superinjunction' Marr informs a grateful readership that:

"A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people... OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk."

A word of warning concerning Marr's comments on the physiognomy of bloggers. I have linked to the piece, but it is accompanied by a picture of Marr's milk-curdling, clock-stopping, mirror-imperilling face.
No critique from the left would be complete without the Maharani of Islington, Polly Toynbee. Here, from 2008, the redoubtable Dizzy reminds Toynbee that opinionated political writing is not always done in exchange for an unrealistic paycheck:

"Have just been watching Sky News, and, besides them showing a screenshot of this blog which was taken just at the moment when the top post had a typo in the title (typical of me really), Polly Toynbee has just been saying that the Tory blogs are all funded by the Tories and awash with money.

Polly, I'm not paid to do this. I'm paid to work elsewhere (not in politics) and this blog gets done in between that. No one is funding me, I'm skint. I have an overdraft, a huge credit card bill, and am facing possible negative equity very shortly as the house prices collapse."

It's an engrossing debate for those of us engrossed by politics which is not spoon-fed but actively obtained from a variety of sources. Those whose intellectual willingness allows them to pluck memes like fruit from different orchards are now forming a distinct sub-blogosphere. Whether you are left or right will soon be about as relevant as whether you are a Platonist or an Aristotelean. The battle is now between the political/media class and the rest of us, the excluded, los desaparecidos. Bloggers of all political stripes should forget sniping at one another and their best minds should train their sights elsewhere.
I'll leave the last word to Juan Williams. Juan was a journalist fired by NPR for failing to adhere to politically correct orthodoxies [the same thing is happening in Germany, incidentally. Hat tip to Gates of Vienna] and has an excellent, must-read piece on the tyranny of false political sectarianism. A sample:

"The biggest lesson for me has come from the endless stream of Americans, Democrats and Republicans, who tell me they can’t believe the constant pressure in politics these days to keep quiet, shut up and bite their tongue for fear of being called a bigot, a crazy right-winger or a socialist lefty... Americans across all political, social and racial lines tell me they resent this political straitjacket. They know that if they speak their mind, admit their fears, hopes, feelings, they risk being told they are not a good Republican or not a good Democrat. They fear being told they are not a good Christian for their views on abortion; not a good Jew for their views on Israel; not a good black man if they question President Obama; not a good Muslim if they condemn Islamic terrorism without any qualification. At every turn, people fear being told they are lacking in principle for simply avoiding political boxes and opening themselves to listen to the other side of an issue and engage in honest debate."

Whatever the independent political blogosphere is, it must not be politically conformist. Left and right has become us and them. Williams gives his reasons for being fired. He is responding to a question from a fellow journalist as to whether the latter was right to have been outspoken concerning 9/11. Williams replied:

"I told him I was not going to play politically correct games."

