CIA Official âBehind Soleimaniâs Assassinationâ Killed in Downed Plane in Afghanistan? https://www.globalresearch.ca/cia-chief-behind-soleimani-assassination-killed-downed-plane-afghanistan/5702161
Brexit Day: âI voted Leave in 1975 ...and again in 2016â By Andrew White @apwecho https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/18199854.brexit-day-i-voted-leave-1975-2016/
David Kernek explains why heâll be in Parliament Square to send up three cheers at 11pm tonight
VOTES in general elections and referenda can change history â making nations and perhaps breaking empires.
They are not, though, sufficiently powerful to change the convictions of those on the losing side, and neither should they be. None of those who I know voted Remain in Britainâs 2016 referendum on European Union membership have changed their minds; some of them have been out on marches, rallies and street stalls to support those in parliament who at the outset declared their respect for the plebiscite result and went on to spend three years attempting shamelessly to have it binned.
Similarly, the result of the UKâs first referendum â the one back in 1975 â on its unenthusiastic involvement in the European project didnât change my judgement, which was that joining the European Economic Community (EEC) was an error, and that the referendum result confirming that membership was likewise mistaken, as was our then prime minister Harold Wilson when, in welcoming the Remain vote, he declared: âIt means that 14 years of national argument are over.â
During those 14 years I read up on the history of the European movement from its origins in 1918, when the founder of the Fiat motor company wrote a book â European Federation or League of Nations â which argued the case for the former. He was followed in 1922 by the son of an Austrian diplomat who wrote Pan Europa, in which Count Richard Coudenhove Kalergi proposed a merger of the German coal and French steel industries that would be the basis of a federal âUnited States of Europeâ.
I had taken the trouble to read the Treaty of Rome. I studied the arguments against membership set out by the Left and the Right, and thought carefully about those put up by the Sensible Centre, most of which â then as now â seemed to be about the frictionless sale and distribution of cars, kettles and cattle.
I looked back at the contribution made by General de Gaulle who, as Franceâs president, not once but twice â in 1963 and 1967 â rejected British applications to join, citing âa number of aspects of Britainâs currency, economy, from working practices to agricultureâ that made âBritain incompatible with Europeâ, adding that the UK harboured a âdeep-seated hostilityâ to the pan-European project.
âEngland,â he summarised, momentarily overlooking the fraying union known as the United Kingdom, âis insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones. She has in all her doings very marked and very original habits and traditions. In short, the nature, the structure, the very situation that are Englandâs differ profoundly from those of the continentals.â He knew it wouldnât work.
That swung it for me. I voted Leave in 1975 and, having since then read or seen nothing to bring about a change of mind, did so again 2016. From Rome to Lisbon, via Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice, each EU treaty has been a building block in the construction of a fantasy country called Europe, a dystopia that will sooner or later implode beneath the weight of its own insoluble economic, political, social and cultural contradictions. Which is why at 11pm today I shall with many thousands of others be in Parliament Square, Westminster, to cheer and applaud if not the definitive termination of the UKâs European Union membership, then at least the decisive and irreversible half-way stage to that end.
Going into Europe was not seen by most of the English â as the general might have said â as anything remotely resembling an historic change. It was just about shifting those cars and kettles and for some, perhaps, the promise of better nosh here and a modest villa in Provence or Tuscany. For the political class and Her Majestyâs Commentariat, the EEC offered a world stage and a gravy train to replace those provided previously by the empire.
The Foreign Officeâs deeper thinkers might have had a more strategic bent, as Sir Humphrey explained in Yes, Minister (1980):...
![<?php echo $config['site_title']; ?>](/static/images/rp-navimg.gif)
![Support the <?php echo $config['site_title']; ?>](/static/images/support.png)