In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, the unnamed island which hosts the dramatic action is ruled over by Prospero, a benign despot modeled on those Renaissance thinkers who were part magician, part philosopher and part alchemist. Prospero’s two servants are very different creatures. Ariel is angelic, a pure and marvelous spirit devoted to Prospero. Caliban, by contrast, is an ignorant, lumbering brute who resents the debt he owes to Prospero, who released him from a tree in which he had been imprisoned by his previous mistress, the witch Sycorax. Caliban flies into a rage when he sees his misshapen reflection in a mirror. Ariel and Caliban, for those interested in symbolism and allegory, can easily be made to fit the pattern of man’s dualistic nature. It would have been a tradition familiar to the Bard, although we no longer have access to it.
Despite – or perhaps owing to – the sickening amount of money lavished on this country’s dysfunctional education ‘system’, few children will ever again grow up to draw lessons from Shakespeare, or even bother to read him. We live in a country where a man called Jeremy Clarkson features on advertisements declaring that he would rather stick needles in his eyes than read Shakespeare. Thus, a man whose fame comes from genuflecting in front of motor cars steals a line from a Jack Nicholson film to tell us to turn our backs on our greatest author. Happy days. But I digress. Regarding our current spate of anti-bank demonstrations, I can’t help but see Caliban’s offspring camped out by St Paul’s Cathedral.
The expanding American Occupy movement is already showing its hidden colours. Demonstrators defecate on police cars, spit at marines and coast guards, and unfurl banners reading Solidarity with Palestine. Our homegrown UK version is, for now, more benign, a small oasis of genuine puzzlement peopled by small-time bedlamites with time on their hands and nothing more useful to do. But to pay attention to these string-pull dollies is instructive.
Listening to the inchoate, free-associative nonsense coming from those interviewed during the Occupy the Stock Exchange jamboree, I detect self-loathing and impotent rage, as the raggle-taggle band of British metropolitan indignados struggle to come to terms with their failure to grasp their own complicity in what has happened to the British economy. Thus, as yesterday’s London Evening Standard pointed out, they do not see the inherent contradictions in tweeting their quarter-baked economic pronouncements on machines made by the very corporations they want so much to despise, or wearing masks from the film V for Vendetta, made by one of America’s top 100 companies. The expensive training shoes so many of them will be wearing are the signs of their membership of the financial freemasonry they think they hate.
The problem with raging against the banks and corporations is that they paid your train fare to the demonstration. Attacking bankers – and that may become as literal as it is now metaphorical – makes as much sense as angrily shaking the fence of a vineyard, furious with the vigneron for getting drunk. The banks are no more to blame for the crisis in the money system than the enterprising eastern European arriviste can be blamed for unregulated immigration. Mankind is damned to grasp what it thinks will lead to self-betterment if is placed within easy reach. This is the psychology of looter and banker alike.
But when you behold a political class who have taken it on themselves to regulate, organise and micro-manage every aspect of the lives of those people it is supposed simply to serve, and yet failed to regulate the one small section of the population who can really burn down the house, and you go on to fail to make that class the target of your ire, you are only showing your brute ignorance. You are Caliban before the mirror.
Apparently, the most coherent and best-received speech given at yesterday’s idiot’s agora was that of an accountant, himself sick of the escalating spiral of greed he saw among the new elites. The average CEO’s salary in 1970, he informed a puzzled carnival, was thirty times the national average. That figure is now 400. A shocking figure, but not the result of any mythical free market. Instead, the game was rigged from the start by the banker’s friend, the political gauleiter. This fiscal mine collapse was orchestrated in club and on golf course, in villa, private jet and corporate hospitality box. Orwell’s dictum that England is a family with the wrong members in control should be tattooed on the arm of every incoming Right Honourable Member as they enter the House of Commons.
The machineries of economic collapse are now well and truly reaching a higher gear. Memo to future generations; live within your means and leave the printing presses for the writers. Personally, it’s my belief that mankind, in terms of its social evolution, is barely ready for the baby bouncer, and I think this obsession with shiny things will pass, as will the addiction to the nipple of the state. But a severe illness will get worse before it gets better. I’ll let Caliban have the last word;

We shall lose our time,
And all be turned to barnacles, or to apes,
With foreheads villainous low.

Now that the grand European folly is cracking along its fault lines, what will the post-European world look like? The post-American meme – possibly partly due to Mark Steyn’s latest offering [which I’ve yet to read] – is beginning to seep into mainstream consciousness, but post-Europeanism is far harder to predict. The history of the European project will read a little like a marine engineer’s report on the seaworthiness of the Titanic. Meanwhile, the world economy broods in the corner like a dyspeptic bouncer.
If the American economy does pull up lame – and Heffer in Saturday's Mail provides sobering analysis - and the USA becomes more insular and less concerned with policing the world [a demonstrably thankless task], and if Europe reverts to the differential gearing of continental nation states, there will be a void, a job vacancy. Wanted: Superpower. Immediate start. As The Stranglers once sang; Who wants the world?
The love affair between the British liberal left and the European project has always been reducible to the former’s ill-disguised hatred of America. This is partly because America is seen as Israel’s sponsor – and the British left are rabidly anti-Semitic, although they disguise this beneath a masquerade mask of anti-Zionism – and partly because America has shown that multi-ethnicity works without the attendant nonsense of multiculturalism.
Personally, I have never had a problem with conspiracy theory number 47b, the one where the Jews run the world in secret via the banks. Capitalism has pulled more people out of poverty than any other –ism [Marxism, anyone? Thought not], and if Jews have the controls, then as far as I’m concerned the bagels are on the house. To me, it’s instructive that when the Mafia wanted a banker, they didn’t promote an Italian but chose a Jew, Meyer Lansky. But the current crisis is not capitalism’s hubris, but the end result of unregulated greed.
As for ethnic mix – the bane of far-right knuckle-scrapers across Europe – it’s a demonstrably good thing. I was told by a psychology student who is now reading a PhD in behavioural genetics at the University of Colorado that the country with the purest racial heritage – and thus prime DNA for study – is Iceland. The first country to default, you will recall [although I believe the patient took its medicine and is recovering]. The noted eugenicist Adolf Hitler believed that a racially pure Germany would conquer the world. That’s all very well if you want a race of humourless, six-foot-seven, blonde bureaucrats, but America won that particular game with an ethnic melting pot that would have appalled the squinting, pinch-faced Austrian maniac. Also, anyone who harbours a belief that inbreeding Germans would provide world leadership should read the extraordinary story of Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and her Jew-hating husband.
So, no Europe and no America; Welcome to the new world disorder. The yawn-inducing leftist mantra that India and China are poised to provide the victorious historians of the future is beginning to look like a tale told by an idiot. While I would be amused to see the left’s reaction to Chinese hegemony – it is your human right to be run over by a tank – China looks increasingly like an infrastructural Ponzi scheme, while India’s economic prowess seems to revolve around its undoubted position as the world’s biggest call centre.
The appropriate word is appropriately German; Schadenfreude. The arrogance of the European gauleiters and their train-carrying MSM courtiers has been breathtaking. I think my favourite example of sheer brass neck was the attempt to make criticism of the EU tantamount to blasphemy. Where does one begin with this kind of designer totalitarianism?
The EU has not had its accounts signed off for 16 years. What company would survive this cankerous fiscal mismanagement? The EU and its proponents have attempted to graft political union onto a currency whose most attractive feature is the prettiness of its banknotes. Countries are required to keep voting in referenda until they come up with the correct, affirmative answer. Has there ever been such an anti-democratic exercise?
Possibly the most disturbing element of this whole Franco-German farce is the collusion of the media, particularly our own version of Pravda, the BBC. The provisional wing of the EU, the European media have never flagged in their sponsorship of this grande guignol stupidity. Only independent bloggers – unpaid and derecognised by the MSM – have spoken out against Europe. Richard North and Christopher Booker were telling the world in 2003 that Europe would end as a busted flush. No one in the MSM listened. If these gentlemen have any horse racing tips, I’m listening.
Memo to Barroso, Sarkozy, Merkel and all the other Euro fanatics. The people of Europe – the real people, not your vain and self-regarding set – neither want nor need your mildly fascist gentleman’s club. Leave us alone. We can trade with one another, visit and enjoy one another’s countries and traditions, exist as countries with our own sovereign right to exist, and probably produce accounts which would not interest the police.
I’m no little Englander. I’ve always sought to avoid those saloon-bar bores who twine on about their own country in much the same way as I’d eschew the company of those parents who speak with love in their eyes of their brattish, snivelling, witless children. Obsessive nationalists belong on the intellectual terraces. But better a modest northern trading nation – if we still have the ability to trade – then a building block in a grey European council estate. It’s always been axiomatic to me that the whole point of corrosive EU laws has been to hobble Britain to the point that we have to beg for permission to join the European folly.
The game has changed. Whether you consider yourself a creature of the political left or of the right is now about as relevant as whether you consider yourself to be a Platonist or an Aristotelean. It is now ‘about’ [as the politicians love to say] the political class and their MSM catamites, and the rest of us. To paraphrase Engels, the EU, thankfully, should be placed in "the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe".